Hypothesis Thursday: The Big Smoke

London is one of those cities that if constantly referred to in a novel gives the illusion of having been richly evoked.

Hypothesis Thursdays: destrangement

Science fiction and fantasy take the strange world and make it familiar again.

Hypothesis Thursdays: Specters

The changes in speculative fiction since the 1970s match the changes in speculative investment. Neither is an educated gamble on future events any longer. In each case, speculation is simply the self-perpetuating production of liquidity: that is, the intense mutability of forms that dissolves form itself, the frictionless compossibility of all things.

Okay: dinosaur sorcerers but their "spells" consist of "future" events (e.g. doings of urban fantasy kitsune detective in Mexico City) and what "happens" in the "future" determines whose magic is strongest in the primordial world ... yeah so those dino witch guys are forced to put aside old rivalries when their way of life and very existence is threatened by the Starborn, shadowy necromantic xenomorphs that have the power to convert weather into specific ninja moves, who are all in love with the same bounty hunter. Only gender-flipped?

Hypothesis Thursdays: Own Up

Because meaning is generated relationally, and every text conditions every other text, no writer is responsible solely for the meaning of their own writing, but every writer is instead responsible for the meaning of it all.

Hypothesis Thursdays: Reasons not to Publish

If you are straight, cis, white, male, financially comfortable, middle or upper class, and you are a cornucopia of physical and mental abilities for coping with what life throws at you, and if you support diversity in fiction, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.

Bonus hypothesis: if you match aspects of this description, but not others, then to the extent that you support diversity in fiction within the categories which you do match, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.

Hypothesis Thursdays: intertextuality

One excellent way of reading any book is to imagine that it is the only book its author ever wrote, and that its author knew in advance it would be so.

Hypothesis Thursdays: (r)

What is mistaken for a crisis in the speculative fiction of extrapolation and prediction is actually often confined to speculative fiction's power of naming. Again and again, speculative fiction is confronted with its fantasies becoming reality, bearing names different to those under which it fantasised them.

What is worse, the new and real names -- which are not only a little different, but completely separate, with neither grateful allusions nor anxiety of influence -- are frequently the proprietary trademarks of companies, or originate as the slang of subcultures, collectives which can only appear in their correlative speculative fiction traditions as a bathetic viral toxins, utterly lethal to all the most enduring assumptions and aspirations of those traditions, and to their mechanisms of subsistence and aggrandizement.

Earlier: names in SFF #1.

UPDATE: Elsewhere: Normalcy is the Future.

Hypothesis Thursdays: Don't Imagine That

What is sometimes called speculative fiction or imaginative literature can just as easily operate through the suppression of some speculative or imaginative element which is ordinarily active in everyday life.

Hypothesis Thursdays: A Muddiest Proposal

When you weigh up the pros and cons, genre writing would be way better off without any prizes at all.

Earlier: underappreciated authors