Dead! |
As mentioned in part 1, it’s mostly because of my new job and the house move: if didn’t do as much reading or writing as I’d have liked, it’s because I was busily occupied on the business of getting on with life and moving on. But because I was distracted, my reading felt a bit random and purposeless this year.
I finished off my series on Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft, and gradually lost interest in the early 20th century popular gothic. Instead I got a dose of the real thing. when I found a copy of The Great Beast: The Life and Magic of Aleister Crowley by John Symonds in the basement of my new house. I read a bit of fantasy including the low fantasy novel Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel while watching the alt-historical drama A Game of Thrones on DVD, and then read World Fantasy Award winner Osama by Lavie Tidhar.
Late in the year, this now infamous review by Paul Kincaid made me ponder my own relationship to the genre because I don’t read a lot of prose SF and fantasy in comparison to my younger days and I’ve been wondering why that might be. While I’ve only just begun to investigate the question, starting with my series on Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, the early diagnosis isn’t encouraging. As far as I can tell, science fiction is dead.