Month: April 2007

So I managed, over the course of a rainy weekend — during which I’d actually expected to be mailing out copies of Kaleidotrope‘s second issue — to get my accumulated “to read” links down to a more manageable level. Which means that I might again be able to make the occasional post that doesn’t involve your having to guess song lyrics.

Like this one. Which is really just a quote from M. John Harrison:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Via Warren Ellis.

I feel like there’s some kind of weird Prison Break riff to be made off of this elaborate Marvel comics tattoo, but unfortunately the only comics prison I can think of offhand is Arkham Asylum*, and that’s DC, not Marvel.

So, yes, I’m a ridiculous geek, but apparently not ridiculous enough to make this connection. Which, come to think of it, is probably for the best.

Anyway, link via Progrssive Ruin.

* Well, okay, there’s also the Phantom Zone, I guess, but that’s really no better, now is it?

Well this is interesting:

John Lennon had read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (one of [Philip K.] Dick’s best, and quite possibly the weirdest book yet written) and wanted to make a film of it. Perhaps, in some alternate universe, Lennon survived to do that, but in our world the big breakthrough was Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, based on one of Dick’s most popular novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Having read The Three Stigmata, I’m having a tough time imagining it as a film, much less one informed by Lennon’s absurdist tendencies. Then again, Blade Runner bears only a passing resemblance to Dick’s original novel — for better and for worse; they’re like mirror-universe versions of one other. Even the best translations of Dick’s stories to the screen — here I’m thinking of Minority Report — usually transform into big action movies along the way*. I think this goes a long way to explaining Dick’s continued appeal in Hollywood. It’s not so much the weird and paranoiac worldview, or its resonance with modern audiences, as it is the simple framework on which directors and screenwriters can stretch pretty shots of stuff blowed up real good.

* I haven’t seen A Scanner Darkly yet. I suspect that, if it is an exception, it’s just the one that proves the rule.