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You are here: Home / Archives for Vintage Science Fiction

Communicating Feelings in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17

By John Folk-Williams

Communicating feelings in Babel-17

I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language and the difficulty of communicating feelings as I have when reading Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Of course, this SFF adventure from the early 1960s is all about language, the mysterious one named in its title. It’s up to Rydra Wong, […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: communication, feelings, language, poet, spaceships

Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A New Species Emerges

By John Folk-Williams

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler Xenogenesis Trilogy

Prepare for a deep dive into the most intimate details of human-alien contact in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Step by step she takes you through the initial encounters between a human, Lilith Iyapo, and her Oankali captors (Dawn), the coming of age of a construct resulting from this union (Adulthood Rites) and the reconciliation […]

Filed Under: Great Series Read Project, Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien life forms, apocalypse, colonialism, gender, human emotion, Octavia E. Butler, sexuality, slavery, species, xenogenesis trilogy

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany: Poet in Dystopia

By John Folk-Williams

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany seems to have many detractors as a work of science fiction but I find it a powerful portrait of a fractured mind, of a poet in dystopia, of a city broken the way its main narrator feels he might be breaking. Known mostly as the Kid, because he has forgotten […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: city, Dhalgren, dystopia, language, memory, mental health, poet, reality, Samuel R. Delany, sex

The Listeners by James Gunn

By John Folk-Williams

The Listeners by James Gunn

Picking out a message among innumerable signals or “voices” is the work of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and it’s the theme of James Gunn’s The Listeners. This is a first contact story from 1972 that Carl Sagan credited as one of the most influential in helping to launch SETI on an international scale. […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien civilizations, first contact, James Gunn, religion, science, seti, The Listeners

Vintage Science Fiction Month – Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

By John Folk-Williams

Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

January is Vintage Sci-Fi Month, but I hate to think of vintage sci-fi as confined to only one part of the year. So I’ll be making reviews of vintage science fiction, like Destination: Void and earlier classics, a regular feature of this blog. Follow Vintage Sci-Fi Month on Twitter and get in on the fun, too! As I […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: artificial intelligence, clones, computer, consciousness, Frank Herbert, Mary Shelley, robotic spaceships, technology

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker: Seeing the Whole of Things

By John Folk-Williams

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker

Considering the convulsing world of 1937 on the eve of World War II, Olaf Stapledon introduced Star Maker with a powerful rationale for science fiction in a time of crisis: “…[P]erhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: cosmic mind, galaxy, myth, Olaf Stapledon, sentient beings, Star Maker, telepathy, universe

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Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

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