Raritania
Monday, September 18, 2017
Reassessing Kurzweil's 2009 Predictions
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Raymond Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines remains a touchstone of futurologists and their critics not only because of ...
Review:
The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
, by Adam Tooze
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New York, Penguin, 2006, pp. 799. I remember that reading Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers back in college I pored o...
Reading Revisionism
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It seems to me that I have been running across a great deal of revisionist World War II-era economic history as of late, focused primarily o...
Friday, August 18, 2017
Animated Films at the U.S. Box Office, 1980-2016: The Stats
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Considering the stats on the action film (such films now typically six of the ten top-grossing films in a given year), I naturally found my...
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
The Action Film Becomes King of the Box Office: Actual Numbers
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It seems generally understood that the action movie took off in the '80s, and, while going through some changes (becoming less often R-r...
Friday, June 16, 2017
The Superhero Film Gets a Makeover
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As regular readers of this blog (all two of you, unless I'm miscounting by two) know, I have been watching the superhero movie bubble fo...
Thoughts on the Wonder Woman Movie Actually Happening
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As is well known by now to anyone who pays much attention to films of the type, DC got the Wonder Woman film made, and got it out this summe...
Saturday, June 3, 2017
On the Historiography of Science Fiction: Info-Dumping and Incluing
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When it comes to "info-dumping" and "incluing," a considerable current of thought about science fiction hews to the stan...
Tell, Don't Show--Again
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In his book How Fiction Works James Wood early on sings the praises of Gustave Flaubert as the founder of "modern realist narration,...
James Wood on Flaubert
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Having been both impressed and disappointed by James Wood's How Fiction Works --impressed by his lucid exposition of some literary funda...
Thursday, June 1, 2017
On the Historiography of Science Fiction
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Writing my book Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry I produced a history of science fiction that was most concerned with the genre's most...
Monday, May 15, 2017
Stormbreaker
, by Anthony Horowitz: a YA
Moonraker
?
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Picking up the first volume in Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series, I was unsurprised to see that he took many of his cues from classic...
Review:
The Messiah Stone
, by Martin Caidin
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New York: Baen, 1986, pp. 407. It seems that once again I am reviewing a novelist who was once a Big Name but has since slipped into obscu...
Why Young Adult Fiction?
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For at least a decade now the bestseller lists have seemed to be ever more dominated by works of young adult fiction. Accordingly to the dat...
Of Working-Class Spies
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H.B. Lyle recently penned an interesting article on the scarcity of working-class protagonists in spy fiction --about which he is, of course...
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