The blend of human and machine goes further in Irenosen Okojie’s ‘Saudade Minus One (S-1=)’. The title reminds us of the nonsense maths of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and the story inhabits an eerie hinterland informed by the kind of reality in which 2+2 really does equal 5. Identical boys are dispatched across a region of North […]
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ does villainy so well its antagonists are part of our language: from the treacherous shopkeeper to the harsh genius O’Brian; from Big Brother to Winston himself as he willingly becomes the thing he hates. Prize for most hateful bastardy in ‘2084’ goes to the mysterious organisers of EJ Swift’s ‘The Endling Market’. Like […]
Mansfield in Space With Fungus Some genre writers can’t avoid putting a robot or an alien into the narrative; Malcolm Devlin goes back and takes them out, leaving interesting scars. The resulting uncertainty is one of the few pointers towards a story being weird fiction, a sub-genre that takes pride in being almost impossible to […]
Like Led Zeppelin albums, Unsung Stories’ spoken word evenings are individually numbered, adding to the unique sense of each. Tonight’s intersection of fact and fantasy was the observation by regular MC George Sandison that today was Diana Wynne Jones’s birthday. Jones, who was at Oxford when CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were lecturing there, is […]
http://www.unsungstories.co.uk Science fiction is inherently dramatic; the highest grossing movies tend to be SF, with their ability to find compelling visual metaphors for the tension between what is possible and what is not (yet). Stage productions are fewer, possibly because of the misguided notion that loads of special effects are needed, and until recently there […]
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