Posts tagged The Expanse
Cameron's Book Round-Up: Fall, part 2
Cameron's Book Round-Up: Fall, part 2

I’m really tired, so I’m just going to get into this. These books are good, but it’s November, and I’m a teacher. November is hell month.

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Book reviews, Written by: CameronCameron SummersJoe Abercrombie, A Little Hatred, The Trouble With Peace, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Locked Tomb trilogy, Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Charles Stross, The Laundry Files, Escape From Yokai Land, The Delirium Brief, The Labyrinth INdex, Dead Lies Dreaming, James S.A. Corey, The Expanse, Leviathan Falls, A Lush and Seething Hell, John Horner Jacobs, Hannu Rajaniemi, Jean le Flambeur, The Causal Angel, Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom: Stories, Iain M. Banks, Iain Banks, Consider Phlebas Comment
"The Time Is Out of Joint": Notes on Metachrony
"The Time Is Out of Joint": Notes on Metachrony

Humans generally look for patterns. It’s one of the things we’re good at, as a species: finding patterns in things, even when they’re not there. So it’s not particularly surprising that we look to the past to try to figure out what the fuck is going on: what is the pattern at work here?

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Literary Theory, Written by: EdgarC.-E. BoylesMetachrony, Personal, Jorge Luis Borges, St. Augustine, My Chemical Romance, The Expanse, Say Anything, Monte Cook, NumeneraComment
Cancer with the Stars: On the Space Western, the Alien Series, and Gothic Marxism
Cancer with the Stars: On the Space Western, the Alien Series, and Gothic Marxism

The Space Western I described above is a fantasy for libertarians; Alien is a nightmare for socialists. The horror here is that Late Capitalism slipped the surly bonds of Earth and is spreading throughout space, consuming everything it touches.

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Analysis, Written by: Cameron, PoliticalCameron SummersSpace Western, Alien series, Gothic Marxism, Firefly, Serenity, The Outer Worlds, Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, The Expanse, James S.A. Corey, Dead Space, mythology, Really Existing Capitalism, LibertarianismComment
The Collapse of Possibility: The Problem of Aesthetics and Ontology in Science Fiction
The Collapse of Possibility: The Problem of Aesthetics and Ontology in Science Fiction

But all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.

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Analysis, Political, Written by: CameronCameron SummersScience Fiction, aesthetics, Philosophy, cyberpunk, The Expanse, Blade Runner, Altered Carbon, Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief, Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer, Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light, Virgil Ortiz, Native Futurism, Black Panther, Afro-Futurism, Star Trek, Gravity (2013), Star Wars, Used Future, Jobsian Minimalism, Transhumanism, Mind Uploading, Peter Frase, Four Futures, CyberpunkComment