Nov 21, 2016 11:39 PM
The Science Fiction That Came Before Science
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ce/508067/
EXCERPT: [...] Science fiction is sometimes understood as the result of modern science. [...] Yet many books written at the height of, or even before, the Scientific Revolution used the same narrative conceit. What makes these books fascinating is not just that they reflect the new science of the time, but that they demonstrate literature’s influence on scientific inquiry. [...] Science fiction alone did not inspire the scientific revolution, but the literature of the era did allow people to imagine different realities—in some cases, long before those realities actually became real....
Can we escape time?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/...es-gleick/
EXCERPT: The tyranny of time travel. The subject has had brilliant thinking from Borges, Stoppard, Sebald, and many scientists and philosophers — but to what end? ...
Stranger Things: The Rise and Fall of UFOs and Life on the Moon
http://bostonreview.net/literature-cultu...-life-moon
EXCERPT: Flying Saucers Are Real is Jack Womack’s wondrous compilation of flying-saucer materials—book covers, quotes, photographs, portraits of aliens by those who saw them, illustrations from handmade and mimeographed saucer tracts, authentic saucer blueprints, accounts from witnesses, including Kenneth Arnold, and stapled pamphlets of messages from cosmic visitors in the 1980s. SF novelist William Gibson says in his brief introduction to the book, “out of the world’s wrack of lost books” Womack has collected “the only physical evidence of the advent” of what he considers a meme—an infectious thought, a notion, a dream passed on through evolving media, at once inside us and outside.
[...] A different sort of passing away is pictured in Tom Gauld’s comic book "Mooncop", which is as short and obvious as a children’s story. In fact it almost could be a children’s book, except for a pervasive sadness that remains undissipated at the end....
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archi...ce/508067/
EXCERPT: [...] Science fiction is sometimes understood as the result of modern science. [...] Yet many books written at the height of, or even before, the Scientific Revolution used the same narrative conceit. What makes these books fascinating is not just that they reflect the new science of the time, but that they demonstrate literature’s influence on scientific inquiry. [...] Science fiction alone did not inspire the scientific revolution, but the literature of the era did allow people to imagine different realities—in some cases, long before those realities actually became real....
Can we escape time?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/...es-gleick/
EXCERPT: The tyranny of time travel. The subject has had brilliant thinking from Borges, Stoppard, Sebald, and many scientists and philosophers — but to what end? ...
Stranger Things: The Rise and Fall of UFOs and Life on the Moon
http://bostonreview.net/literature-cultu...-life-moon
EXCERPT: Flying Saucers Are Real is Jack Womack’s wondrous compilation of flying-saucer materials—book covers, quotes, photographs, portraits of aliens by those who saw them, illustrations from handmade and mimeographed saucer tracts, authentic saucer blueprints, accounts from witnesses, including Kenneth Arnold, and stapled pamphlets of messages from cosmic visitors in the 1980s. SF novelist William Gibson says in his brief introduction to the book, “out of the world’s wrack of lost books” Womack has collected “the only physical evidence of the advent” of what he considers a meme—an infectious thought, a notion, a dream passed on through evolving media, at once inside us and outside.
[...] A different sort of passing away is pictured in Tom Gauld’s comic book "Mooncop", which is as short and obvious as a children’s story. In fact it almost could be a children’s book, except for a pervasive sadness that remains undissipated at the end....
