From "Mutant Popcorn"

By Nick Lowe, Interzone 253.

[...] It’s easily the most complex transformation yet of a major franchise universe, bending the series’ increasingly centrifugal spin-offs, prequels, and reboots back into a single continuity by folding the Fox franchise’s past and future (which, to complicate things further, are in internal continuity the other way around) back together so that a new future (or past) is born out of the Singer-Vaughn canon while Last Stand and the Wolverine films are erased from the memory of all but the hero and his mentor, who in this film are also the other way about. By a productive accident, the X-Men films have wound up extending their universe backwards and forwards in tandem, resulting in the only comics franchise whose history is laid out before us as a sixty-year whole; and the coexistence of original and reboot cast allows the continuing dramatisation of a complete generations-spanning allohistory of our own world from the Silver Age to the Age of Apocalypse, with Days’ end-credit tease extending the canon into gulfs of time deeper still [...]

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.

From Schiller's letters on aesthetics

"If the nobility of art has survived the nobility of nature, it also goes before it like an inspiring genius, forming and awakening minds. Before truth causes her triumphant light to penetrate into the depths of the heart, poetry intercepts her rays, and the summits of humanity shine in a bright light, while a dark and humid night still hangs over the valleys.

"But how will the artist avoid the corruption of his time which encloses him on all hands? Let him raise his eyes to his own dignity, and to law; let him not lower them to necessity and fortune. Equally exempt from a vain activity which would imprint its trace on the fugitive moment, and from the dreams of an impatient enthusiasm which applies the measure of the absolute to the paltry productions of time, let the artist abandon the real to the understanding, for that is its proper field. But let the artist endeavor to give birth to the ideal by the union of the possible and of the necessary. Let him stamp illusion and truth with the effigy of this ideal; let him apply it to the play of his imagination and his most serious actions, in short, to all sensuous and spiritual forms; then let him quietly launch his work into infinite time.

"But the minds set on fire by this ideal have not all received an equal share of calm from the creative genius—that great and patient temper which is required to impress the ideal on the dumb marble, or to spread it over a page of cold, sober letters, and then intrust it to the faithful hands of time. This divine instinct, and creative force, much too ardent to follow this peaceful walk, often throws itself immediately on the present, on active life, and strives to transform the shapeless matter of the moral world."