It complements rather than replaces The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, which Andrew, Sherryl and I co-edited with Adam Roberts, who had to pull out of this one.
When Routledge approached us around Easter 2019, they were clearly thinking along the lines of ‘drop a few chapters, update the remaining ones and add a few new ones’. I hate those kind of second editions, since they are basically a scam to milk University library budgets while maximising income for minimum outlay. So instead we suggested a New Companion. There was a compromise around a larger number of new chapters, and then somewhere in the shuffle and churn of Routledge editors we basically commissioned an entirely new volume. Adam’s chapter is the only one carried over from the original Companion, with just a couple of others appearing in revised versions; the other 50+ chapters are entirely new (and the old Companion will remain available electronically).
When the New Companion was contracted in December 2019, we imagined delivering the manuscript around Easter 2021 delivery.
So only two-and-a-half years late on this one.
Table of Contents Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler and Sherryl Vint, Introduction Part I. Science Fiction Histories 1. Sinéad Murphy, North African, Middle Eastern, Arabic and diasporic science fiction 2. Adam Roberts, The Copernican revolution 3. Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado, Indigenous futurisms 4. Andrew M. Butler, Art as science fiction 5. Arthur B. Evans, Nineteenth-century western science fiction 6. Rubén R. Mendoza, Latin American science fiction 7. Brittany R. Roberts, Russian-language science fiction 8. Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, South Asian science fiction 9. Nicola Hunte, Afro-diasporic speculative fiction 10. Emily Midkiff, Anglophone print fiction. children’s and young adult 11. Rone Shavers, Afrofuturism 12. John Timberlake, Science fiction illustration 13. Baryon Tensor Posadas, Japanese science fiction 14. J.P. Telotte, Science fiction film, 1895-1940 15. Wu Yan, Chinese science fiction 16. Patrick B. Sharp, Anglophone print fiction. the pulps to the New Wave 17. Robin Anne Reid, Anglophone science fiction fandoms, 1920s-2020s 18. Christos Callow, Jr., Science fiction theatre 19. Karen Hellekson, Radio and podcasts 20. Michael Goodrum, Comics from the 1930s to the 1960s 21. Lincoln Geraghty, Science fiction film and television. the 1950s to the 1970s 22. Dan Byrne-Smith, Video, installation art and short science fiction film 23. Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Anglophone print fiction. the New Wave to the new millennium 24. Martin Lund, Comics since the late 1960s 25. Dan Hassler-Forest, Transmedia and franchise science fiction 26. Sharon Sharp, Science fiction film and television. the 1980s and 1990s 27. Sunyoung Park, South Korean science fiction 28. Barry Keith Grant, Twenty-first century film 29. Sherryl Vint, Twenty-first century television 30. John Rieder, Anglophone print fiction. the new millennium 31. Taryne Jade Taylor, Diasporic Latinx futurism Part II. Science Fiction Praxis 32. Jordan S. Carroll, Advertising, prototyping and Silicon Valley culture 33. Glyn Morgan, Alternate history 34. Anna Maria Grzybowska, Animal studies 35. Sherryl Vint, Biopolitics 36. Melody Jue, Climate crisis and environmental humanities 37. Christopher T. Fan, Critical ethnic studies 38. Elizabeth Callaway, Digital cultures 39. Josefine Wälivaara, Disability studies 40. Jonathan Alexander, DIY science fiction 41. Hugh C. O’Connell, Economics and financialisation 42. Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Empire 43. Rhys Williams, Energy humanities 44. Rebecca J. Holden, Feminisms 45. Paweł Frelik, Game studies 46. Amy Brookes, Geography, urban design, and architecture 47. Gerry Canavan, Marxism 48. Anna McFarlane and Gavin Miller, Medical humanities 49. Alison Sperling, New materialism 50. Veronica Hollinger, Post/trans/human 51. Beyond Gender Research Collective, Queer and trans theory 52. Brooks Landon, Science fiction tourism 53. Shelley Streeby, Social activism and science fiction 54. Erik Steinskog, Sonic studies 55. Katie Stone, Utopian studies
It ispart of a new series conceptualised as being for graduates contemplating a return to education (and other general audiences). The first two sections, mostly by me, contain 500- or 1000-word introductions to critical/theoretical approaches and genre history; the third section, by brilliant and lovely others, pairs a 500-word introduction to a critical idea with a 500-word introduction to a key contemporary novel (plus a 50-word introduction to a key contemporary film by me).
If you buy the book, start with the final section; you can hear me banging on about stuff any old time.
When first approached about This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook, I imagined a quick and dirty 4–6 month project that would be over by Xmas 2021, so eighteen months wasn’t too bad.
Table of contents Introduction – Steven Shaviro How to use this book – Mark Bould Part one: theory 1. Genre – Mark Bould 2. Defining science fiction – Mark Bould 3. Estrangement – Mark Bould 4. Extrapolation – Mark Bould 5. Alterity– Mark Bould 6. Historicising the present – Mark Bould 7. The language of sf – Mark Bould 8. Spectacle – Mark Bould Part two: history 9. Scientific revolutions – Mark Bould 10. Imperialism and colonialism – Mark Bould 11. The French roman scientifique – Mark Bould 12. The British scientific romance – Mark Bould 13. Nineteenth-century US sf – Mark Bould 14. The US sf magazines – Mark Bould 15. The New Wave – Gerry Canavan 16. Feminist sf of the 1960s and 1970s – Katie Stone 17. Ecological sf of the 1960s and 1970s – Sarah Lohmann 18. World sf – Mark Bould Part three: key concepts 19. Afrofuturism – Aisha Matthews 20. N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015) – Aisha Matthews 21. Alien Encounters – Joy Sanchez-Taylor 22. Nnedi Okorafor, Binti (2014) – Joy Sanchez-Taylor 23. Alternate history – Glyn Morgan 24. Nisi Shawl, Everfair (2016) – Glyn Morgan 25. Animal studies – Sherryl Vint 26. Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time (2015) – Sherryl Vint 27. Climate fiction – Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Col Roche and Elena Walsh 28. Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140 (2017) – Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard, Col Roche and Elena Walsh 29. Contagion – Anna McFarlane 30. Ling Ma, Severance (2018) – Anna McFarlane 31. Cyberpunk – Anna McFarlane 32. Larissa Lai, The Tiger Flu (2018) – Anna McFarlane 33. Disability – David Hartley 34. Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep (2017) – David Hartley 35. Dystopia – Sarah Lohmann 36. Leni Zumas, Red Clocks (2018) – Sarah Lohmann 37. Gender – Katie Stone 38. Kameron Hurley, The Stars are Legion (2017) – Katie Stone 39. Globalisation – Hugh C. O’Connell 40. Malka Older, Infomocracy (2016) – Hugh C. O’Connell 41. Hard sf – Sherryl Vint 42. Sue Burke, Semiosis (2018) – Sherryl Vint 43. Latinxfuturism – Taryne Jade Taylor 44. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow (2019) – Taryne Jade Taylor 45. Neurodiversity – David Hartley 46. Dora Raymaker, Hoshi and the Red City Circuit (2018) – David Hartley 47. Postcolonial sf – Hugh C. O’Connell 48. Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift (2019) – Hugh C. O’Connell 49. Posthumanism – Chris Pak 50. Tade Thompson, Rosewater (2016) – Chris Pak 51. Queer sf – Katie Stone 52. Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hudson and Jonathan Snipes, The Deep (2019) – Katie Stone 53. Space opera – David M. Higgins 54. Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013) – David M. Higgins 55. Time travel – Glyn Morgan 56. Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline (2019) – Glyn Morgan 57. Utopia – Sarah Lohmann 58. Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day (2020) – Sarah Lohmann 59. Weird – Roger Luckhurst 60. Catlín R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland (2017) – Roger Luckhurst
(A little earlier than usual this year cos I ain’t planning on doing nothing else before 2024.)
On 6 November, I arose well before dawn to catch the first of the four trains necessary to ensure I would be at Fulham Palace before 10am, as the call-sheet demanded, for makeup. Once the top of my head was dusted down to reduce the glare of reflected light, I had a quick catch up over coffee with the producer, and then commenced the interview.
It turns out there are boisterous school trips to the palace, which is on a Heathrow flight path, and while the Bishop’s library makes for a great setting, the Diocese has never sprung for soundproofing. There were other issues.
The perfectly charming and lovely producer/interviewer was still early in the process of figuring out the content and shape of this four-hour/four-episode documentary series on sf (for SkyArts, to be broadcast early next summer). So he was not entirely sure what he wanted, and the questions he asked didn’t really match up with our preparatory discussions. Nor could he actually formulate questions, leaving me to figure out which bits of his of beatings around the bush I could respond to. But I’m a trouper, used to thinking on my feet. During the interview, I helped him evolve several plans to ensure he had at least some of the material he needed. But he couldn’t stick to a plan: let slip anything even mildly unanticipated and he was off like a greyhound who’s sighted the hare.
All of the notes I’d jotted in advance stayed in my bag, useless. And my answers got longer and longer, careering wildly between generalisations and specificities. I forgot names and titles, got details wrong, launched into examples that partway through I realised wouldn’t work, backtracked, foraged, scavenged and dredged as beneath the hot lights I became increasingly panicked and delirious.
For five hours.
(With a short break for lunch).
Afterwards, as I walked to the tube, I realised I could recall nothing at all of what I’d said, only the things I’d meant to say but knew I hadn’t.
On the trains home, I couldn’t concentrate to read. But when my mind tried to go back over what happened to flagellate itself, there was nothing: just hysterical blankness. Exhaustion.
The whole year’s been a bit like that.
A long slog, often at fever pitch but never with any sense of consummation: work; industrial action that petered out despite obvious and egregious institutional/sectoral dishonesty, recklessness, incompetence, unconcern and contempt; and editing, so much fucking editing.
Various contingencies, mutual agreement and a certain amount of falling on my sword/control-freakery, meant I was the main editor for the former, and line-edited all 55 chapters of the latter (from roughly 320,000 words down to 275,000). They are two very different books, described here and here.
Both fell foul of Covid and its long ongoing tail, and of the ever-increasing workloads and ever-deteriorating working conditions of academics everywhere, including the editors.
I actually enjoy editing. Partly it’s a way to carve out time to keep on top of the field, including finding new voices and perspectives, partly it’s the problem solving: how to wrestle pieces down to word-length, while clarifying meaning and without sacrificing content. Such focused work is probably the only area of my professional life where I feel any sense of control.
But it is massively time-consuming labour (and completely unvalued by HE institutions and systems). Also, I’m tired of participating in my own exploitation, and enabling the exploitation of others, by commercial academic publishers. The ones I’ve worked with have treated me well enough, apart from the fact that their immensely profitable existence depends on not paying authors and editors for their actual labour. Hence, these two books may very well be the last things I edit.
In just a few days’ time, I stand down as a co-editor of the Studies in Global Science Fiction series, which I’ve been involved in since the original 2015 pitch, leaving it in the-hands-far-more-capable-than-mine of Anindita Bannerjee and Rachel Heywood.
I am also in the process of standing down as a co-convenor of the BAFTSS SFF SIG (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Science Fiction and Fantasy Special Interest Group), which will take a few more months as Craig and Stacey and I ease our replacements into place.
And I’ve already stood down as Film Studies Programme Leader after my latest seven-year stint (I’ve been PL or acting PL for more than half of my 21 UWE years, which are like dog years but in reverse).
Hopefully, this will all free up some time for doing nothing.
Fat chance.
In 2024, there will be builders (and Routledge proofs) during my busiest stretch of teaching and marking.
For stupid self-inflicted reasons I have to read 200 climate change short stories before May (i.e., during my busiest stretch of teaching and marking).
I really need to do the formal proposal for the sequel to The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture.
And I’m still toying with the idea of a short book (30,000 words-ish) on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but I need to find a publisher who will trust me to write it in a couple of months in the early- and mid-summer, and who I trust to publish it before the end of the 50th anniversary year.
And I need a proper holiday of some sort.
Sure, we had a ten-day trip to Amsterdam (and to Utrecht to hang out with Marta and with dreamboat Dan), but I went down with a week’s worth of norovirus on day two, and we also had to survive the worst summer storm and hottest day Amsterdam has experienced since records began.
And I did manage to visit a friend in Cornwall just before term started up again. It was only three days but it was the first break since Xmas 2021 where I’ve not gone sick with something.
Unless I get my act together in the next three days and make some actual fucking headway on this piece on contemporary dystopian film, the only thing I’ve managed to write this year is:
‘Horror and Class’ for Roger Luckhurst, Stacey Abbott et al., eds, The Routledge Companion to Global Horror (forthcoming)
But I did see a handful of things published, the first two written during 2020’s lockdown:
‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Suburban SF’, Science Fiction Film and Television 16.3 (2023): 251–275
‘Cli-Fi’ in J.P. Telotte, ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas (Oxford UP 2023), 52–70
‘Post Production: Screening Futures – From Scarlet to Ebon’ in Joel Hawkes, Alexander Christie and Tom Nienhuis, eds, American Science Fiction Television and Space: Productions and (Re)configurations (1987-2021) (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), 263–276 (my first ever postscript to someone else’s book)
‘Transitional Demands: John Rieder, Speculative Epistemologies: An Eccentric Account of SF from the 1960s to the Present’, Science Fiction Studies 150 (2003), 271–75
‘Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods, Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk’, American Literary History Review 35.2 (2023), 1107–1110.
‘Criticism and Not: An Interview with Mark Bould by Marta Olivi’. lay0ut 1 (2023); an English-language transcript of the original rambling interview here.
I delivered two invited research presentations:
‘Strategic Realism, Techno-Utopianism and Environmental Apocalypticism: Key Tendencies in Cli-Fi/Sci-Fi Cinema’, Cardiff Environmental Cultures, Cardiff University, 1 November 2023
‘Three Tendencies in Sci-Fi/Cli-Fi Cinema’, St Andrew’s University, 13 March 2023
and one conference paper:
‘Marjorie Prime: labour and technology, memory and loss in the Anthropocene’, BAFTSS 11th Annual Conference, University of Lincoln, 3–5 April 2023
I also banged on and on (and on) about Free Guy as a podcast guest:
And I found a new niche for myself in Bristol film exhibition ecology as the bloke you bring in when you want your audience to be reminded how shit, fucked up and weird the 1980s were, introducing:
Albert Pyun’s Cyborg for Bristol Bad Film Club, Bristol Improv Theatre, 16 February 2023
John Badham’s WarGames for Horror Without End/20th Century Flicks at Bristol Aquarium IMAX, 24 September 2023 (in a double bill with Threads called ‘ThreadGames’)
Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours for Forbidden Worlds/20th Century Flicks at Bristol Aquarium IMAX, 22 October 2023 (the second half of this was a bit harder to pull off as I am no fan of Scorsese – but I did trick a mostly baffled and increasingly angry audience into a massive round of applause for Teri Garr)
This is the first year since 2006 that I have not examined at least one PhD.
Lurching towards, but not quite achieving, a conclusion But there are still 26 titles unaccounted for…
As I mentioned right at the start, this year – by chance – I read two of them, so Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and Mansfield’s Bliss, and Other Stories (1920) are quickly disposed of. See – I’m moving right along. (I’d intended to read all of Mansfield’s short fiction this year, but Clarice Lispector shoved her aside and got right up in my face demanding attention. Maybe next year.) Two others, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Kipling’s Kim (1900–1) I read as background for writing about the ongoing perpetuation of colonial adventure fiction narratives in Science Fiction: The Routledge Film Handbook (2012).
Which leaves 22 titles, five of which I’m surprised by.
Anthology of Fear collects twenty ghost stories originally published between 1824–1914. I have no memory of this book being in the series; if it had been, I would have read it. I can only return to the anomaly of a partwork magazine having 54 rather than 52 issues. Did I miss bonus issues? Did they have to adjust the length of the year to make up for an excess of Daylight Saving or something?
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) This is utterly mystifying to me. I read Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Agent (1907) for the first time in my mid-teens, and was completely swept away by the latter. It is one of the few occasions I recall being utterly gripped by suspense (was it Stevie who got blown up?). Although Conrad’s posthumously published unfinished final novel was called Suspense (1925), I’m pretty certain he had little actual interest in suspense and that I was applying the wrong reading protocols, but everyone should have that intense an experience the first time they read Conrad. At university, I also read Nostromo (1904) and Under Western Eyes (1911), and since then Almayer’s Folly (1895) and The Inheritors (1901), co-written with Ford Madox Ford. Which is an embarrassingly short list for someone who’s spent 40 years thinking of himself as a Conrad admirer. So maybe it’s not so utterly mystifying after all. Maybe it’s time to bring the others into the rotation – one a year and I’ll be done by the time I’m 70.
(The only other time I can recall being caught up by that kind of suspense was reading Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Could the mysterious helper-figure be Captain Nemo? Surely not, but what if it is?)
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) This is nearly as mysterious. I did not read Eliot until university, when I was blown away by Middlemarch (1871) and only a little less by Daniel Deronda (1876). But then I read nothing else by her for decades. In the last few years, she has been in the rotation: Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), The Lifted Veil (1859) and a re-read of Middlemarch. So I am kind of halfway there.
yes, i know
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1851–3) I’m not a fan but I do I find her I-know-best philanthropic condescension of the working class and her terror of organised labour almost as hilarious as it is painful as it is fascinating. I first read Mary Barton (1848) as very distant background for a piece I wrote about Gwyneth Jones in 2005. Gwyneth once described sf as ‘the green lung of the city of science’ so I started thinking about the industrial/rural hinterlands of Manchester, where she was born and grew up and where Gaskell lived, and went looking for representations of that landscape. I’m pretty certain I also read North and South (1854–5) for the same reason so I have no idea why I didn’t also read Cranford.
More recently, I read Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) because it is about whaling. Only it isn’t. Not really.
John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1906–21) A decade or more ago, I bought my housemate the DVD boxset of the 1967 BBC adaptation. It was unexpectedly compelling. And perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the 26-episode series is the way it manages to utterly transform your feelings towards Soames Forsyte, from despising him for his marital rape of Irene to the moment when you realise (many episodes later) that he has become far-and-away the most sympathetic character amongst all these dreadful people. I immediately wanted to see whether (and how) Galsworthy pulls it off. Every second-hand omnibus volume of the much longer The Forsyte Chronicles has since sat in a box unread.
Which leaves 17 titles. Some are easy to explain.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) I have read just under half of Dickens’s novels, some of them more than once: The Pickwick Papers (1836–7), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846–8), David Copperfield (1849–50), Bleak House (1852–3), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1860–1), Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870; with the Leon Garfield conclusion). Mostly, it has been for purposes of study. My least favourite module at university was the compulsory (!) ‘Dickens and Wordsworth’ – it was the only one for which I did not receive a first class grade and I hated it so much I’ve always been quite pleased with that.
Drood I read on my own recognisance, back in my teens, because I’d heard there was spontaneous human combustion in it! Simpler times. (And as a kid, I’d loved Leon Garfield’s Smith (1967) and Black Jack (1968)).
Bleak House I read about a decade ago. My partner, who likes Dickens but no one’s perfect, had to go back to the States for a couple of months, so she bought me a copy to read, a chapter a day, while she was away. In return, I gave her Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (1914) – remember, I’m given to big romantic gestures.
She’s never quite forgiven me for sending her off on her own with such a devastating book; and I’ve never forgiven her for giving me a book in which the most interesting character, the London fog, turns out to be just a fucking metaphor.
She so got the better part of that deal.
Of them all, Hard Times is the one I came closest to liking. Not just because it’s short, although that helps, but because the weekly publishing schedule completed screwed with Dickens’ rhythms and forced him into producing something interestingly different.
So the reason I’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities is that I really don’t like Dickens. He’s such a chore, even when he is not literally so.
The reason I have not read the following three books is their authors’ close association – in my head, if not necessarily in reality – with Dickens:
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–8) Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860) – although I did recently crack and read The Moonstone (1868) and The Frozen Deep (1874) and am prepared to forgive Collins his real or imagined association with Dickens,
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) While I’m not convinced of its genius, I have read The Turn of the Screw (1898) maybe half a dozen times, most recently this summer as background for that chapter on horror and class with which these musings began. I quite liked Washington Square (1880) and The Bostonians (1886) – which were on my American Lit module and all right as far that kind of realist novel goes. So I was quite looking forward to reading more by him on The Novel module. So naïve! What Maisie Knew (1897) was a baffling mess: not that I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, but that he should botch it so very badly. Maybe, I thought, The Ambassadors (1903) would be better. Quit laughing at the back.
The Ambassadors seminar was one of those excruciating ordeals. Clearly no one else had read it. Years later, I discovered from his own confession that that included the tutor.
There is not a barge pole long enough with which not to touch Henry James again.
DH Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gypsy, and Other Stories (1930) That bleeding module on The Novel. They also made us read Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). I hated the whole night-blooming tumescent bunch of them.
I’d already read The Fox (1923) and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930) at secondary school, but not ‘the Other Stories’, so by the end of the sixth/final post you will appreciate how fucking virtuous I am being by not lying about it here.
EM Forster, A Passage to India (1924) I’ve only read two things by Forster, but I have read both of them several times: ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909), which seems a little less remarkable with each go, and the first two-thirds of the first chapter of A Passage to India, which is so fucking irritating I can’t ever get any further than that. Does this make me a bad person? Perhaps. Does it make me want to try something else by him instead? Hell, no.
Wrong Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) I guess I’m still suffering Red Pony trauma after all these years, although I did read Of Mice and Men (1937) for my brother’s CSE coursework. I’ve had a copy of In Dubious Battle (1936) lying around unread since I was writing The Cinema of John Sayles (2009), intended as background for the Matewan chapter. And I’ve been to Tortilla Flat, the oldest operating stagecoach town in Arizona, but have not read Tortilla Flat (1935), and not just because it isn’t actually set there (which doesn’t stop them selling copies).
Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966) I very occasionally pick up something by Greene – Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair (1951), Our Man in Havana (1958) – and like all right-minded folk prefer his ‘entertainments’ to his ‘novels’. I guess I’ll get to this one eventually, or maybe not, who knows, but I do have a copy of The Ministry of Fear (1943) kicking around somewhere, so I should read that first.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) I loved about two-thirds of The First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), The Old Man and the Sea (1952) and the admittedly not-great To Have and To Have Not (1937). I loved the first half of A Farewell to Arms (1929), and the first quarter of The Sun Also Rises (1926). I do not love the law of diminishing returns.
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1820) Late in my teens, I got myself a dirt cheap, second hand, almost complete, 20-or-so-volume hardback edition of the complete Waverley novels. Faded blue, well musty and water stained, it looked grand all lined up on a shelf. Proper handsome. Never read a one of them. Years later, for something or other I was writing (thinking about historical narrative for the John Sayles book?), I read, I think, Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817) and one other – I cannot remember which for they all made very little impression on me.
Peveril of the Peak
I sometimes ponder reading The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) since I have a fond attachment to Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the first opera I ever saw, and when my partner was living in Manchester I was sometimes tempted by Peveril of the Peak (1823) since it shared its name with our favourite city centre pub, but on the other hand it is Scott’s longest novel…
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903) I’ve read Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901) and bear their author no ill-will so I really cannot explain not having read this as well.
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934) I’ve read Seven Days in New Crete/Watch the North Wind Rise (1949) and bear its author ill-will so that’s that cleared that up.
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868) I’m not American, so it just really doesn’t loom that large. (Also male, so ditto.)
W Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915) I’m British, but it just really doesn’t loom that large.
HE Bates, Love for Lydia (1952) I’m as surprised as you to see Bates considered a ‘great writer’. But since I’ve not read anything by him, who am I to say.
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930) Towards the end of 1981, the whole world it seemed was a-flutter over Granada’s 11-part TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited (1945). Desperate for cultural capital, I tuned in faithfully each week on the black-and-white 12-inch portable upstairs (no one else in the house was remotely interested so no chance of seeing it on the 24-inch black-and-white in the living room). But try as I might, I simply could not figure out what all the fuss was about. Sometime the following year, I got hold of the library’s tie-in (but fancy B-format) paperback and made my way through the dreadful thing. Utterly lamentable stuff.
But someone somewhere recommended the Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61) – probably Anthony Burgess, who lists it and Brideshead in his Ninety-nine novels – as the culmination of the mature Waugh. That might be true since it is certainly long and tiresome.
There was a copy of Scoop (1938) lying around in the book cupboard at the back of our sixth-form English classroom which, bored one day, I picked up (the book, not the cupboard). It rises at times to the mildly amusing. In 1990, BBC2’s Moviedrome season, hosted by Alex Cox, screened Tony Richardson’s 1965 adaptation of The Loved One (1948), which was all right (though I’d much rather Luis Buñuel or especially Elaine May had succeeded in making their versions), which led me to give Waugh one last go.
Bottom line: no fucking way is Evelyn Waugh a great writer.
Here endeth the sound and the fury; tune in tomorrow (or sometime soon anyway) to see if it signifies anything.
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Ambulance (Michael Bay 2022) is not the hilarious overuse of drone cameras or the odd shot pretending to be in infrared that accidentally recapitulates something of Tony Scott’s much more interesting chaos cinema stylisations in Domino (2005) or the hilarious series of endings offering redemption to characters – rather, ‘characters’ – no one could possibly give a fuck about in slow motion so as to help to drag out the run time to almost twice the length of the Danish film Ambulacen (Laurits Munch-Petersen 2005) it’s based on – though that could partly because Los Angeles is a lot bigger than Copenhagen – no, the best thing about Ambulance is that is finally fucking over and, should I choose to continue to subject myself to Michael Bay films even though Nick is no longer my student working on Michael Bay films, it will be a few years until his next one (Robopocalypse, stuck in pre-production hell) rocks up to make me question my life choices….
and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Bullet Train (David Leitch 2022) is remembering those first half dozen episodes of Martial Law (1998-2000) when Sammo Hung (as Sammo Law) and Kelly Hu (as Chen Pei Pei/Grace) regularly put David Leitch in his place…
Best dog In joint first place Dog (Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum 2022) and Paterson (Jim Jarmusch 2016) – but definitely not Dog (Andrea Arnold 2010)
Best performance by Daniel Radcliffe Swiss Army Man (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert 2016), as a farting corpse
Best accidental thematic double bill Titane (Julia Ducournau 2021) and Trafic (Jacques Tati 1971)
Best (and most unexpected) appearance of a character based on Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko Tawny Pipit (Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders 1944)
Best (and most unexpected) scene of English schoolchildren being taught to sing ‘The Internationale’ Tawny Pipit (Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders 1944)
Best (and most expected) appearance of a Tawny Pipit Tawny Pipit (Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders 1944)
Here’s my top 23 in roughly this order Earwig (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2022) Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror 1972) Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland 2022) Nope (Jordan Peele 2022) Radio On (Chris Petit 1979) X (Ti West 2022) He qi dao/Hapkido (Feng Huanh 1972) Bu san/Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Ming-liang Tsai 2003) Chemi bebia/My Grandmother (Kote Mikaberidze 1929) Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch 1984) Xian si jue/Duel to the Death (Siu-Tung Ching 1983) Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt 2006) Un monde/Playground (Laura Wandel 2021) Everything Everywhere All At Once (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinart 2022) Lucky (John Carroll Lynch 2017) Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho 2019) RRR (S.S. Rajamouli 2022) Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer 2019) Dorosute no hare de bokura/Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Junta Yamaguchi 2020) Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson 2022) The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh 2022) Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (Stuart Cooper 1974) The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour 2016
And here is the full list: The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (Jack Sher 1960) 4 mosche di velluto grigio/Four Flies on Grey Velvet (Dario Argento 1971) 6 donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava 1964) 2040 (Damon Gameau 2019) The 355 (Simon Kinberg 2022) 20 Million Miles to Earth (Nathan Juran 1957)
Abaddon (Jesica Aran 2018) The Adam Project (Shawn Levy 2022) Advantageous (Jennifer Phang 2015) Aelita (Yakov Protazanov 1924) A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg 2001) Aladdin (Ron Clements and John Musker 1992) Aladdin (Guy Ritchie 2019) Algoritmo/Algorithm (Thiago Foresti 2020) Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) All the Old Knives (Janus Metz Pedersen 2022) Alone (John Hyams 2020) American Evil (Georgina Lightning 2008) Aniara (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja 2018) The Apartment (Billy Wilder 1960) The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers 1981) Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko 1929) Avril et la monde truqué/April and the Extraordinary World (Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci 2015))
Baby Face (Alfred E. Green 1931) Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho 2019) The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour 2016) Bait (Mark Jenkin 2019) Bait (Mark Jenkin 2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh 2022) The Batman (Matt Reeves 2022) Battletruck (Harley Cokeliss 1982) Before I Hang (Nick Grinde 1940) Be My Wife (Max Linder 1921) The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis 1955) The Bishop’s Wife (Henry Koster 1947) Black Friday (Casey Tebo 2021) Black Panther (Ryan Coogler 2018) The Black Room (Roy William Neill 1935) Blacula (William Crain 1972) Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott 2007) Blonde Crazy (Roy Del Ruth 1931) Boiling Point (Philip Barantini 2021) The Boogie Man Will Get You (Lew Landers 1942) The Book of Life (Jorge R. Gutiérrez 2014) Boss Level (Joe Carnahan 2020) Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah 1974) A Broken Fan (Before the Big Collapse) (Assaad Khoueiry 2022) Bubba Ho-Tep (Don Coscarelli 2002) Bu san/Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Ming-liang Tsai 2003)
CALL END (Hakima Benjamin 2022) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur 1942) Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond 2021) The Challenge (John Frankenheimer 1982) Chaos Walking (Doug Liman 2021) Chemi bebia/My Grandmother (Kote Mikaberidze 1929) Chibusa yo eien nare/Forever a Woman (Kinuyo Tanaka 1955) Circle (Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione 2015) Coco (Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina 2017) Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same (Madeleine Olnek 2011) Come Dancing (Bill Douglas 1971) The Contractor (Tarik Saleh 2022) Cop Car (John Watts 2015) Copshop (Joe Carnahan 2021) Les Créatures (Agnès Varda 1965) Creep (Patrick Brice 2014) Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg 2022) Crumbs (Miguel Llansó 2015) Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 1997)
Le daim/Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux 2019) Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (Gordon Flemyng 1966) The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodmak 1946) Day Shift (J.J. Perry 2022) Dead Slow Ahead (Mauro Herce 2015) Dementia (John Parker and Bruno Ve Sota 1955) Un dessert pour Constance/A Dessert for Constance (Sarah Maldoror 1981) The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk 1941) Diabolik (Mario Bava 1968) Diabolik (Antonio and Marco Manetti 2021) Ditadura Roxa/Purple Dictatorship (Matheus Moura 2020) Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi 2022) Dog (Andrea Arnold 2010) Dog (Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum 2022) Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer 2019) Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues 2021) Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay 2021) Dorosute no hare de bokura/Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Junta Yamaguchi 2020) Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) Dr. Who and the Daleks (Gordon Flemyng 1965) Dracula A.D. 1972 (Alan Gibson 1972) The Driver (Walter Hill 1978) Druk/Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg 2020) Druk/Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg 2020) Dünyayi Kurtaran Adam/The Man Who Saved the World/Turkish Star Wars (Çetin Inanç 1982)
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears 1956) Earwig (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2022) En fin de conte/A Fairy Tale (Zoé Arène 2021) Eternals (Chloé Zhao 2021) Everything Everywhere All At Once (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinart 2022) Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi 1987) Évolution (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2015) Évolution (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2015) Executive Decision (Stuart Baird 1996) Extraction (Sam Hargrave 2020)
Fast and Furious 8 (F. Gary Gray 2017) Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw (David Leitch 2019) Fast and Furious 9 (Justin Lin 2021) A Field in England (Ben Wheatley 2013) File Under Miscellaneous (Jeff Barnaby 2010) Filmed in Supermarionation (Stephen La Rivière 2014) Fire of Love (Sara Dosa 2022) First Cow (Kelly Reichardt 2019) First Men in the Moon (Nathan Juran 1964) Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges 1980) Flux Gourmet (Peter Strickland 2022) Foo gwai lip che/Millionaire’s Express (Sammo Hung 1986) Forbidden World (Allan Holzman 1982) Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky 1948) Fractured (Brad Anderson 2019) Freaky (Christopher Landon 2020) Free Guy (Shawn Levy 2021) A Free Soul (Clarence Brown 1931) La frusta e il corpo/The Whip and the Body (Mario Bava 1963) Fury (Fritz Lang 1936)
Gakusei romansu: Wakaki hi/Days of Youth (Yasujiro Ozu 1929) Gesetze der Liebe/Laws of Love (Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Oswald 1927) Get on the Bus (Spike Lee 1995) Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Jason Reitman 2021) Giornata near per l’ariete/The Fifth Cord (Luigi Bazzoni 1971) Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson 2022) The Golden Age (Hannah Hamalian 2021) The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler 1973) Gonawindua (Giuliano Cavalli and Jorge Mario Suárez 2011) The Gray Man (Anthony and Joe Russo 2022) The Guilty (Antoine Fuqua 2021)
Halloween Kills (David Gordon Green 2021) The Harder They Fall (Jeymes Samuel 2021) Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby 1971) He qi dao/Hapkido (Feng Huanh 1972) Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall 1941) High Noon (Fred Zinnemann 1952) The Hill (Sidney Lumet 1965) His House (Remi Weekes 2020) His Wooden Wedding (Leo McCarey 1925) Holy Motors (Leos Carax 2012) Hoverboard (Sydney Freeland 2012) El hoyo/The Platform (Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia 2019) Hrútar/Rams (Grímur Hákonarson 2015)
Ice (Robert Kramer 1970) Ichimei/Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (Takashi Miike 2011) Idi I smotri/Come and See (Elem Klimov 1985) Infinite (Antoine Fuqua 2021) Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2004) In the Earth (Ben Wheatley 2021) Invasão Espacial/Space Invasion (Thiago Foresti 2019) It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon 1955) I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur 1943)
Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey 1963) Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama 2009) Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle 1932) Jingle All the Way (Brian Levant 1996) Jiu xian shi ba die/World of the Drunken Master (Joseph Kuo 1979) Jodorowsky’s Dune (Frank Pavitch 2013) Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (Brad Peyton 2012) Jue quan/Seven Grandmasters (Joseph Kuo 1977) Jupiter holdja/Jupiter’s Moon (Kornél Mundruczó 2017)
Kajillionaire (Miranda July 2020) Kajillionaire (Miranda July 2020) Kaleidoscope (Rupert Jones 2016) Killer’s Kiss (Stanley Kubrick 1955) Killing Them Softly (Andrew Dominik 2012) Kimi no na wa/Your Name (Makoto Shinkai 2016) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933) The King’s Man (Matthew Vaughn 2021) Kona fer í stríð/Woman at War (Benedikt Erlingsson 2018) Kozure Ôkami: Ko wo kasha ude kasha tsukamatsuru/Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi 1972)
Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson 2021) Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright 2021) Let Us Be Seen (Elspeth Vischer 2022) Limbo (Ben Sharrock 2020) Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (Stuart Cooper 1974) Liu lang di qiu/The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo 2019) Locked In (Our Lockdown Stories) (William Powers, Lucy Groenewoud and Amy Browne 2022) Lola Montes (Max Ophuls 1955) Looper (Rian Johnson 2012) The Lost City (Aaron and Adam Nee 2022) Lou (Anna Foerster 2022) The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson 2009) Lucky (John Carroll Lynch 2017)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller 1981) Malignant (James Wan 2021) Mandy (Panos Cosmatos 2018) The Man from Toronto (Patrick Hughes 2022) The Man They Could Not Hang (Nick Grinde 1939) The Man with Nine Lives (Nick Grinde 1940) Marlina si pembunuh dalam empat babak?Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya 2017) Marlina si pembunuh dalam empat babak?Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya 2017) Marlina si pembunuh dalam empat babak?Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (Mouly Surya 2017) Marte: Loga/LOGA – Mars Projections (Jane de Almeida 2021) Marte: Loga/LOGA – Mars Projections (Jane de Almeida 2021) Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir 2003) Matango/Attack of the Mushroom People (Ishirô Honda 1963) The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski 2021) Max Wants a Divorce (Max Linder 1917) Mayhem (Joe Lynch 2017) Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010) Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt 2010) Men (Alex Garland 2022) Mi quan san shi liu shao/The 36 Deadly Styles (Joseph Kuo 1979) The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges 1944) Missão Berço Esplêndido/Mission Splendid Cradle (Joel Caetano 2021) Un monde/Playground (Laura Wandel 2021) Moonfall (Roland Emmerich 2022) Morgan (Luke Scott 2016) The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson 1992) My Childhood (Bill Douglas 1972) My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas 1973) Mysterious Island (Cy Endfield 1961) My Way Home (Bill Douglas 1978)
Nectar (Lucile Hadzihalilovic 2014) Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams 2021) Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro 2021) Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers 1962) No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen 2007) Nope (Jordan Peele 2022) The Northman (Robert Eggers 2021) Nuevo Rico (Kristian Mercado 2021)
O Brother, Where Art Thou (Joel and Ethan Coen 2000) Okja (Bong Joon Ho 2017) Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt 2006) One Night in Miami… (Regina King 2020) The Outfit (Graham Moore 2022)
The Pajama Game (George Abbott and Stanley Donen 1957) Pariah (Dee Rees 2011) Paris Blues (Martin Ritt 1961) Paterson (Jim Jarmusch 2016) Paterson (Jim Jarmusch 2016) The Path Without End (Elizabeth LaPensée 2011) Petit Maman (Céline Sciamma 2021) Pet Sematary (Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer 2019) Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson 2017) Phase II (Kelly L. Sears 2022) Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon 1959) Pin Cushion (Deborah Haywood 2017) Playtime (Jacques Tati 1967) Pleins feux sur l’assassin/Spotlight on a Murderer (Georges Franju 1961) Poetic Justice (John Singleton 1993) Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow 1991) Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper 1982) Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg 2020) Princess Tam Tam (Edmond T. Gréville 1935) The Proposal (Anne Fletcher 2009) The Purge (James DeMonaco 2013)
Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas 2019)
Radio On (Chris Petit 1979) Random Acts of Violence (Jay Baruchel 2019) The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls 1949) Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway 1932) Red Notice (Rawson Marshall Thurber 2021) Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (Johannes Roberts 2021) Robin Hood (Ridley Scott 2010) Roman Holiday (William Wyler 1953) RRR (S.S. Rajamouli 2022) Ryojin nikki/The Hunter’s Diary (Kô Nakahira 1964)
Sambizanga (Sarah Maldoror 1972) Scary Places/Shapes and Places (Pamela Falkenberg and Jack Cochran 2020) Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang 1947) See Us Come Together (Alyssa Suico 2022) Seungriho/Space Sweepers (Sung-hee Jo 2021) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran 1958) Shao Lin Si shi ba tong ren/The 18 Bronzeman (Joseph Kuo 1976) Shao Lin xiao zi/The Shaolin Kids (Joseph Kuo 1975) Sharpe’s Company (Tom Clegg 1994) Sharpe’s Honour (Tom Clegg 1994) Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright 2004) Shelley (Ali Abbasi 2016) Sherlock Holmes (Albert Parker 1922) Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton 1924) Shi fu chu ma/The Old Master (Joseph Kuo 1979) Shock (Mario Bava 1977) Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven 1995) Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (Sam Wanamaker 1977) Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly 1952) Smokey and the Bandit (Hal Needham 1977) Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (Robert Schwentke 2021) Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts 2021) Stranger than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch 1984) The Suicide Squad (James Gunn 2021) Swiss Army Man (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert 2016)
Tawny Pipit (Bernard Miles and Charles Saunders 1944) Tayne pechati drakona/The Iron Mask (Oleg Stepchenko 2019) Tenebrae (Dario Argento 1982) Terminal (Vaughn Stein 2018) A Terrible Beauty (Iram Ghufran 2022) ATerrible Beauty (Iram Ghufran 2022) Terrore nello Spazio/Planet of the Vampires (Mario Bava 1965) Texas Chainsaw Massacre (David Blue Garcia 2022) They Live (John Carpenter 1988) The Thief of Bagdad (Raoul Walsh 1924) Thor: Love and Thunder (Taika Waititi 2022) Tie zhang xuan feng tui/Lady Whirlwind (Feng Huang1972) Titane (Julia Ducournau 2021) Trafic (Jacques Tati 1971) Tremors (Ron Underwood 1990) Troll (Roar Uthuag 2022) Twin Town (Kevin Allen 1997) The Twonky (Arch Oboler 1953)
Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru/Warning from Space (Kôji Shima 1956) The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Tom Gormican 2022) The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Tom Gormican 2022) Uncharted (Ruben Fleischer 2022) Uncle Buck (John Hughes 1989) Upstream Color (Shane Carruth 2013) Us (Jordan Peele 2019)
Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn 2009) Venom: Let There Be Carnage (Andy Serkis 2021) Vuelven/Tigers Are Not Afraid (Issa López 2017)
Warui yatsu hodo yoku menuru/The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa 1960) Who Killed Captain Alex? (Nabwana I.G.G. 2010) Who Killed Captain Alex? (Nabwana I.G.G. 2010) The Woman in the Window (Joe Wright 2021) Work It Class! (Pol Diggler 2021)
X (Ti West 2022) Xian si jue/Duel to the Death (Siu-Tung Ching 1983) Xing xing wang/The Mighty Peking Man (Meng-Hua Ho 1977) Xiu chun dao/Brotherhood of BladeYang Lu 2014) Yi dai jian wang/The Swordsman of All Swordsmen (Joseph Kuo 1968) Yip Man ngoi zn: Cheung Tin Cheu/Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy (Woo-Ping Yuen 2018) You Don’t Nomi (Jeffrey McHale 2019)
I love the way Martha Wells promptly switched to titling the Murderbot series like late 80s/early 90s erotic thrillers: an Adjective Noun combination that bears a tangential but potentially evocative relationship to the contents of the story (Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry). Next up I want to see
Special Measures. In which Murderbot is contracted to take over running an inner city school that failed its OFSTED inspection.
Research Excellence. In which Murderbot is contracted to waste vast sums of public money to ensure research funding is primarily distributed to the already-wealthiest universities.
Reasonable Adjustment. In which Murderbot is contracted to replace absurdly complex legacy systems for deadline extensions for students with SpLDs and other ongoing issues.
Peer Review. In which Murderbot is contracted to assess the contribution made to human happiness by Reviewer 2.
2022 was my first year as a professor and/but was mostly spent trying to buy and move into a new house.
It took a mere seven months from making the offer to getting the keys, and most of an eighth month before I was finally fully moved in. Probably the lowest, yet also most typical, point of this terrible process was when the deal fell through, and we thought fuck it, we’ll go away for a week’s holiday in Devon to regroup before picking up the pieces. I caught Covid on the train down there; got the all-clear on the morning we had to get the train back.
Still, we now live – surrounded by 150+ boxes of books and DVDs, which will remain unpacked while we have some pretty major conversion work done – in Wales.
Just barely in Wales.
As in, by the first train station, in one of the villages built to house workers digging the Severn Tunnel.
It is a marginally quicker commute to work in north Bristol than it was from my old home in south Bristol. I just have to get used to being reliant on a train or two (rather than multiple buses) per hour.
And to there being almost nothing in way of emergency grocery/wine suppliers en route home.
And to having to leave fun nights out in Bristol earlier than everyone else in order to get the last train back.
Otherwise, the first half of the year was pretty much taken up with promotional work for and spin-offs from The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture, including:
‘Perturbations of a Planet in Peril: Utopian Interventions in Biodiversity and Climate Breakdown’ plenary panel with Heather Alberro and Richard Seymour, Utopian Studies Society Conference, Brighton 13–15 July 2022
I’ve also given three very different versions of this related paper:
‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Suburban Science Fiction’, Once and Future Fantasies, University of Glasgow, 13–17 July 2022
‘Climate Change in Suburban Science Fiction’, The Future: To Whom Will It Belong? Scientific Film and Science Fiction, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, 17 November 2022
‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Suburban Science Fiction’, Literary and Visual Landscape seminar series, University of Bristol, 23 November 2022)
which is forthcoming as ‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Suburban SF’ in Ania Malinowska, ed., Anthropocenes: Reworking the Wound (Intellect 2023?)
and one profoundly curtailed version of this related paper:
‘Cli-fi/Sci-fi Cinema: Some Tendencies’, FilmeCiência: IV Festival de Filmes Científicos, Banco do Brasil Cinema Cultural Center, São Paolo, Brazil, 16 November 2022
I’d already cut it to the bone, and then at the last moment discovered the live simultaneous translation was actually live sequential translation, so while Alfredo was bravely making sense of what I was saying and turning it into Portuguese, I was busy editing each next paragraph down into a digestible sentence or two. I like to think no one noticed. (Everyone did.) It is forthcoming as ‘Cli-Fi’ in J.P. Telotte, ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas (Oxford UP, 2023?).
And the Italian translation of The Anthropocene Unconscious came out, courtesy of the smart, lovely and helpfully bilingual Marta Olivi.
The only completely new things I managed to write this year were a reminiscence/ article:
‘ghetto jazz mumbo jumbo’, Foundation: The International Journal of Science Fiction 51.2 (2022): 33–40.
and the first postscript I’ve ever been asked to contribute to an edited collection (in which I seize the opportunity to make elaborate connections between Captain Scarlet and Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history):
‘Postscript: Screening Futures: From Scarlet to Ebon’ in Joel Hawkes, ed., American Science Fiction Television and the (Re)configuration of Space, 1987-2021 (Palgrave Macmillan 2023?)
and a book review which, despite the urgent tone with which it was commissioned, has still not appeared:
‘Joshua Schuster and Derek Woods, Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk’, American Literary History Review
and all but the last two boring leftover bits for Mark Bould and Steven Shaviro, eds, This is Not a Science FictionTextbook (Goldsmith Press/MIT Press 2023?), the manuscript of which will finally be submitted early in January.
I also got to do two live on-stage interviews with directors after screenings of their films.
Hanging out with Lucile Hadzihalilovic (the only-slightly-bemused recipient of a copy of The Anthropocene Unconscious, the cover image of which comes from her film Evolution) and then discussing Earwig with her and a properly and appropriately stunned audience (Watershed, Bristol 11 June 2022) was a real lift in the middle of our house-buying ordeal:
MB (naïvely): Will you ever let your audience see the sky in one of your films?
LH (deadpan): Of course you can’t see the sky, because then you could breathe…
‘Science, Science Education, Scientific Film and Science Fiction Cinema in Times of Pandemic and the Extreme Right’ with Oliver Gaycken and Alfredo Suppia, The Future: To Whom Will It Belong? Scientific Film and Science Fiction, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil, 17 November 2022
Other public events:
‘SF and Utopian Art as a Model for the Future’, a public talk at Bristol Transformed Festival, Malcolm X Centre, Bristol 15 May 2022
introducing Ridley Scott’s Alien for Horror Without End, the Lansdown, Bristol 5 July 2022
banging on about Crimes of the Future with Nick Chandler for it-will-feel-like-hours on Reel Talk
introducing Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: The Final Cut for Film Noir UK, Curzon Cinema & Arts, Clevedon 9 September 2022 (although I was not actually there in person since we were birthday partying in London with China)
I also joined the advisory editorial board of the soon-to-launch journal The Incredible Nineteenth Century: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Fairy Tale, and examined a pair of rather tasty PhDs
Iram Ghufran, Situating Documentary Film in a Speculative Future: An Exploration in Multi-Species Entanglements (University of Westminster 2022)
Guangzhao Lyu, The Boom and the Boom: Historical Rupture and Political Economy in Contemporary Chinese and British Science Fiction (University College London 2022)
Oh, and I had a couple of quite serious seizure-like events (March, September) and then a really serious one (December) which left me spasming unconscious in the street. Doctors are now considering whether it is not in fact a neurological problem (i.e., not technically seizures) but a cardiological one.
As in, sometimes, for unknown reasons, my heart just stops beating.
And then, after a while and for equally unknown reasons, starts up again. (So far.)
I’ll be having a subcutaneous heart monitor inserted some time in the new year.
I changed my email signature from Reader to Professor. Heartfelt thanks to all the friends, comrades, collaborators and colleagues for all they’ve done over the last couple of decades to make that possible.
‘What is the Anthropocene Unconscious?’, Visual and Materials Culture Research Group, Northumbria University, 15 December 2021
‘The Anthropocene Unconscious of Zombies and Flying Sharks’, School of Critical Studies/ Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow, 24 November 2021
‘The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture’, Centre for Research into Philosophy, Literature and the Arts, University of Warwick, 26 January 2021
I also published two books chapters: ‘Speculative Fiction’, in Joshua L. Miller, ed., The Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction (Cambridge UP 2021), 63–78 ‘Flicks! Flicks! I Love You!’ in Melanie Kelly, ed. Opening Up the Magic Box: Friese-Greene and Reflections on Film (Bristol Ideas 2021), 86–89 – also hear me read it on soundcloud
delivered one conference paper: ‘For an Imperfect Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Research Association 2021: The Future as/of Inequality, Seneca College, Toronto, Canada 18–21 June 2021
introduced two film screenings: Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor for The Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury, 31 October 2021 Ozu Yasujiro’s Hijosen no onna/Dragnet Girl for Southwest Silents/BFI/Arnolfini, the Arnolfini, Bristol 30 October 2021
examined three rather tasty PhDs: Päivi Väätänen, Rhetorical Narratology and the Politics of Identity in Afrofuturist Fiction, (University of Helsinki) David Hartley, The Fantastic Autistic (University of Manchester) Joshua Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction (Monash University)
with Stacey Abbott and Craig Ian Mann co-founded the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Science Fiction and Fantasy special interest group – find us on Facebook and Twitter
and, thanks to Peter Wright, wrote some ancillary content for a Crooked Dice game – two fake reminiscences by made-up filmmakers to be included with the remastered blu-rays of two non-existent films, Conquest of the Dinosaurs (1973) and Bullet for a Dinosaur (1975).
Mark Bould 