Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...science fiction story, Bell asked whether white Americans living in a ruined world would choose to restore their economy and natural resources in return for enslaving their Black neighbors to extraterrestials. In Bell's scenario, Black Americans allowed a white-controlled constitutional convention to disenfranchise them, overriding their protests in the name of due process and majority rule...
...Easy in the Islands (1985), Bob Shacochis proved he could spin colorful tales about life, chiefly low, in the Caribbean. His exotic settings and laid- back prose won critical praise and an American Book Award for a first book of fiction. He might be excused for trying to repeat his earlier success, but that turns out not to be necessary. Only two of the eight stories in The Next New World take place on tropical islands, and while perfectly fine, they are not the best things in this collection. A typical Shacochis story is still likely to have a large...
...Bernie Alazar, who is experiencing the progressive deterioration of Alzheimer's disease. Nothing can save Bernie in the long run, but this story, the best in the book, provides moments of touching recognition and redemption. Shacochis inserts, with no visible effort, an extraordinary amount of detail into his short fiction. The fashion in stories these days runs toward attenuated apercus. None of these will be found here, only pieces that are unstylishly generous and memorable...
...strange ideas in physics, perhaps the strangest is the wormhole. It comes perilously close to science fiction: a wormhole is a hole in the fabric of space and time, a tunnel to a distant part of the universe. While no one has proved that wormholes exist, that does not for a moment keep the more adventurous of thinkers from trying to figure how they might behave. Last fall, for example, three researchers from Caltech floated the notion that in theory at least, wormholes could be time machines...
This sudden, inexplicable eruption of violence typifies what many find troubling about Oates' fiction. If the purpose of art is to provide a comprehensible context, an explanatory train of circumstances, for human activity, then Oates certainly falls short. She knows this risk and consistently runs it anyhow. Her obsession remains the untidy world where everyone actually lives, where headlines daily scream out the unthinkable and where nice people find themselves behaving in ways they can barely imagine, much less condone. The McCulloughs' marriage, despite outward appearances, is far from perfect; the author deftly reveals the stresses and fault lines that...