Last Class 2022

The familiar giant triangle

SF as warning.

SF as wonder.

SF as explanation.

A future history timeline compiled from high quality SF.

A historical dictionary of SF.

What if it's ALL SF?

The sweetest, best space cartooning, one more time.

What's special about television. And about feature film.

Brenda Shaughnessy, I Have a Time Machine. The book.

Franny Choi, Field Trip. The book.

The Angel of the North.

The creator's own view of the famous monument.

Thank you for hanging out with us this term.

Nalo Hopkinson

Afrofuturism. In music: hip-hop as in Deltron 3030. Calypso: for example, Sugar Aloes, "Signs of the End Times."

Hopkinson's own page (some broken links). Her essay "Code Sliding" about writing Midnight Robber.

A useful interview with Hopkinson. An even more useful interview. A terrific and more recent interview.

The Caribbean background. For example, Trinidad, and Jamaica.

One of many available images of Toussaint L'Ouverture.

THIS IS A COMIC WINGS: A COMIC

The most frequently circulated image of Granny Nanny of the Maroons.

Another source for her Web.

A solicitation for Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line.

A still from a production of Aime Cesaire's A Tempest, at Lafayette College.


Some English guy whom Hopkinson rewrites.

Cross-section of an Atlantic slave ship: the Middle Passage.

A monster puppet from Carnival in Toronto, where Hopkinson now lives.

A Midnight Robber from Carnival.

A famous former (or current?) Jamaican Maroon settlement.

The sugar cane slave economy.

A good father: the nonhuman daddy tree.

A decidedly non-scholarly, but edifying, guide to Trinidad and Tobago folklore.

Indigenous Caribbean peoples.

Not the same thing on which other comedies end.

Split paths.

A good choice for a given name.

Greg Egan, Charlie Jane Anders, Rebecca Roanhorse

Greg Egan's author site.

The full text of Egan's novella "Oceanic."

World-building at one scale. And at another.

Philip K. Dick's lecture: "How to Build a Universe..."

An earlier, much-noted work with a gendered novum.

SF as experiment.

Famous people named Martin. Famous people named Daniel.

Not quite, but not unrelated to, the beliefs on Covenant.

Not this kind of bridge.

The argument from design.

Is faith a chemical?

"Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience."

Best picture, 1990. Another useful picture.



Review: the science-fictional triangle whose points are explanation, and wonder and warnings about the unknowable or unknown.

Review: sf as experiment, real world and realist fiction as controls.

Review: the novum. Novums within novums.

William Gibson; Alan Turing

How cyberspace used to look.

A very good reference site for Turing, maintained by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges. The same site's index.

An Enigma machine.

Dilbert's boss takes a Turing Test.

Extremely effective, and therefore unpredictable, learning machines.

Neuromancer, the game, the first edition, another early edition.

An elegant nonacademic reference site for Gibson, with pages specific to Neuromancer (site has been up and down lately).

Riding the monorail in the real Chiba City, Japan.

A dead television channel?

In the midst of life we are in something else.

The same cultural moment as this famous film.

Some complicated visual information (the Tokyo subway). A lot more (not specific to computers) about the visual display of information.

OMNI magazine. Another early issue. Another issue, apparently with Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic."

One metaphor for personality. With an early-80s look.

The arcade game that must be one source for how cyberspace looks.

A world of commerce and commerce. And then, not commerce.

Whether it's wires or wetware, data has to be stored somewhere.

Something's up with vision. A symbol for cyberpunk. The resulting anthology.

New ways to move through space, or think about space.

Who controls what territory, what space?

Haitian voodoo divinities.

The end of the novel repeats a famous quest.

So does this work of art, and this one, with this guy.

What people thought high tech images looked like in the early 1980s: two minutes of highlights from the movie TRON.

James Tiptree, Jr.

A source for a name.

A warmer collection.

The source for another pseudonym.

Another radical version of feminist sf.

Pheromones in another mammal.

They're just molecules.

Homages to more advanced (or "advanced") cultures we don't understand (yet): like a cargo cult.

Not just the sex drive, but the wish to escape.

"We are built to dream outwards."

"Girl" anticipated a cultural movement.

Who needs real bodies?

Anthony Van Dyck's Cupid and Psyche (1640). The story of Cupid and Psyche, adapted from Apuleius and retold by Thomas Bulfinch (1855).

Instinctive, arguably biological reactions of attraction and aversion.

"The Song of Hiawatha," entire, and in a sample from the first book.

Blake's peach thief.

A lot more William Blake.

Women and night time.

Time to leave this behind?

Leaving Earth, and leaving realism, behind in time and space.

Maybe we don't want to lose this sort of thing, or this either.

Ways, short and long-term, for representing time.

Alice Bradley's first husband, the poet and novelist William Davey ("green hill against sunrise" &c.) (via Greta Friar).

An acoustic homage to Tiptree's works.

Take me to the river.

Jack London (and a bit of Delany and Zoline)

Quite a lot of Jack London online, through Sonoma State Univ.

The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, as photographed by (possibly) London himself.

More earthquake: SF City Hall after the quake and fire, again in a photo that may be by London himself.

Attractive pack animals. Violent but attractive herd animals. The results of predation.

West Coast beaches and the end of humanity (Shell Beach, Sonoma County).

"The Scarlet Plague" in a new, better academic edition online.

More of London's sf. His famous book-length proto-fascist dystopia.

London was in some ways against white supremacy, but in some ways horrifyingly racist.

"The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry."

Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" now online.

Dangerous Visions.

Welcome to Istanbul.

Entropic disorder. Another order and entropic disorder.

Another order and disorder.


A symbol for older SF.

Dr. Weiner's neighborhood.

The world will end in fire and/or ice.

Frederik Pohl's Gateway

A massive, but non-academic, list of Pohl's works, and a recent interview.

The first three chapters of Pohl's memoir, The Way the Future Was.

Gateway, the spinoff video game.

Reacting against the Campbell ethos.

A lot of Galaxy magazine.

Everything we know about the Heechee.


We may have a sense of wonder, but that's not why people really take risks.

An old-time old-time prospector.

What you don't see in Gateway.

The role of chance in American life. The really big role of chance in American life.

One analogy for the Gateway asteroid.

Another analogy for the Gateway asteroid.

Another analogy for the Gateway asteroid.

Pohl can't believe in him. Does Pohl believe him instead?

A real psychoanalyst from the late 1960s.

Computer simulation of light and motion around a black hole. (How to weigh a black hole.)

Another (groan) plot-relevant black hole.

A sequel. Another sequel. And another.

Gilman

The first issue of Gilman's Forerunner (1909).

What seems to be the first book (rather than serial) edition of Herland.

Gilman herself.

Friedrich Froebel, sometimes credited with an important invention.

Images from the Smithsonian's Making of Homemakers collection

There is an essential womanhood but it's not this. Maybe it's this?

There is evolution but it's not this; maybe it's this.

Not quite what this guy thought.

Another familiar contrast between men's tastes and women's.

One analogy for Herland.

Another analogy. Who's the snake?

A future that came true.

A hard problem for Gilman's Utopian program to solve.

Naming a genre.

Using another genre.

Explicitly feminist sf: much later examples.

Looking for secondary sources? You can reach the Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliography through the main Harvard library site.



Hawthorne: a famous garden.

Hawthorne: Genesis 3, the Fall.

Hawthorne: the Roman god Vertumnus, a dude made in part of fruit.

Artificial selection gave us maize, or American corn.

The dark purple flower of doom.

Nightshade's purple flowers and dark fruit.



An apparently reliable academically sponsored reading edition of "Rappaccini's Daughter."

Connecticut Yankee

Another point of origin for a kind of sf.

From the University of Virginia, a useful guide to contexts for Twain's Yankee.

An 1889 edition of Connecticut Yankee.

About the production of Yankee and the illustrations by Dan Beard; a few of Twain's favorites.

A symbol for Connecticut.

The marvelous lightning rod.

Mark Twain's house in Hartford (built 1873-74); a virtual tour.

Illustrating Malory's Morte d'Arthur with 1890s artist Aubrey Beardsley.

P. T. Barnum, The Art of Money Getting (1886).

A full suit of armor. Heavy, isn't it?

Contemporary recreational armor.

The advent of outdoor electric lights.

An early telephone (1876).

Knights on pennyfarthing bicycles.

From the Mark Twain Museum in Missouri, a Twain timeline and brief publishing history.

The infamous Paige Compositor. More about it.

Remembering the U.S. Civil War-- dead soldiers at Antietam; anticipating trench warfare.

Does all sf tend to become military sf?

Key lines from Twain's novel: "Training is all there is"... "any Established church"... "a man is a man at bottom."

More key lines: the "ossifying" effects of slavery. Gutenberg, Arkwright, and so on, the real creators.

What Arkwright invented: the water-frame loom. A late nineteenth century Singer sewing machine.

Mark Twain and Nicola Tesla on public radio. (They don't become close till after the Yankee, though.)

An ad for tooth polish (1913).

The past is a place (apologies to Bud Foote.)



Hawthorne: a famous garden.

Hawthorne: Genesis 3, the Fall.

Hawthorne: the Roman god Vertumnus, a dude made in part of fruit.

Artificial selection gave us maize, or American corn.

The dark purple flower of doom.

Nightshade's purple flowers and dark fruit.



An apparently reliable academically sponsored reading edition of "Rappaccini's Daughter," from Jack Lynch's miscellany of online texts.

H. G. Wells

A reliable text for The Time Machine (book version). First book edition.

Darko Suvin excludes some fiction from "science fiction" (1978), and offers an sf theory list in 1979.

Suvin gets interviewed at length in 1991.

The H. G. Wells Society and its journal.

Jules Verne versus H. G. Wells.

From the 1977 Burt Lancaster Island of Dr. Moreau.

Wells in 1926: respectable enough for the cover of TIME.

Wells as guiding spirit for a Romanian science fiction club.

British disasters and longue durée sf after Wells.

Toy Time Machines and a toy Time Traveller, by the sadly defunct toy designer Spookypop.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, outside and inside.

A poster for George Pal's 1960 film version.

Pure wonder.

Sketchy terror.

The future of characteristically British sadness.

Harmless flowers. More harmless flowers.

In a coal mine (Illustrated London News, 1876).

Coming out of a coal mine.

Contemplating evolution.

A real giant centipede, not for the squeamish, and some attractive jellyfish.

first lecture

Robot fanfare to open the course.

The visual future.

This guy likes cyberpunk.

Let's play a game. A brief not-especially-woke but favorable review of the game.

Fan culture worldwide, and in New Zealand. At Harvard itself. And at MIT.

Theodore von Holst's 1831 frontispiece to a book written earlier and made even more famous later.

Mythical tech. Mythical biotech.

The H. G. Wells Society. H. G. Wells looks worried.

Hugo Gernsback's Radio News and Amazing Stories.

Issues of Astounding Science Fiction, from 1939, and from 1950.

A paperback illustator's Mesklin.

More on the Cartmill affair. An A-bomb diagram.

Chesley Bonestell: spacecraft.

A beautiful robot B.E.M. head.

You can't avoid Robert A. Heinlein.

Stuff engineers like.

We can't avoid politics.

Neither can superheroes, who are indeed SF.

Also SF: near-future authoritarian dystopias. And giant hurricanes.

Mapping More's Utopia. Peter Fitting on Utopian studies.

Critics make theories of sf, and more theories.

SF as an experiment, with the real world, or realist fiction, as control.

Book cover for Ishiguro.

A poster for the midcentury film Destination Moon.

Later sf on TV. And on film, not necessarily popular American film.

Ice melts in Antarctica. Kim Stanley Robinson is right to worry about it.

The academic journal Science Fiction Studies.

The official Harvard College Canvas site for our course.

Everybody should read Strange Horizons.

You might also consider helping Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.

Also relevant: Lightspeed. Current issue of Apex.

And Clarkesworld. And of course LCRW.

Podcasts can be SF. Nightvale, maybe. Bright Sessions, certainly.

Near future dystopia trends. Sandra Newman, for example. And yes, this.

First handout, 2017

If every man, woman, boy and girl, could be induced to read science fiction right along, there would certainly be a great resulting benefit to the community, in that the educational standard of its people would be raised tremendously. Science fiction would make people happier, give them a broader understanding of the world, make them more tolerant.
--Hugo Gernsback, editorial in Amazing Stories (1927), qtd. in Brooks Landon, Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (New York: Routledge, 2002 [1995]), 52





When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
--Jo Walton, Among Others (New York: Tor, 2010), 52





"OK, Chief! All tight here. You say it's ten light-years to that star. How long's it going to take us to get there?"
"About ten minutes."
--E. E. "Doc" Smith, Skylark Three (Lincoln, Neb.: Bison, 20004 [1930]), 172





Then her world exploded.
If such a string of words appeared in a mundane fiction text, more than likely we would respond to it as an emotionally muzzy metaphor...
He turned on his left side.
---Samuel R. Delany, "Science Fiction and 'Literature,'" in D. Hartwell and M. Wolf, eds., Visions of Wonder (New York: Tor, 1996), 448





"Mr. Million," my father said, "is perhaps a bit more sentimental than I—besides, I don't like to go out. You see, doctor, your supposition that we are all truly the same individual will have to be modified. We have our little variations."
---Gene Wolfe, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," in The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David G. Hartwell (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 239





Although SF does not generate story-structures of its own, it transforms popular cultural materials by reorienting their concerns towards its characteristic horizons: the transformation of human societies as a result of innovations attending technoscientific projects.
--Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction_ (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2008), 7





Science fiction is always about the here and now, about this place where humans live.
--Justine Larbalestier, "Introduction," in Larbalestier, ed., Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the 20th Century (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ., 2004), xviii





All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook among them…. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
--Ursula K. LeGuin, "Introduction" (1976), in The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 1976 [1969]), xii


“Alien planets aren’t Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept them on the basis of the logic that makes them the way they are.”
“I know all that, agreed Mackenzie, “but honest, chief, this place gets in my hair at times. Trees that shoot at you, moss that talks, vines that heave thunderbolts at you—and now, the Encyclopedia.”
--Clifford D. Simak, “Ogre” (1944), in The Best of Astounding, ed. Tony Lewis (New York: Baronet, 1978), 155





Only science fiction can properly confront the moral questions implicit in the political task of steering the human world into a future... I do not say simply that science fiction is useful in this respect: I say that it is necessary.
---Brian Stableford, "To Bring in Fine Things," in Visions of Wonder, 674





"Let me get this straight: you're the KGB's core AI, but you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.
"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements... Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect."
--Charles Stross, "Lobsters," in V. MacIntyre, Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 230





[The video] arcade seems nothing more than a defunct landmark around which has gathered this intense cult of paperwork-hobbyists. A wiry teenager in tight black jeans and a black t-shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative confidence of a pool hustler, a long skinny cardboard box slung over his shoulder like a rifle. "These are my ethnic group," he explains in response to the look on her face. --Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon, 1999), 647.

Last lecture, 2017

A memory of the future.

The shape of things to come.


The world is amazing.

Modern tech helps people.

Modern tech could kill us all.

Modern experimental science helps us understand ourselves.

Modern tech creates beauty.

Modern tech hurts us all.


Kate Elliott is right.

One governing metaphor for sf in general.

One complement to that metaphor.

New worlds, far-future or otherwise.



Fabula and syuzet: a refresher.

One subgenre of sf.

Another subgenre of sf.

What happens to time?

A detailed but outdated nonacademic Ted Chiang fan site.

An interview with Ted Chiang from 2010 (at Boing Boing).

A more recent interview with Chiang (Asian American Writers Workshop). Another interview (Clarion Writers' Workshop).

Nnedi Okorafor clarifies some sources.
Nnedi Okorafor generally.
A good essay on "Binti" and its contexts.

The Clarion Workshop and the associated Clarion Foundation.

Want more book-oriented SF? Go here. Or, closer to home, here.

Pie contest, 2017

We will award pie to any complete answer we get to this set of questions, or to the top three answers if we receive no complete and correct ones. Incomplete answers and guesses are encouraged.

Please email your answers by 4pm on Thursday Dec. 7 to Stephanie and to your TF.

(Note also that Stephanie will hold ordinary office hours, 1:30-4pm, next Tues. Dec 6; Stephanie will also be available to meet by appointment when on leave this spring.)

1. Where is Miriam called Miriam, where is she called Helge, and why?

2. What tattooed hero denies that he is a Sin-Eater?

3. What book of poetry set in the future features a main character who lived through the Kwangju uprising?

4. What name does Sax Russell later assume?

5. Why do scanners live in vain?

6. What do Sarah, Alison, Helena, Cosima, Tony, Beth, Krystal and Rachel have in common?

7. What got New Worlds magazine in legal trouble?

8. Did Doro die? If so, who killed Doro?

9. What 1990s rapper told the people of California he was born on Jupiter?

10. What French composer introduced electronic instruments to his postwar orchestra?

11. What British poet who died in 2015 edited sf and later wrote about Stalin?

12. What novella about a charismatic abbess is probably a tribute to James Tiptree, Jr.?

13. What are slipstream and steampunk?

14. What's the difference between the New People and the rest of the people in Bangkok?

15. What Easthampton, Mass.-based magazine had an amazing story about jellyfish, near-future genderqueer kids, and water pollution in its environmental-themed 33rd issue?

16. Who created a habitable future world that extends for 360 degrees around the sun?

17. Why will Ken Liu be in Quincy, Mass. in July 2018?

18. What was Deirdre's profession, when she was human?

19. What aliens' Language requires two speakers or phonemes at once?

20. How is a land ironclad like a communications satellite?

New media and SF, 2017

SF is time travel: forwards, backwards and sideways, including alternate histories.

SF is also an escape from history.

The Hitler wins topos/trope/meme. The map of America in a famous Hitler wins story that's now a TV show too.

SF is an experiment whose control is not just the real world; it's also other genres.

You can experiment with alternate phenotypes, but also with alternate language.

An earlier innovation in physical substrate that clearly affected what sf writers did.

An even earlier innovation.

Egan's "Black Box," Paste Magazine online version.

Egan's "Black Box" in the original Twitter version thanks to Storify.

The New Yorker interviews Egan about "Black Box."

To read the famous or infamous PowerPoint chapter from Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, go to her own main site and click on the extreme right-hand label "Great Rock and Roll Pauses." You may also be able to view the chapter here.

More material from and about Egan's novel A Visit from the Goon Squad.

You can go back to your body, or you can end up in the night sky.

Joe Winkler's Twitter-style review of Egan's "Black Box."

Nick Montfort (and collaborators') interactive fiction. His monograph (2003-05) on interactive fiction.

The first widely influential interactive fiction.

Planetfall, by John Burnett. Burnett's main site. (Warning: may start audio automatically.)

José Adolph's story "Nosotros, no."

Cixin Liu, trans. Ken Liu: The Three-Body Problem.

Audio-native SF: The Bright Sessions. Audio-native slipstream: of course.

One way to think about gaming.

Another way to think about gaming.

Ted Chiang

Review: the science-fictional triangle whose points are explanation, and wonder and warnings about the unknowable or unknown.

Review: sf as experiment, real world and realist fiction as controls.

Review: the novum. Novums within novums.

Review: the idea of genres and subgenres, which branch out over time.

One particularly reflexive subgenre.

Review: sf asks about historical change.

SF also asks about an afterlife.



"Liking What You See" helped inspire influential YA SF.

"Story of Your Life" is now a movie.

An interview with Chiang.

Louise is a reader.

Fiction as face.

Fiction as mirror.

People who misunderstood Hopi.

Nietzschean Eternal Return.

Ideas about characters.

Narrative usually works like that. Real life works like that.

What if we could see our lives like that?

Practice exam 2017

Our December final exam will have this structure and these kinds of questions, though all the examples will be different. We’re distributing this practice exam before Thanksgiving in response to student requests. We’ll discuss the exam and how to take it after Thanksgiving, in one of our final lecture classes.

PART I. Pick ten terms from the list of twenty below and write, for each of the ten, just one phrase or sentence about what it means and how it functions in a work we have read for this course; give the name of the author of that work (you may but need not give the title of the work as well). A few terms may have more than one right answer (20%).

PART II. Then, from among those ten, pick three and write two or three substantial paragraphs about each, making an argument about how it functions in that work and what it means (45%).

Obsidian ---------------------------The Palace of Green Porcelain
Yorkie --------------- --------------A solar eclipse
Andy ------------------ -------------Cyberspace
The space elevator ----------- ----The Three Laws of Robotics

Gelle-Klara Moynlin -------------Lentz
Florida ------------------------------Ellador
C. P. (“Cold Pig”) -----------------Joe Chip
Jordan -------------------------------cognitive estrangement
Ann Clayborne---------------------A sudden shift into color from black and white
Frelks -------------------------------Joe-Jim

 PART III. In a cogent essay with a well-supported argument, answer one of the following questions. Your answer should refer to, and demonstrate that you have thought about, at least two works we have read for this course (35%). You may, of course, refer to others. Please do not duplicate in this part the claims that you made in part II (you may refer to the same works); do not duplicate the arguments you made in the papers you wrote for our course. You may refer to the works on which you wrote papers, though the best essay for this exam would remind us that you have read other works too.

1. Sf developed first as prose fiction, consisting of nothing but printed words. What can images, sound or digital media do for sf that print, on its own, cannot?

 2. How do sf works and sf authors construct a tradition, or propose lines of descent, connecting their own works to earlier works within sf?

 3. Can sf effectively represent consciousness, intelligence or personality that we can recognize as not human, and as in some important way not like what’s human? If so, how? If not, why do authors keep trying?

4. SF by definition depicts a world in at least one respect (the novum) unlike our own. Does that make all sf an escape from history, or from the present, or from the real world? If not, why not? If so, is that a problem, or a source of strength?

Ryman, Roanhorse, Walton...

"Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience."

The Angel of the North is real. You can go see it.

So is Blaydon.

The Mundane Manifesto. And some more Mundane SF.

Authentic Indian territory?

Best picture, 1990. Another useful picture.

Jo Walton's "Other Worlds." Jo Walton's Among Others.

Richard Powers (and a bit of Delany)

Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" now online.

Dangerous Visions.

Welcome to Istanbul.

The second movement of Mozart's clarinet concerto.

The author's own website.

The Beckman Institute for interdisciplinary work, including human-machine interaction, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Powers's first two novels. Powers's well-received third.

A relatively accessible, and Pulitzer Prize-winning, source for Powers' thinking about AI.

Thinking again about ELIZA. Thinking about machine translation.

Thinking about time and fruit.

Lentz's "near-opaque glasses."

Computers used to be big.

An extremely important code.

A book of these things too.

Arts and sciences: language as against other kinds of experience and information.

Not all experience is verbal.

Can Richard ever belong here? What about here?

Extremely effective, and therefore unpredictable, learning machines.

Hey, Marcel...

Poems cited in Powers's first pages, by John Keats, and by Wallace Stevens, and by Keats again.

The hippocampus in your head.

A nice Dutch train. (Not sure whether it's running south.)

A book about the limits of novels' directional plot.

A book about the limits of tests.

Personhood: is it about having a human body? Or can you get it from these things?

Literature as connection.

Connecting this book to other books about paths. To other books about education.

Playing Mastermind and Connect Four.

Listening to Hopkins's "The Wind-Hover."

Listening to the Violent Femmes.

"A story about how we're all going to end up in cubicles."

A tangled web of connections.

Getting outside the wall or the bars of the self.

"Good girl outside."

Do you see a face? A face? A face?

Literature as escape. Or as escape.

Stalker; some reference works

Stalker and other Tarkovsky films online.

About Geoff Dyer's Zona, a book about Stalker.

Shorter Dyer: "it is the reason cinema was invented."

Russian critics remember how the film was made: in Russia, Tajikstan, and Estonia.

Cinema, a visual medium, turns space into time.

A sort of real-life Zone.

John 20 (see especially John 20:29). Revelation 6.

Walking on water. A Russian-style crown of thorns.

Another sacred place.

*******

This belongs somewhere: a lot of review-essays about SF since the 1990s (not academic-scholarly, but critical and serious).

So does a a reminder about the all-purpose SF news site io9.

And so does the new online edition of the SF Encyclopedia, edited by John Clute.

Here are all its entries on film.