Sunday, August 27, 2017

Kirby's Wilderness of Building

[Note:  this article was written for the catalog of the 2015 exhibition, Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby, curated by Charles Hatfield and Ben Saunders at the art gallery of California State University, Northridge. That catalog is now out of print.  I am reposting the article here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jack Kirby's birth.]


Outer space is much too close.  Or rather (since space extends everywhere), its furniture, its stage props are.  Past a great spinning wheel, the technological purpose of which is hard to fathom—it looks partly like a state-of-the-art waterwheel ferrying, ensconced in each of its compartments, a sphere of some kind (a planetoid, perhaps?), partly like an arcing array of electronic circuits—rough-hewn asteroids hurtle by.  They are so near that the imagination boggles at why gravity doesn’t bring them crashing in.  Or, perhaps, it will?  That seems unlikely, however:  down on the glistening terrace of a municipal building designed in retro style (it rather recalls Earth visions of modernist architecture from the 1950s or ‘60s, and we’re in the future, aren’t we?) the inhabitants of the city stroll about unconcerned.

Monday, August 21, 2017

An exchange with Brian Aldiss

I have just learned that Brian Aldiss passed away two days ago, at the age of 92.  I will not recap here his achievements, or wax enthusiastically about his books, though I could, at length.  As a brief memorial, I will post excerpts from an email correspondence I had with him between April and June 2015.  His generosity in answering questions from a reader was exemplary.  Since these were answers to a scholarly inquiry, I feel that their publication here, as an interview of sorts, is appropriate.