Please welcome Paul Kincaid to Big Other. Paul is a writer and critic living in England. He is the author of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction (Hugo Award nominee) and co-editor of The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology. He was awarded the Thomas D. Clareson Award for services to science fiction after administering the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 11 years. He is currently one of the judges for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He reviews for far too many places to list here. His web site is HERE and he blogs, intermittently, HERE.
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John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
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Welcome, Paul! I’m very curious about “What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction”; I’ll have to check that out.
Best regards,
Adam
Welcome, Paul.
I look forward to more sci-fi content. Great addition!
Oh, and congratulations on reading so many books last year. I’m having fun poring over the list.
Your comments on the INTERFICTIONS 2 anthology match my own. I keep kicking myself that I didn’t submit something to it, though.
Ooh, I see you wrote something about DHALGREN…
…Regarding that idea of ULYSSES being both Modernist and Postmodernist, have you see Brian McHale’s analyses of the book in CONSTRUCTING POSTMODERNISM? I mention it mainly because McHale’s writing is on my mind these days.
Cheers,
Adam
Hey Adam,
I haven’t seen Paul’s comments on Interfictions 2. Where is it?
Never mind; I found it: http://peake.livejournal.com/160076.html
I liked this, of course:
“There is, to my mind, no such thing as a pure example of genre. Throughout the history of literature, writers have plundered modes, approaches, styles, forms, genres, in exactly the way that contributors to this volume ascribe to interstitial. Thomas More’s Utopia is a combination of themes taken from the writings of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci and structure taken from works of philosophy such as The Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus. Five hundred years later, China Miéville’s The City and the City is a combination of approach taken from any number of crime novels and theme taken from Foucault’s notion of the Heterotopia. In between, practically every work of fiction you can name has borrowed liberally from history, biography, science, travel, philosophy, other fictions, and so on (and conversely, every work of history, biography, philosophy and such has borrowed liberally from other fictions and the rest). In other words, if interstitial fiction exists, then it is indistinguishable from fiction as a whole.”
And this:
“I have consistently argued that genre is a relative thing, indefinable precisely because it is constantly reinventing itself, because it has no set limits.”
Hi everyone, and thanks for the welcome.
Adam, I have indeed read the McHale. A formative influence that I keep quoting, especially POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM. I think my views on postmodernism (and on cyberpunk) have changed somewhat since I first read it, but it is still so useful.
They were big influences on me, too. I was never sold on McHale’s overall arguments for what postmodernism is (although his version makes for a nice story), but his formal analyses are superb. And those books are such excellent primers on how to write postmodernist fiction—huge catalogs of tropes, especially the first one…
I haven’t read his third book, though. Have to pick that up…
Cheers,
Adam
Welcome Paul! Excited to have you here.