Projections : Science Fiction in Literature and Film

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: A single word came to mind after I read this book.

Fascinating.

This is not a book about SF cinema, speculative fiction, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the classic tales of science fiction, or B-movie monsters. It is about the intersection of those things, the blending, morphing, and contrasting - the speculative spectrum running from the big screen to the paperback. An interesting topic, but what makes it a fascinating topic, is that this book is written from a science fiction perspective, by many of the SF writers whose work has helped shape just what written science fiction has become. These include amongst others, such writers as Robert Silverberg, David Brin, Michael Swanwick, Catherine Asaro, Sean McMullen, Michael Moorcock, Robert Sawyer, Mike Resnick, Lucius Shepard, and James Gunn. When you read the fiction of these writers, you can always hear something of them running beneath the work, a voice that is uniquely theirs, at times easy to hear, at other times only a whisper. In PROJECTIONS, these writers have been pulled out front and center, from behind their fictional words, voices booming, to discuss the SF world about them (whether found in film or the written form). This adds an entirely new dimension to these writers fictional work. I discovered that the excitement and sense of wonder that these writers bring to their fiction is not simply because they have mastered the tools of writing SF (which of course they have), but because they find the world around them, the world of here and now, to be an SF place - amazing and science fictional, both frightening and full of promise. The pieces by Swanwick and Sawyer particularly struck me in this regard - these two writers obviously live in the future. I also found the book a good mix of the serious and the entertaining. While critical analysis by John Clute and John Grant details just what science fiction and fantasy tells us about ourselves and our world, on a lighter side, Lucius Shepard in the guise of H.G. Wells, offers up his opinion on the various cinematic incarnations of his works of fiction. And when Shepard examines the X-Men film, the reader knows that a chapter entitled eXcreMENt is not going to be a dry and academic review (and even introduces us to the concept of evaluating SF films by comparing them to different pizzas).

Lou Anders has assembled a wide range of SF writers and critics, examining the science fictional nature of both entertainment and our world, from more perspectives than one would have thought possible. This can be read from cover to cover just like a novel, and then put on the reference bookshelf, where it will be pulled down again and again to check on an opinion and insight.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have also contributed a chapter to this book - whether it works, or is even worth reading, is for others to say. But my contribution aside, there are 28 other chapters from some of science fictions most fascinating voices, whose perspectives on SF in all its many forms, makes this book a must have for any reader or viewer of science fiction in its various forms.