Sci-fi taxonomists take note: We are now officially in the Rare Earth Age of Science Fiction. Technological change driving changes in human consciousness is not a trope, but a given. Philosophical arguments about organic consciousness versus AI take a back seat to practical considerations of how to deal with the inevitable robot apocalypse. We’re hip…
Category: Criticism
Tom Bradley’s Energeticum/Phantasticum
Tom Bradley has made me an outcast in my own home. Again. This time, it’s Energeticum/Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion in Seven Cantos, a handsome volume that begs to be read aloud. After following family members around the house for a few days declaiming choice snippets of Bradley’s vision, I was finally banished to the deck,…
Five Japanese Books of Mystery and Imagination
My blog post onTOR.com to promote The Devouring God. Very exciting for me, as I have read TOR paperbacks since the 1980s. They were almost as much fun as the old ACE doubles! Read the post on TOR.com, along with astute commentary by British horror great Ramsey Campbell (squee) and others. OR: Read it below,…
Family Romance: Our Cup of Meat
Kendley Fiction confirms it: Bizarro fabulist Tom Bradley exists, and he appears to be entirely human. Taller than most, and much redder, but still. I know Bradley exists because I’ve seen him. He taught alongside me at a Japanese institution of higher learning in the mid ’90s, and I spotted him at a spring semester start-up confab. This was a…