The Mumpsimus

Snowpiercer Let's talk about white saviors, emotions, and endings. Daniel José Older has an interesting take on Snowpiercer , particularly its ending, likening it to Children of Men :

Harou Romain, Project for a Prison, 1840 I can't say I've followed the writing career of B. Obama very closely over the years — his oeuvre seemed a bit too mainstream, a bit too conservative for my tastes — but I'm interested in the book he's apparently been working on for more than five years now , a kind of sequel, it seems, to Patriot Acts  by G.W. Shrub* (a paranoid military thriller that was, inexplicably, the most popular book in the U.S. before Fifty Shades of Grey ). Various sources have reported rumors about the new Obama book over the years, including apparently facetious reports that it would be not one book but a series, collectively titled Drone Strike , with individual entries such as Drone Strike: American Citizen Down!  and Drone Strike: Oops, Dead Kids!. It seems now that Obama is actually at work on a comprehensive near-future epic. The Wall Street Journal  has a particularly concise summary of some facets of the dystopian world imagined b...

The good people at Tor.com asked me to contribute a post about the playwright Caryl Churchill for Dystopia Week , and I was thrilled to be able to oblige them with "Dystopia on Stage: Caryl Churchill's Far Away " . Here's a taste: Most people don’t often think of playwrights as science fiction and fantasy writers, and SF doesn’t really exist as a genre in the theatre world in the same way it does in the world of print and cinema. Yet from its earliest incarnations, theatre has reveled in the fantastic, and many of the greatest plays of all time have eschewed pure realism. Something about the relationship between performers and audiences lends itself to fantasy. The British playwright Caryl Churchill has written a great number of extraordinary plays, many of them enlivened by impossible events. Churchill is a staunchly political writer, a writer who seeks to challenge audiences’ complacencies about the real life of the real world, but flights of imagination give ...