Ancient Logic

Agent Carter is one of the best shows on television right now and certainly one of the best arguments for a feminist critiques of culture. Whenever I get really interested in a show, to the point I start structuring my schedule around it, I have to wonder why. Why this show? What is it that appeals to me? Agent Carter Promo Picture The actress playing the title role, Hayley Atwell is a big part of that. She was a highlight of the surprisingly entertaining if flawed first Captain America movie and, in preparation for the Agent Carter mini-series, appeared in a couple of cool vignettes during the first half of this year’s Agents of Shield. In all of these, Atwell portrayed Agent Carter as an extremely capable and stylish agent, unafraid to use her keen wit or powerful right hook to get the job done. In a one-shot filmed by Marvel and tucked into the extras of the Iron Man 3 DVD, Agent Carter is coping as best she can with the aftermath of losing Steve Rodgers, and the contempt of h...

Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice” gives me a chance to talk shop. In a science fiction novel, like the Radch series, a writer is confronted with the need to express novel concepts through the English language. Whether introducing an alien species or a new technology or simply a specific style of dancing, a author must choose from three basic options. Wind Sculpture near Loretto Chapel, Santa Fe. Taken by Morgan Crooks (2013) One: use common English analogues to express concepts similar to ones more familiar to readers. So instead of calling an alien fork a Quedebblian food-trident, call it a fork assuming it has the same basic function. Secondly, a writer could resurrect a less frequently used word and apply it to the situation - think the Wachowski sibling's use of the word 'Matrix.' Finally, a writer might created a neologism. This last category is in someways the most broad as it includes portmanteaus, figurative transliterations, and out-an-out inventions. Howeve...

I tried an experiment in 2014. I sought to read enough of speculative fiction published this year (as opposed to three decades ago as was my habit) that I would be able to understand it for myself rather than be told about it at the end of the year. This post is an effort to summarize what I found in short and long fiction in 2014, the themes that I saw repeated and the trends I saw embraced. I’ll start with a topic that seemed to echo from one end of speculative fiction to the other: Lovecraft. H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy is a complicated subject in speculative fiction. Like many others, I owe a tremendous debt to Lovecraft’s legacy, one that I’m often flummoxed how to acknowledge. I have enjoyed his works, drawn inspiration from his mythologies, and been influenced by his vision of a vast and indifferent universe. The problem is Lovecraft, even in terms of his contemporaries, was an unreformed, unrepentant bigot. What’s worse, his personal biases seeped into his writing in...

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson was published in 1993 so in reading it I was very curious to see how how well the book has aged. I would argue pretty well but especially in terms of Mars itself, the book remains remarkably close to what seems to be the developing understanding of both the planet itself and the feats of engineering required to reach it. Partly I think this comes from the conservative approach to the planet and its exploration. Right off the bat, Robinson takes the very measured and, even today defensible view that Mars does not have and never had life even in microbial forms. While rovers and probes sent to the red planet are increasingly finding evidence of a warmer, wetter past, the evidence for carbon based life is highly debatable. More on that later. Looking back to 1993, it's interesting to see how the book was received given the views about space exploration common to the time. The book would have been written primarily during the first Bush a...

From Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail: King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England. Cloud Atlas has earned, I believe, a fairly unshakable reputation as a great piece of literature. In common with all great works of art it is heartfelt, complicated, courageous, and a lot of fun. The book came out in 2004, can more be said? One aspect that especially interests me, a day or so after having finished it, is its ability for whipping up truly impressive structures of vapor. This book artfully and consistently drives the home the artificiality of its narratives while simultaneously...