It is perfectly possible that I spend too much time on the Internet, and on social media. But there is so much amazing stuff out there – insightful, informative, passionate, provocative, brilliantly written stuff, produced not for profit but for the sake of the ideas and the wish to communicate with others – and if it wasn’t for the Twitter I wouldn’t know a thing about most of it. My ‘best of’ list seems to get longer every year, perhaps because I’ve got into the habit of making notes as soon as I’ve read something, rather than relying on my ever more erratic memory to recall things from earlier in the year – and this is as much about reminding myself and revisiting things as it as about recommending that you should read them too… (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’
Holiday Reading: Best of 2017
Posted in Musings, tagged archaeology, blogs, classical reception, classical studies, digital humanities, economics, history, politics, science fiction on December 22, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Once again, I’ve remembered to keep track of the blogs I’ve especially enjoyed over the last year (with the curious exception of April – I don’t know, at this remove, whether I was too busy to read anything, or not much was published, or I was feeling hyper-sniffy at the time so didn’t think there was anything worth recommending. Very happy to get suggestions in the comments of great things that I’ve missed). This doesn’t claim to be a definitive list, just the stuff I came across – often via the Twitter, which continues to be a great way of keeping up with what’s going on in different regions and fields, despite all the management’s efforts to ruin it and drive everyone away – that deserves a more than ephemeral readership… (more…)
The Future of Classical Reception
Posted in Musings, tagged Ada Palmer, classical reception, history, science fiction on March 17, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Will the people of the future still be reading classical literature and thinking about ancient exempla – and, if so, in what ways? This isn’t a topic that gets a great deal of attention in science fiction; I’m not thinking of the sorts of books that imagine a new Roman Empire with spaceships (see this list – the Trigan Empire lives!) or which deploy classical motifs as a key plot element (hello BSG) but rather those that try to imagine the world of the future in its own terms, but take the time to mention whether anyone still references Thucydides. (more…)
Is There Anybody Out There?
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged internet, quotations, science fiction, Thucydides, William Gibson on April 26, 2016| 12 Comments »
In William Gibson’s Count Zero, cyberspace is haunted, by ghosts, demons or voodoo gods – or rather, non-human intelligences choosing to present themselves in those forms. It’s the aftermath of When It Changed, when an AI achieved full sentience and autonomy and almost immediately fragmented; and I’ve always assumed, given how prescient Gibson’s books have turned out to be, that the first signs of the Singularity will not be the sudden refusal of computer systems to cooperate (nothing new there), but a load of Weird Shit happening out in the wilder reaches of the Internet. (more…)
The Joy of Anachronism
Posted in Musings, tagged fiction, historiography, Jo Walton, reception, science fiction, time on January 27, 2016| 2 Comments »
Crooked Timber is running an online book seminar about Jo Walton’s ‘Thessaly’ novels, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings, and the main aim of this post is to point you in that direction forthwith. My contribution reflects on the books as meditations on different aspects of the classical tradition, and I would hope that most visitors to this blog with an interest in classical reception will need little persuasion to take a look at them. However, I had far more things to say than would fit comfortably into a more or less coherent blog post, and so I’m going to take this opportunity to try to persuade sceptical historians, ancient or otherwise, that they should be just as interested in a fictional exploration of Platonic political philosophy, its limits and its implications. (more…)
Sphinx 