Ian's Curated Musings

In her article " Fantasy, Reading, and Escapism ," author and Tor.com contributor Jo Walton writes, "If your life is bounded and restricted, seeing that more options exist helps, even if they’re all theoretical and imaginary. Escaping doesn’t mean avoiding reality, escaping means finding an escape route to a better place." This defense of Fantasy (and we might add Science Fiction) is one that many of us first encounter in print through J.R.R. Tolkien's On Fairy Stories , but it is also something that many readers and writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy know intrinsically. There is value in getting away, in witnessing another world's epic struggles of good against evil and putting our own problems aside, if for a moment, so that we might recharge. It's something I've felt, too, but when I sat down to create the world for my latest Work in Progress, I thought: Fantasy can be more than that.  It can be equipment for living. It can be an exploration o...

When Donald Trump ran for the 2016 presidency, it was common to hear late night hosts and comedians joke about how their material was writing itself. Then, as time went on, the joke became that they would much rather write their own material than deal with the horrific confederacy of dunces that is the Trump presidency. Now, with a teenager jailed because she didn't complete online schoolwork ,  with our personal data being weaponized by companies to manipulate our opinions , with federal officers abducting people participating in the uprisings in unmarked vehicles , and with the Homeland Security chief terming these as 'proactive arrests,'  it doesn't feel like jokes are writing themselves anymore, but (what should be science fiction) dystopias are. In Marie Lu's Legend , a plague ravages the people as the government tests its people, but only offers them treatment if they can afford it; while in M.T. Anderson's Feed , personal market data is used by companies ...

In one section of my current work in progress, the main character is kept a captive audience as his English teacher recites lines from Yeats's poem " The Second Coming " as a means of both demonstrating the danger of literature and of change.  The poem itself imagines the end of days, and I've always loved it for this: the description of destruction, its prophetic tone, and the parting images of the "rough beast" moving slowly towards its own birth.  Those cycles of death and birth, the fading of one age into another, is something that has always interested me; and it's something I want to revisit in today's context--hoping and working towards the ebb of racism and the growth of anti-racism. "Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre" Yeats's theory of history--represented in the double gyre --in its most basic sense is that something has power, and then, as that power diminishes, a new power establishes itself and begins to grow until t...