6 Fictional Places You Didn’t Know Actually Existed

By: Jacopo della Quercia ,  David Christopher Bell

 

Part of what makes fantasy and sci-fi appealing is that it’s not just a bunch of characters — it’s a whole world. One you want to live in.

That’s true even if it’s an objectively bad place — Gotham City looks like a shithole, but who wouldn’t trade their current life with a chance to go there and fight supercriminals with Batman? Of course, that’s part of the frustration, too — we’ll never actually see the Shire or Mordor firsthand. But you can come pretty close, because it turns out a lot of these fantasy settings were based on real places. For instance …

Click here to read the rest of this story

George Orwell back in fashion as Prism stokes paranoia about Big Brother

Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a society in which liberty was impossible – so how should we respond to this new threat?

By Stephen Moss

The NSA Prism surveillance scandal has been good news for George Orwell, and in particular for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was originally published in 1949. Sales of the centennial edition have risen by more than 7,000% on Amazon.com . Having been languishing at 13,074 in the list, it is now up to 193 and rising.

It may not rival Caroline Barnett’s Willing to Walk on Water: Step Out in Faith and Let God Work Miracles through Your Life, which has miraculously surged from 144th to first in the past 24 hours with a 267,000% rise, but clearly many people are finding parallels between the US government’s willingness to snoop on Joe Public’s emails and phone calls and Orwell’s vision of a future in which Big Brother is everywhere.

“Orwellian” is the word on everyone’s lips.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Rachel Kushner’s Ambitious New Novel Scares Male Critics

Photo Credit: RachelKushner.com

When a woman—not a venerable male auteur—writes the Great American Novel, male reviewers get flummoxed.

By Laura MillerIn 1963, Esquire magazine’s July issue was about the American literary scene, and featured an essay by Norman Mailer. Titled “Some Children of the Goddess: Further Evaluations of the Talent in the Room,” the piece was a repeat of a survey of his “rivals” that appeared in “Advertisements for Myself.” Few American novelists have ever been more invested than Mailer in the mystique of the Great American Novel, and it’s no coincidence that his list of the authors likely to produce such a work (William Styron, James Jones, James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger and Saul Bellow) consisted of exactly zero women.

The deliberate pursuit of the Great American Novel has always been a peculiarly masculine endeavor. It is a book, in Mailer’s words, designed to “seize the temper of the time and turn it.” To attempt to write the Great American Novel is to surmise that you can speak on behalf of an entire, fractious nation. Plus, by all appearances, we’re talking about a game of King of the Mountain: Only one winner allowed, and the competition is bruising. The photograph accompanying Mailer’s piece showed him standing in a boxing ring, poised to deliver his punches.

Click here to read the rest of this story

The End of Happily Ever After

By Rob D. Young

Once upon a time our stories ended in happily ever after. Dragons were slain, damsels rescued, glass slippers found, and eternal bliss achieved—usually thanks to a combination of wealth and marriage. Things have changed. While “happily ever after” holds on in a variety of forms, audience expectations have shifted. Readers not only accept but often prefer endings that aren’t entirely happy. Why, as readers and writers in the 21st century, do we shy away from the old expectations of eternal happiness?

Hollywood vs the Unhappy Ending

***I’m talking about endings, so it should go without saying that spoilers will abound. Read on at your own risk.***

To say we no longer have “happily ever after” would be misleading. Some markets want that happy ending. Some genres demand it. Hollywood has certainly gone to great lengths to provide happy endings in the bulk of its stories; even books written with a mixed or unhappy ending often find a new conclusion in the film rendition.

Perhaps the best example comes from The Princess Bride, where the film gives us a concretely happy ending and the book gives us a happy ending only to tell us that’s not how it really happened:

Click here to read the rest of this story

Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion

By Maria Popova

“Colour itself is a degree of darkness.”

Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colours (public library; public domain), his treatise on the nature, function, and psychology of colors. Though the work was dismissed by a large portion of the scientific community, it remained of intense interest to a cohort of prominent philosophers and physicists, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

One of Goethe’s most radical points was a refutation of Newton’s ideas about the color spectrum, suggesting instead that darkness is an active ingredient rather than the mere passive absence of light.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Is this the end of fiction’s genre wars?

Has the question of genre in fiction become ‘a flimsy irrelevence’ or will the mores of the book trade maintain the distinctions?

By Stuart Kelly

This week, the chair of this year’s Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison’s Climbers. In it, he says “let me try to express a little of the amazement I feel when standing in front of the work of Harrison, who is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF but who is to my mind among the most brilliant novelists writing today, and with regard to whom the question of genre is a flimsy irrelevance”. Are we witnessing the end of the genre wars? Macfarlane has written introductions as enthusiastically to the (genre) work of John Christopher and the (literary) work Edward Thomas and Charles Dickens. Before starting on this year’s submissions for the Man Booker (I am also a judge), I was among those who selected the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a list which featured a number of genre-inflected writers (Steven Hall, Naomi Alderman, Joanna Kavenna, Ned Beauman, Xiaolu Guo, Helen Oyeyemi, Jenni Fagan and Sarah Hall). Is genre, as Macfarlane says “a flimsy irrelevance”?

Well, not to publishers and booksellers, who seem the section of the literary world most wedded to genre distinctions: you’ll still find China Miéville and Lauren Beukes in fantasy, Ken MacLeod and Iain M Banks in sci-fi, Sophie Hannah and Ruth Rendell in crime, Brian Evenson and Kathe Koja in horror.

Click here to read the rest of this story

No Kidding: Women Writers and Comedians on the Choice Not to Have Children

By Maria Popova

“Motherhood Personality Disorder is a complex, interfamilial compulsion fueled by estrogen, culture, religion, and the Family Values Industrial Complex.”

Mother’s Day has come and gone, and with it history’s finest letters of motherly advice. But while most people have a mother or mother-figure to associate with the holiday, far fewer than half are a mother or mother-figure, placing the occasion on a spectrum from irrelevance to alienation and discomfort for them. Those of us who have chosen not to have children harbor particular unease around the implicit cultural value judgment embedded in this holiday — after all, what does it say about a culture when its only national holiday celebrating womanhood celebrates women’s uterine capacity or adoptive aspirations? In No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Parenthood (public library), comedy writer Henriette Mantel rounds up a troupe of female entertainers and authors whose essays explore various facets of what it means to be happily childless — or, as one contributor aptly puts it, “child-free.” Most women desisted from motherhood by their own volition, and some by nature’s, by way of reproductive health issues and painful surgeries, but all share a contentment with the final product of not reproducing.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Watch John Green’s commencement speech: ‘Do not worry too much about your lawn’ — VIDEO

By Adam Carlson

Author John Green — famous for The Fault In Our Stars and for making you laugh and then cry — has joined David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, and many others on the long list of Authors Giving Commencement Speeches with his address to Butler’s graduating class. Like theirs, Green is mostly warning the audience to not grow up and be terrible. It also comes with advice, such as: “Do not worry too much about your lawn.” And: “Keep reading. Specifically, read my books, ideally in hardcover.” The address is heartfelt and conversational, peppered with asides and references to the Internet — just like Green’s novels. Except this time: no deaths!

Click here to read the rest of this story

Restyling the Classics: Don’t Judge a New Cover by the Old Book

By Jen Doll

There’s been a lot of talk about the new (book) edition of The Great Gatsby, with its movie tie-in cover that’s been dubbed terrible by some and enticing by others. But there’s a whole world of re-imagined book covers for classic novels well beyond those Leonardo Di Caprio editions of Gatsby. Take a look, for instance, at book designer Neil Gower’s new cover for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, which was released April 30. (It’s the one in red, above, at right, next to the 1934 classic designed by Alfred Maurer.) There are many, many examples of old books done new again, like Drop Caps (see below), the stand-out series from type designer Jessica Hische and Penguin VP Executive Creative Director Paul Buckley. And there’s Coralie Bickford-Smith’s lovely Cloth-Bound Classics series for Penguin, in which she turns books into collectible, cloth-bound artifacts (scroll down to see them; they’re the row of books with spines facing toward you below The Portable Dorothy Parker).

There’s no shame in redesigning a classic. “Given the fact that the classics have been around for many years, it is no surprise to me that they have been re-jacketed numerous times,” Bickford-Smith told me. “I truly admire some of the iconic covers from the past for certain classic pieces of literature, but from a selfish point of view as a designer of books, if the original cover had stuck, I would have never have got to design covers for such a incredible bunch of historic authors.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

When horror stopped being supernatural

Nowhere left to run for horror? Brad Pitt in the 2013 film of World War Z.

How afraid should we be for scary reading now that fiction’s monsters are being reinvented as worldly threats?

By David Barnett

It’s a cliché to say that Author W does for Subject X what Author Y did for Subject Z. But it was one I found unavoidable when I turned the final page of Benjamin Percy’s excellent Red Moon, released last week.

For it has to be said that Benjamin Percy does for werewolves what Justin Cronin did for vampires and, before that, Max Brooks did for zombies. This century the monsters of old have been taken out of the shadows. Where once a single, terrifying creature sparked supernatural terror, now monsters have become the product of science, of viruses, of very human meddling. They have multiplied and been recast from the night into bright sunlight on a global scale. The horror is now the prospect of monsters supplanting humanity … but does that make them any more scary?

Vampires, werewolves and the revenant dead have been the unholy trinity at the heart of modern horror since the days of folk tale. But their journey from archetype to ubiquity has, I feel, been brought to an almost inevitable conclusion.

Click here to read the rest of this story