The Mumpsimus

While reading (and enjoying) a recent review at Strange Horizons , I became obsessed with a single word: mimetic . Writing about Vandana Singh's story "Thirst", Dan Hartland says, "Indeed, 'Thirst' is a largely mimetic piece, which opens itself to the fantastic only towards its close..." and then at the end of the paragraph finishes by saying, "two planes often opposed to each other in fiction co-exist and co-mingle, rendering metaphor, allegory and mimesis one". He calls another of Singh's stories "essentially a mimetic story about the search for truth". There's a minor tradition within the science fiction community of using mimetic and mimesis to mean the opposite of the fantastic . The oldest such uses that I could find (with a quick and profoundly less than exhaustive search) date to the early 1970s, and the casual employment of the term in those contexts makes me suspect that it has a longer history within the SF wor...

Colleen Lindsay asked me to write a little something for her blog, perhaps something about MFA programs (though I've never attended one), perhaps advice to beginning writers (though there are vastly better people to receive advice from), perhaps pictures of sickeningly cute animals. I dithered, then wrote this . Pictures of sickeningly cute animals will have to wait.