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Is escapism the enemy of smart science fiction? Are stories that let us escape reality always inconsequential fluff? That's what people argue — but the reverse is true. Escapism is a literary impulse, and escapist art is the highest art. More »
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Is there life after death? Maybe, if you're wired. After all, death is just a failure of storage media. Science fiction is full of people who've died in meatspace, only to live on in cyberspace. Here's our inventory of cyber-Heaven. More »
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If you've read an exciting/edgy book of short SF in the past few years, there's a decent chance it comes from Tachyon Publications. We talked to publisher Jacob Weisman about niche publishing, and Thomas Disch. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5122501&view=rss&microfeed=true The book-focused scifi gathering Readercon starts on Thursday, and includes guests of honor Jonathan Lethem and James Patrick Kelly. It also includes the first public showing of the late Thomas Disch reading his poem sequence "Winter Journey," which he wrote after the death of his partner Charles Naylor. Based on Schubert's lider cycle "Winterreise," the poems are bleak, funny and heart-rending according to Elizabeth Hand. Disch asked his friend, filmmaker Eric Solstein to film him reading the poems as a suicide note, and planned to kill himself at the end of the recording to help publicize it. But Solstein made a deal with him: he'd tape the reading, if Disch would postpone the suicide for an indefinite period. The poems, with a DVD of the reading, will be published later this year by Payseur and Schmidt. [Readercon, via Ellen Datlow] More »
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