A speculative mind

  You can’t get much more futuristic dystopian than the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. It practically invented the subgenre of dystopian science fiction.   It was written in the 1940’s when the year 1984 seemed like a long way off.  I was thinking about it the other day and realizing that the year 1984 was 37 years ago. A good chunk of the population of the world wasn’t even born yet when this “futuristic” novel was set. How are we supposed to feel about a book or a film that is set in a future that has already passed? Nineteen Eighty-Four is not alone in this quandary.  Back to the Future II (the one that is really set in the future) is set in 2015. The novel Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison which became the movie Soylent Green , was set in 1999. The film Blade Runner is set in 2019. Ray Bradbury’s the Martian Chronicles (in the original printing) was set over a range of years from 1999 to 2026. At least Aldous Huxley set his Brave New W...

  If you are looking for some good fantasy that is a bit different from the normal fare, I recommend reading books by people named Rebecca. A few weeks ago, I reviewed The Poppy War by R. F. (Rebecca) Kuang. A fantasy that seems not-so-loosely based on Chinese culture and history. The very next book I read was Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse which is a fantasy that seems modeled on pre-Columbian Native American and maybe some Polynesian culture. Now I love The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire etc., but it is refreshing to find fantasy that doesn’t look like medieval England. In Black Sun we follow several seemingly unconnected people.  There is a blind boy, Serapio, who has an appointment with destiny. We see his mother’s severe preparations for her child. We see his brutal training. When the metal is forged to a sufficient hardness, passage is booked for him on Xiala’s boat where the point of his existence will be tested at the city of Tova. We follow the ...

  “Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast.” The often-misquoted line by the poet William Congreve, nonetheless rings true. Who among us hasn’t had a piece of music that gave them pause? One such moment for me was when I first heard the song “The House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals.  I don’t know how old I was, but I couldn’t have been more than seven. Music was not as prevalent back in the mid-1960’s, this was pre YouTube, pre Internet, pre phone apps, pre many things. About the only music you heard was on the radio. And if you heard a song you liked, you had to either go out and buy the record (not likely for a seven-year-old) or wait endlessly through many lesser songs on the one or two radio stations that might play it. Prior to this I had been listening mostly to children’s music, because, well, I was a kid. I had heard other music too. I was not immune from the radio. But when I heard “The House of the Rising Sun,” something clicked in me. Suddenly I “got” Rock ...