Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hard to see why cops in a police state find Pramoedya an embarrassment and a danger. A final irony in this rich lode is that for several years Pramoedya has suffered from writer's block in regard to his fiction. Presently he is working on an Indonesian encyclopedia. "Indonesia is still an abstract concept for me," he says wryly. An encyclopedia, he thinks, might help make this diffuse country of 17,000 islands and 365 languages and dialects a more graspable reality. For his readers, the Buru Quartet has already done that...
This summer, as the stack on my nightstand will attest, I've been flitting from one book to another, from non-fiction to fiction, from light to heavy, from practical to fantastical, all depending on mood...
...Tofflers didn't invent futurism, of course. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and George Orwell were all practicing futurists working under a science-fiction guise. Fittingly, perhaps, modern futurism was born with the atom bomb, in that moment in history when it was suddenly possible to imagine a world without a future. It was Herman Kahn, a graduate of the Rand Institute, the Ur-think tank, who gave the nascent profession credibility with such groundbreaking books as Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962), which used sound scientific principles to predict with great specificity the likely effects of a thermonuclear...
John O'Brien, the tormented author of the 1991 novel Leaving Las Vegas, which served as the basis for last year's film, did not live in the world of overachievers, nor did he view alcoholism as something to be overcome. O'Brien wrote fiction, but his tales of the bottle are intensely biographical. Like the washed-up screenwriter Ben in Leaving Las Vegas, he lost jobs because he couldn't stay sober. He too had intended to drink himself to death but in 1994, at age 33, committed suicide more expediently with a gun. For O'Brien...
...combination of all these techniques creates a thrilling ensemble effect all its own that allows one to experience science fiction with a sense of free, Indiana Jones-type adventure spirit. Aliens with bulky heads resembling AWACS spy planes, swooping air battles, visions of destruction on a Biblical scale -- you can see it all here. The movie therefore delivers excitement in the familiar visual vocabulary of past classics, but skillfully updated with a cheerful feel for the epic. Oh, and don't forget such hard-to-beat signature shots as the encroaching shadows and rolling atmospheric disturbances of the spacecraft...