Sotto Voce.

"Qui plume a, guerre a." — Voltaire

The Peculiar Tale of How Yesterday’s Unfulfilled Tomorrows Became Today’s Unrequited Yesterdays



Categorised as: Typecasting

Comments are disabled on this post


One Comment

  1. sottovoce says:

    There are a lot of thoughtful SF writers who are feeling the same unease that I felt three years ago when I posted this. Charlie Stross’ rant, “the Hard Edge of Empire,” just nails it for me. Copies of Stross’ manifesto should be pasted to the lampposts of every colonial outpost in the steampunk empire. His penultimate paragraph is the cry of “aux barricades!” to a generation of writers of socialist realist SF (Stross’ weighty term) who, in the mold of E.D. Morel, bear insistent witness to the misadventures of empire and who demand of their fellow men that society be designed to accord with their better natures and to abjure their predilection for indulging their baser instincts upon the backs of their brothers and sisters.


Discover more from Sotto Voce.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading