How the amazing Ray Bradbury changed science fiction, literature, and the world.
Sam Weller, professor of fiction writing at Columbia College in Chicago. He’s the co-editor of the upcoming anthology Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury.
Gary Wolfe, award-winning science fiction editor, critic, and biographer. Professor of humanities at Roosevelt University.
Science fiction is the marmite of literature – people tend to love it or hate it. Yet no one could deny that it has produced many of the great myths of our age, from Frankenstein’s monster to William Gibson’s cyber-reality.
SF blogger Damien Walter joins our panellists to discuss where it is now, and why we should all tune in to a genre that can be satirical, prophetic, political and plain good fun, often all at the same time. He also outlines some of the titles to look out for in 2010.
We also look at John Wyndham’s previously unpublished novel, Plan for Chaos, and interview China Miéville, rising star of the "new weird".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2010/jan/14/science-fiction-books-podcast
Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.
John Hodgman (accompanied by his personal troubador, Jonathan Coulton), provides a hilarious look into his first book, The Areas of My Expertise, which is a brilliant (and funny) compendium of trivia and wisdom on topics large and small. Make sure you stay tuned for the author’s theme song (performed by Coulton) and the Q&A by walkie talkie, which has to be a podcasting first!
http://authorsontourlive.com/aot-31-john-hodgman-podcasts-the-areas-of-my-expertise/
Space, the final frontier. But is science fiction the final frontier when it comes to being a literature of ideas? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll wax philosophical about science fiction with two of the genre’s greatest writers — George R.R. Martin and Ursula K. Le Guin. And we’ll explore H.P. Lovecraft’s literary philosophy of "Cosmicism."