Category: Critical Mass

James Bacon: Jo is quite Irish, I wondered if you were trying to bring an extra depth to this character as there was a lot to her history and the first comic was very intense, and what you were trying to do with her, was she your first comic book character?

N.K. Jemisin: She was first one I have wrote myself, I have been a comics fan for years, and I did the same thing with her character that I did with any character I would have written, which was to give her some depth, but I honestly felt that she was a bit shallow as there wasn’t time to really delve into her background or any of the other stuff that is gone on in her life. I was only really able to give a thin sketch of her, and I was a little kinda sad about that, so to hear that she has a lot of depth, great, I faked it [laughter] but I wanted her to be three dimensional, interesting, memorable, quirky, complicated, flawed, she’s an ex NYPD cop, I have a lot of feelings with a  capital F about that and I wanted to not portray her as a one note thing, I wanted her to be layered. If she came across as complex and having some depth, then good, it means I did what I set out to do.

See http://file770.com/far-sector-round-table-with-n-k-jemisin/ for the full discussion about Far Sector

— On the film Blade Runner
In fact, this is what links all the films I love the most: they manifest what I take to be a new cultural logic in SF. The genre has shifted from being a literature of ideas (books are good at ideas) to a literature of enduring, powerful and haunting visual images (films are poor at ideas, but very good at the poetry of beautiful images). This is what La Jetée, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stalker, Alien and The Matrix have in common – their gobsmacking visual aesthetic. But Blade Runner beats all of these. It is the most beautiful, the most haunting, the most visually perfect of all of them. It is Scott’s expert conjuring with near-palpable beams and shafts of light amongst the cluttered, smoky and misty darkness; the shadows blocking out a somatically believable city; the gorgeous design; the detail.
— On Quantum Thief
At the heart it’s a heist story: Jean le Flambeur is sprung from a deep space prison by the enigmatic warrior Mieli and her Banksish sentient spaceship Perhonen, in order to pull-off a complicated crime upon Mars. Meili is in the service of a mysterious, capricious goddess-like being, and the plot unwraps its several mysteries in a very satisfying manner. The Oubliette in particular is a splendid creation; not so much in terms of its far-future hardware as its social codes of privacy, guarded by information-exchange veils called ‘guevelots’, policed by ‘tzaddicks’ – and its currency, time, to be lavishly spent or carefully hoarded as citizens countdown towards a ‘death’ that reprocesses their consciousnesses into ‘Quiet’ machines that do all the hard areoforming and city maintenance work. There’s also a quick-witted Holmes-like youth, with a genius for solving crimes.
— On Chris Priest’s The Islanders
One of the things I loved about The Islanders is that pretty much all the Priestian fascinations and preoccupations are here: doubles; mirrors; dreams; stage magic; the unreliability and instability of narrative, and several intriguing and underplayed metafictional touches (a young [female] novelist writes fan letters to a tetchily unpredictable Kammeston; when her first novel is published she sends a copy to him. It is called The Affirmation). It coheres, or more precisely refuses quite to cohere, very stylishly indeed. It’s an archipelagic novel in more than one sense (always assuming that the word has more than one sense), formally embodying its scattered loosely connected strings of island subjects in loosely connected strings of narratives. There’s a distant family relationship with Borges, perhaps; or Ballard’s anthology of ‘condensed novels’, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Roberts, Adam. Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews . Steel Quill Books.

Sibilant frictive is a collection of 40+ reviews/essays by Adam Roberts, collected in print in 2014.
You may disagree with Roberts on some things, but you will find his comments interesting and worth reading.

One of Dune’s overarching concerns is to locate and explore a “Muslimness in time.”  The novels fixate on change across time and space: How does a tradition adapt, or not, across centuries, environments, and societies? The novels interrogate this question through a range of Muslim approaches to it. They look to Muslim scholarly traditions, historical interpretations, and experiences as they shift from place to place and generation to generation. The saga finds answers in Muslim beliefs in the sanctity of the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings; in Muslim practices of mysticism and experience as a response to legalism and scientism, or to the (orientalist) binary of reason against unthinking following; in a respect for other traditions that nevertheless preserves a unique commitment to the bespoke quality of Islam; and in Muslim narratives of political succession and revolutionary power.

Haris Durrani, writing on Dune in “The Muslimness of Dune: A Close Reading of “Appendix II: The Religion of Dune“, tor.com