I struggled to find a better picture of Chris Claremont’s recent donation of his notes and personal archives of his work on X-Men. But this tiny offering from the Wall Street Journal is all that I could find, and there was nothing on Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library site. The article is worth a read:
Mr. Claremont’s 2011 donation is a game-changing addition to the university’s collection of graphic novels and related materials, which grew out of a pet project of librarian Karen Green.
“I think that our buying of comics and science fiction shows that we understand the value of things we used to see as perishable or less scholarly,” said Ms Green. It’s “not something we went after systematically before.” But now they are, she added.
The “X-Men” collection represents a core “around which we hope to build a collection of rich, comic-related material,” said Erik Wakin, Curator of Manuscripts at Columbia University during a symposium in March.
This collection has since grown to include more rare comics and manuscripts as well as a rare Science Fiction magazines.
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
―Philip K. Dick, VALIS
..and lasers!
“I remember going to a party, evenly divided between writers and dancers from the New York City Ballet, back in those years, where once the people discovered what I did for a living, I was hooted at and called ‘Buck Rogers’ and ‘Flash Gordon’”. - Ray Bradbury.
If only he had this comic to brandish at those people.
(Source: myjetpack)
Michael Chabon Attacks Prejudice Against Science Fiction | Underwire | Wired.com
Interview
Also see the classic defense of Sci-Fi, Ray Bradbury’s The Art of Fiction interview for The Paris Review:
Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
Lesbian Protagonists in Science Fiction and Fantasy
By Catherine Lundoff, as part of KB/KT Grant’s Lesbian Fiction Appreciation Event.
Books win their audiences for a reason. Most popular books wear their artlessness on their sleeve: Stephenie Meyer, the author of the “Twilight” series, is an awkward writer with little feeling for construction, but the intensity of emotion with which she imbues her characters is enviable. You never doubt her commitment to the material, which is half the battle won. So to say that Paolini is an unskilled narrator and a derivative mythmaker is more or less beside the point. What is it, then, that makes the books enter kids’ consciousness?
First, kids experience them as mythologies more than as stories—the narrative sweep is, curiously, the least significant part of their appeal. When kids talk about movies, it’s usually the cool parts that get highlighted. (“So there’s this, like, cool part where the guy—the blue guy?—has to tame, like, a flying dinosaur and they’re all on a cliff and he says, like, ‘How do I know which one is mine?’ And, so, the blue girl is, like, ‘He will try to kill you!’ ”) Readers of the Eragon books don’t relate cool incidents; they relate awesome elements. You hear about the Elders, the dragon riders, the magical fire-sword Brisingr; what drags readers in is not the story but the symbols and their slow unfolding. The sheer invocation of a mythology casts a deeper spell than putting the mythology on its feet and making it dance. If you talk to an Eragon reader, you will see why the introductory seven-page synopsis of the mythology is necessary. The synopsis is the story.
And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda. Yet the spell such works cast on their audience wasn’t diminished by what we find tedious. The incantation of names is, on its own, a powerful literary style. The enchantment the Eragon series projects is not that of a story well told but that of an alternative world fully entered. You sense that when you hear a twelve-year-old describe the books. The gratification comes from the kid’s ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative.
” Adam Gopnik, “The Dragon’s Egg: High fantasy for young adults” (via thelifeguardlibrarian)
