Every October (well, since last October) Science Fiction editor Keith Allison turns his telescope toward the cosmic horror of weird fiction’s most illustrious Woodrow Wilson look-alike, HP Lovecraft, and the many ways in which people re-interpreted and mis-interpreted his work, in a series called “Punching Cthulhu in the […]
I was fifteen, pulling the ol’ “spending the night at a friend’s house” scam so I could sneak off and indulge in the sundry sins the big city offers to a country boy with a twinkle in his eye and about nine dollars in his pocket. I bummed […]
One of the (many) challenges of science fiction, both for readers and creators, is conceiving of things for which humans have no frame of reference. HP Lovecraft used to confront us with such intellectual challenges in rather a simple but effective method. In The Color Out of Space, […]
In the latter half of the 1950s, it seemed like every alien race with a saucer was high-tailing it to Earth with dreams of conquest, colonization, and a little lovin’ with the locals. The invaders of the 1950s came in many shapes and sizes. Some were blobs. Others […]
I’ve read plenty of good “first contact” stories, and a few great ones. A personal favorite, The Mote in God’s Eye, goes some distance to portraying the tragically insurmountable gulf that might appear when two very different species encounter one another. But no one has realized that gulf […]
Not so very long ago, I was talking with a friend about science fiction’s infatuation with two things: empire and dystopia. Space opera and military science fiction has a fetish for empire, but we’ll deal with that some other time. Dystopian science fiction, those stories of humanity’s struggle […]
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The Cultural Gutter 