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World-renowned science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson is a world builder beyond compare. His political acumen makes his speculations feel alive in the present as well as laying out a not-so-radiant future. He is the author of more than 20 novels and the repeat winner of most major speculative fiction prizes; his celebrated trilogies include
Three Californias,
Mars Trilogy: Green, and
Blue. In an earlier life he was a PhD student of Fredric Jameson, and he wrote his dissertation on the novels of Philip K. Dick. He is also, as this interview shows, an acute taxonomist not just of SF but also of its roots in and its relation to a longer, larger realist tradition.
Each year, Pembroke College in Oxford the university where J.R.R. Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon literature holds an annual public lecture series in honor of the late author and professor.
Fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay delivered this year’s lecture, titled “Just Enough Light: Some Thoughts on Fantasy and Literature.”
The Tolkien Lecture is designed to promote “the study of fantasy literature, and advances our understanding of it, by inviting influential and talented speakers to share their ideas on the field,” and was established in 2013 by the university’s students. Past speakers have included Kij Johnson, Adam Roberts, Lev Grossman, Terri Windling, Susan Cooper, V.E. Schwab, and Marlon James. (R.F. Kuang was supposed to give the lecture last year, but because of COVID, will do so at a to-be-determined date.) In 2020, the symposium brought back a bunch of prior speakers for a virtual panel discussion.
U
pon its initial release in 1982, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” was a critical and commercial disappointment. Over time the film amassed a devoted cult following, and in 1992, upon the release of Scott’s director’s cut, Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote a deep dive into the making of the film and its rediscovery. Twenty-five years later a sequel, “Blade Runner 2049,” will open in theaters nationwide. This article was originally published on Sept. 13, 1992.
Elegant cars gliding through a decaying infrastructure, the dispossessed huddling in the shadow of bright skyscrapers, the sensation of a dystopian, multiethnic civilization that has managed to simultaneously advance and regress these are scenes of modern urban decline, and if they make you think of a movie, and chances are they will, it can have only one name: “Blade Runner.”