Thursday, September 14, 2023

Reading Lists - Cleaning Out The Clippings App

 Just making a list of things I have looked at without finding time to put them in other posts, or detail any thought in a separate post. Pick, choose, ignore, but thanks for reading

Speculative fiction is a broad field that encompasses works of fantasy such as “The Lord of the Rings”, horror like “The Exorcist,” the supernatural as in “Stranger Things,” dystopia such as “The Hunger Games” and science fiction like “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Often, speculative genres have been considered escapist or not serious. Yet, when addressing social, political, economic and climate conflicts and projecting them into the future, speculative literature offers a new way to understand the consequences of the past and the concerns of the present.

Futurism is also a type of speculative fiction. At the center of Peruvian futurism are characters of Spanish, Indigenous and African descent. The stories feature Native technologies like quipus or “talking knots”, an ancient system for recording and transmitting information, and “andenes,” or agriculture terraces. They highlight Inca beliefs about the natural world and astronomy.

COVID was good to me. I hide and shut the world out in prosaic times. Exceptional times do not alter my routine. Young to old, then to now. I ignore the contemporaneous world and live in the historical eras I depict in my books. I’ve been interviewed six trillion times. I’ve been the subject of seven documentary films. Interviewers harp on my mother’s 1958 murder and cite childhood trauma as the fount of my gifts. I’ve played along. It jukes book sales. Disingenuousness is a sin. I’m writing this essay in the spirit of atonement. My ongoing biography should be revised to reflect this:

I’m just a numbnuts kid who loves to read. The books I read taught me to write. I love American Hard-Boiled Fiction. I rarely stray from that oft-maligned canon. The Enchanters hits bookstores September 12. It’s far and away my best book. It’s an ode to Red Harvest, The Carpetbaggers, The Stewardesses, The Call Girls, The Nymphomaniacs, and The Zebra-Striped Hearse. It’s a monument to Crown Liquor.

sch 9/13

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