essays and ideas from Eliza Sarobhasa
Can Reading Make You Happier? – The New Yorker
Fiction is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social world… based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible futures.
The halting genius of science-fiction writer Ted Chiang – The California Sunday Magazine
“Sometimes, people who read my work tell me, ‘I like it, but it’s not really science fiction, is it?’” he says. “And I always feel like, no, actually, my work is exactly science fiction.”
After Star Wars forever made the genre synonymous with what Chiang calls “adventure stories dressed up with lasers,” people forgot that science fiction includes the word “science” for a reason: It is supposed to be largely about exploring the boundaries of knowledge, he says. “All the things I do in my work — engaging in thought experiments, investigating philosophical questions — those are all things that science fiction does.”
Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world | Books | The Guardian
Every fantasy reflects the place and time that produced it.
If The Lord of the Rings is about the rise of fascism and the trauma of the second world war, and Game of Thrones, with its cynical realpolitik and cast of precarious, entrepreneurial characters is a fairytale of neoliberalism, then Dune is the paradigmatic fantasy of the Age of Aquarius.
Its concerns – environmental stress, human potential, altered states of consciousness and the developing countries’ revolution against imperialism – are blended together into an era-defining vision of personal and cosmic transformation.
Books read differently as the world reforms itself around them, and the Dune of 2015 has geopolitical echoes that it didn’t in 1965, before the oil crisis and 9/11.
Ray Bradbury on Writing, Emotion vs. Intelligence, and the Core of Creativity | Brain Pickings.
If I’m anything at all, I’m not really a science-fiction writer — I’m a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.
Can Reading Make You Happier? – The New Yorker
We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you’ve never heard of, or whose sense you’re unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you already know.
…
The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. They’re all a chore to read. There’s no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.
John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.
The way you do it, he says, is “you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.” You go looking for le mot juste.
But where?
“Your destination is the dictionary,” he writes:
Suppose you sense an opportunity beyond the word “intention.” You read the dictionary’s thesaurian list of synonyms: “intention, intent, purpose, design, aim, end, object, objective, goal.” But the dictionary doesn’t let it go at that. It goes on to tell you the differences all the way down the line — how each listed word differs from all the others. Some dictionaries keep themselves trim by just listing synonyms and not going on to make distinctions. You want the first kind, in which you are not just getting a list of words; you are being told the differences in their hues, as if you were looking at the stripes in an awning, each of a subtly different green.
via You’re probably using the wrong dictionary « the jsomers.net blog.
Ray Bradbury on Writing, Emotion vs. Intelligence, and the Core of Creativity | Brain Pickings.
If I’m anything at all, I’m not really a science-fiction writer — I’m a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.