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23 Vol 4 Num 5 February 2010
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From The Heart's Basement Archives
Interregnum
Thu, Feb 25, 2010
By the end of the 1950's, just in time for the Great Fall, genre science fiction had become at the top of its range a beautiful, precise instrument.
The Prince of Stasis
Tue, Jan 5, 2010
Raymond Carver's complete collected short stories, just published by the Library of America, are an interesting and disturbing concatenation; quality lit at its cusp in the late twentieth century.
The Laxian Key
Sun, Nov 8, 2009
The guy who pumps gas at the local Shell is genuinely contemplative and thoughtful.
Terminal Error
Thu, Jul 16, 2009
From a recent letter to Todd Haines, Artistic Director of the Roundabout Theater in New York City: “Mark Saltzman's new Tin Pan Alley Rag is very promising, neatly staged, but the play rests upon an historical inaccuracy which undercuts seriously, and I am surprised that neither the playwright nor someone in the Roundabout chain of command failed to spot it.
Fragments of Sussex
Tue, May 12, 2009
He, Suspension, Darkness Ballard's "condensed novels," brief snapshots of the century in turmoil, began in New Worlds in the early 1960's, were aggregated into The Atrocity Exhibition, a collection at the end of that decade and probably had more effect upon science fiction than any other work from that period.
Across the Gates
Thu, Mar 5, 2009
Another of my abandoned projects: a series of alternate histories in which science fiction writers have their careers instead in the mainstream or mainstream writers become science fiction writers instead.
Master of the Abyss
Tue, Jan 6, 2009
"This man" Jonathan Lethem said, pointing to me at the rear of the room in which his Readercon Guest of Honor interview was taking place, "had a direct hookup thirty-five years ago to the outcome of the space agency. Astronauts driving cross-country in diapers to speed along a murder plot. The crazy collapse of it all."
Letting The Guns Bury Them
Fri, Nov 7, 2008
John F. Carr's new biography of H.Beam Piper (McFarland 2008) is pretty good, and has some fascinating leads as they like to say (and too much on Piper's pre-publishing life; the book has reached page 71 before reaching in chronology his first sale) but ultimately it is more of science fiction publishing's decades in Piper's working lifetime than of the author himself.
Scattershot Again
Wed, Sep 10, 2008
Harold Ross's major selling point for The New Yorker whose first issue he published in February of 1925 was that his magazine was definitely "Not for the little old lady in Dubuque."
At the O. K. Corral
Tue, Jul 8, 2008
Early on in what I then thought of as my "career" I had Big Plans.
The Toy Shop
Sun, Feb 17, 2008
That's what Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post called the newspaper Sports Department.
Substantial Fire, or Why This Column Almost Didn't Appear
Sat, Dec 22, 2007
Three passes at an opening, one reaching a quarter-length of a full column, and I abandoned each in disgust.
Scattershot
Sun, Aug 26, 2007
Harold Bloom coined the term "Anxiety of Influence" in the 1970's, describing the situation facing the contemporary poet, but it transports effortlessly to science fiction.
The Conventional Wisdom
Thu, Jun 28, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut called the phenomenon "Foma" . . . myths whose falsity was well understood but which we had quietly agreed to treat as if they were true.
Arias & Barcarolles
Sat, Mar 3, 2007
From its inception as a category of publishing in this country (the first issue being Gernsback's April, 1926 Amazing Stories), science fiction was a literature of ideas.
From the Heart's Basement February 2007
Wed, Jan 24, 2007
Here is the third incarnation of this column of commentary; there were eight in Pulphouse in the early 90's and then a couple in Ellen Datlow's online Event Horizon in 1998.
