#the jodorowsky library

[graphicpolicy]

Preview: The Jodorowsky Library Book 6: Madwoman of the Sacred Heat • Twisted Tales • The Debt

The Jodorowsky Library Book 6: Madwoman of the Sacred Heat • Twisted Tales • The Debt preview. Hardcover BOOK 6 includes two of Jodorowsky's most philosophically daring collaborations #graphicnovel #comics #comicbooks

[comiccrusaders]

#PREVIEW: THE JODOROWSKY LIBRARY BOOK 6 by #AlejandroJodorowsky, #FrancoisBoucq, #Moebius & more... from @HumanoidsInc #indie #comics http://ow.ly/IAJp50OEPBA

[unhookedwings]

Photos of writer and filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spending time with his cats

[narayphyrgar]

What is the goal of the life? It's to create yourself a soul. For me, movies are an art... more than an industry. And its the search of the human soul... as painting, as literature, as poetry.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

[rootfish13]

Here are some of the graphic novels I want to check out at a later date.

My city library recently had a remodel and they have a manga & graphic novel section finally!

[ofmermaidstories]

MERMS! Hello :)

your updates are never annoying, i love every little tidbit. It reminds me of this post:

https://at.tumblr.com/coffeepeople/i-find-it-endlessly-fascinating-that-most-humans/77nfpirtk9mu

Im incredibly busy and don’t really have people in my life tbh, but sometimes seeing your updates at the end of the day is enough because it brings a sense of comfort and normalcy, so I do appreciate them and you :)

anon. 🥺 hello, my hardworking love. 🌷🌈✨💕 this is me filling you in on all the gossip after work (while you’re in a oodie and we’re eating pasta).

okay, lemme think: i read a 20k+ review (takedown) of Lightlark, the YA book that got a 6 figure publishing deal because of the author’s tiktok about it. i love YA as a genre (it’s such a formative genre, as fiction for kids/bigger kids tends to be, so i do believe that that audience in particular deserve fun, good books to read) so i like to stickybeak in whatever drama is happening in their corner and the Lightlark thing has been pretty interesting! the linked review is not generous lmao, but outlines pretty solidly why it won’t be so if you’re bored and nosey it’s an interesting read!!!!! it does spoil the book though!!!!!!

what else what else. this isn’t fic related but i started a mubi trial because i thought they had in the mood for love but they don’t, and no streaming service in australia does either. :( i really want to watch it!!!! but that’s okay—i lined up some interesting looking films so im gonna work through them before the trial ends. i’m about to start i am not your negro, which i’m excited for because i’m currently in the middle of if beale street could talk. i also have la notte waiting; i think italian cinema is very beautiful and romantic, and im curious to see if it’s gonna make me grind my teeth like so many older films do, when it comes to how dickish the men in them are LOL. el topo (the trailer is not work friendly!!!) is also on my watchlist but if i’m completely honest i am not that great with surrealism as a genre—i tend to like my stories literal, and also it gives me war flashbacks to highschool, and having to write essays about Dali and melting clocks. 🥹 but i’ll watch it because i’ve always been curious about jodorowsky’s dune, and i think it’ll be fun to go into that documentary at least having a taste of jodo’s style!!! and then there’s also the 1972 doco three cheers for the whale—it looks like a history on whaling? 🧐 i’ll report back. i probably won’t subscribe to mubi because i need to be picky with my monthly bills lmao, so i’m determined to watch anything that looks interesting during my trial!!!

i’ve been going on a bender, lately, in like, actively seeking out stuff to consume. i went to the library a couple of weeks ago and walked out with six different books (and four manga volumes!!!) and i’m still making my way through them—i have two more books waiting on hold for me and a wishlist in my notes!!!! i’ve also pre-ordered jennette mccurdy’s i’m glad my mom died—basically i am trying my damndest to drown myself lmfao. this is not the norm for me—i don’t know what switch has flipped but eh. there’s worse things that i could be doing, i guess. 🥹

i’m trying to think of something else that might be interesting for you in our pasta-date. 🥺 i saw a tiktok just today of a indie author who specialises in, um, monster-loving, trying to decorate her laptop with monster-lover stickers and she had like, a logo for the writing group she was apart of and—!!! omg. writing groups when they’re with your friends seem so fun. i always get so jealous when i read about like, great artists or writers all hanging out in the same dingy parisian bar or whatever. sometimes i feel like my brain is so rotted from the constant overstimulation that is the internet and being connected to everything everywhere all at once—i would love to switch off for a few solid weeks and just sit in a café in a city half a world away with people who like creating the same kind of things and just—yeah. i think we must all have some variation of that dream, right? having enough time and space to be able to linger somewhere outside and write or knit or paint or read a good book. doing that without having to fret about money or having to make it. we’d all be such different people if we didn’t have to worry about maintaining the sawdust in our cages. 🥹 anon!!!!!!! my busybee anon—i hope you see this. you sound like you work hard and i want you to know i am very proud of you—it’s hard slog making a life for yourself, and i just know you have done wonderfully this week. 🌷💕 i will save the next few interesting tiktoks i see and squirrel away any funny twitter drama just for you, for our next dinner date. 📚🍳📝💕 happy weekend, my love, and i’ll see you on the other side of it. ☀️

[nitebloom]

Can you share some of your favorite books with us?

oh ym god thank u this is the best question <3 definitely leaving a lot out but here for the sake of time and space but here are the ones id rather die than be without lol

the way of the tarot - alejandro jodorowsky literally my bible like ive slept w this in my bed like a stuffed animal multiple times it’s underlined and written all over lmao, ended up writing my thesis on the tarot (and leonora carrington, who was his tarot teacher) based off the stuff ive learned from this book song of songs from the bible uuuhmmm yeah one of the greatest poems and mystical texts ever written also reading it 20000 times and thinking about it a lot really influenced my spiritual philosophy ladders to fire anais nin love and other demons gabriel garcia marquez wise blood flannery oconnor weetzie bat (and all the books in that series), got the 1st book when i was 13 changed my life forever going solo roald dahl this compilation of edgar Alan poe poetry lol night wraps the sky: writings by and about mayakovsky my beloved mayakovsky ilysm <3 les fleurs du mal baudelaire duhhh tristessa jack karouac isabelle and the angel - thierry magnier literally a kids book that ive had forever and have a complex about where i feel like it prophecized the course of my life, also the illustrations are oil painted and so beautiful i’m with the band - pamela des barres <3 i first discovered gram parsons cuz of this book need i say more ask dr. mueller: the writings of cookie mueller -cookieee i love you so much. this is a compilation of her short stories and such and mostly it’s my favorite for this one story about her going to jamaica in the 70s with her son and gf and it’s seriously some of the most beautiful writing i’ve ever read. all the other stories are so good too. i discovered it in 2018 while going thru cookie’s archive at the NYU library and read an original copy that allegedly belonged to david wojnarowicz (<3) moon moon anne kent rush alice in wonderland - lewis carroll literally fave forever ive owned like 30 copies throughout my life& its another one w an intense affect on my subconscious lol

also the collected articles of ida craddock (!!! google her), the bell jar (duh), ram dass be here now, d’aulaires book of greek myths and euripides the bacchae

[laetitiacartomancy]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Laetitia Barbier (@laetitia.cartomancy)

What tarot card does it remind you of and why? There is no wrong answer, I'm just curious about what you come up with. Try to add a couple of key words to your answer. Image: Rainbown tunnel from Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, 1973. #tarot #tarotcards #tarotreading #tarotreadersofinstagram #antique #art #card #oracle #divination #cartomancy #cartomancer #museum #library #collection #Brooklyn #rainbow #psychedelia https://www.instagram.com/p/B-SqMJtHFui/?igshid=1q40u06id1o2q

[corkcitylibraries]

International Fiction in our Libraries

by Ann Riordan

One of the things I love about libraries most, is the diverse nature of books bought for our readers. We love bestsellers, but we also love the unusual, the eclectic, literature and lives from around the world. Here is a list of twelve international fiction titles recently added to stock. Travel along with these stories from Russia to El Salvador, Kuwait to Canada. Enjoy!

Homeland by Fernando Aramburu, translated by Alfred MacAdam. Translated from the Spanish, this novel explores the personal impact of terrorism and violence on all sides.

The Pact We Made by Layla AlAmmar. A young woman, her life and her choices in contemporary Kuwait.

The Passage of Love by Alex Miller. Semi-autobiographical novel based on the life of this Australian writer.

Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Kalau Almony. An edgy and exciting thriller set inside a violent cult in Japan.

November by Jorge Galan, translated by Jason Wilson. A novel set during the civil war in El Salvador.

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh. Climate change explored through one man's life journey, from India via Venice to Los Angeles.

The Family Tabor by Cherise Wolas. A generational saga about US Jewish family and their secrets.

The Forgotten Girl by Rio Youers. A supernatural thriller from this Canadian based author.

Masha Regina by Vadim Leventhal, translated by Lisa C Hayden. The St Petersburg literary scene described through the eyes of a girl in search of more from life.

99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai. A debut novel set in contemporary Afghanistan.

The Son of Black Thursday by Alejandro Jodorowsky, translated by Megan McDowell. A novel inspired by the author's life in 1930s Chile.

The Year of the Comet by Sergei Lebedev, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. The fall of the Soviet Union through the eyes of a boy.

All titles are available to reserve through your online account. Login via our website at www.corkcitylibraries.ie

[corbie]

Words I Have Enjoyed, 2018

Books

J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation

Jodorowsky, The Incal

Charles Stross, Toast and Other Stories

Richard Feynman, QED: the strange theory of light and matter

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gentry’s Holistic Detective Agency

Iain M. Banks, The State of The Art

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Iain M. Banks, Excession

Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Frank Herbert, Dune

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Longer Reads

Assorted Alan Kay Emails

��After more than 50 years of doing edge of art research, my conclusion is that "it is delicate". An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while. What was wonderful about the big creative projects of the golden age was that they had to be conducted out in the open by lots of people, but the processes and pressures were such that the delicate parts were not done in.”

Are We Awake Under Anesthesia?

What happens to the mind and consciousness under anesthesia?

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

“A gene for…“, “Brain region X lights up”, “Chemical imbalance”, “Closure”, “Fetish”, and friends.

The Female Price Of Male Pleasure

“Once you've absorbed how horrifying this is, you might reasonably conclude that our "reckoning" over sexual assault and harassment has suffered because men and women have entirely different rating scales. An 8 on a man's Bad Sex scale is like a 1 on a woman's. This tendency for men and women to use the same term — bad sex — to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called "relative deprivation," by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers.”

DNA Through The Eyes Of A Coder

“DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called 'the nucleus'. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation - what you see is all you get.”

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

“That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution.”

The Recurse Center User’s Manual

I wish every technical working group I’ve been on for the past fifteen years had something one-tenth as thoughtful as this.

The White Darkness: A Journey Across Antarctica

The trial of crossing the Southern continent on foot, alone.

Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

“One interesting consequence of this process is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European – there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.”

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer

“I think one of the overarching goals of compute science is to make more programming like wizarding. We want our computers to be human-amplifiers.”

The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks

“Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” are themselves meaningless....In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.”

Computing is Everywhere: A conversation with Bret Victor, Creator of Dynamicland

“That was the plan, yeah. I had um I just built up a . . . a set of things I wanted to think about that could not be thought at Apple. It was kind of this — um I had a bulletin board in my room and had like all these little pieces of paper that I had stuck to that board. And so when I went on my trip, I kind of scooped all those papers into like three little plastic baggies, and then at some random public library somewhere in the middle of the country, I spread out those papers on a big desk and tried to figure out what — what is it? Like what — what is the abstraction here? What — what does all these little ideas add — What are the categories here? What does it add up to?”

Lessons from Optics, The Other Deep Learning

“If anything, I wanted to reply that maybe her engineers should be scared.”

How To Be A Systems Thinker: A Conversation With Mary Catherine Bateson

“The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.”

Deconstructing the Unix Philosophy

Lots of good bits here.

A Basic Lack of Understanding

“This article is about what AI is, but it’s also about why learning what AI is is important in the first place. It’s about how AI is marketed as a commodity today, and what impact that has on people whose work and social lives are touched and shaped by AI on a daily basis. And it’s about how the future of resistance against AI-backed exploitation may not just be technological in nature, but social and cultural.”

One day I'm going to do a survey of the early-21st century AI skepticist essay landscape.

Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power

“To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

Carbon Ironies

“Most likely, you are a hard, angry person. . . . Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues . . . fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure?”

Utopia and Work

“The utopianism of full employment is so entrenched, as a seemingly uncontested common sense, it’s difficult to imagine a different utopian horizon.”

Disposable America

“As it turns out, all three companies’ histories intersect with each other, as well as with structural changes to the American economy. But first, we have to talk about McDonald’s.”

What can a technologist do about climate change?

No clear answers, but thoughtful and insightful.

Survival of the Richest

Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

Bourdain Confidential

“As much as I look at houses sometimes and think wow, that would be really nice, if that were my house, I know that I would be miserable. It would be… cleaning out the… the gutters, and you know, what about the pipes freezing, and if you own a home it means you have to vacation in the same place every year. I’m a renter by nature. I like the freedom to change my mind about where I want to be in six months, or a year. Because I’ve also found you might have to make that decision… you can’t always make that decision for yourself, you know… shit happens.”

How to write a good software design document

“A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done.”

The Bullshit Web

“There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.”

On Production Minimalism

“Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”

“Omakase”

Just read it.

See No Evil

“What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain?”

Estrangement and Cognition

“SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.”

Layering

“This is good advice, and with a bit of adaptation it can apply to many things in life. Any sort of improvisation must arise from a basic technique. And just as important, the advice understands that there’s nothing more intimidating than a pristine kitchen, a blank canvas, an empty screen.”

The Heart of the Problem

“But consider this for a moment. Perhaps once we are adequately fed, diet becomes far less significant in determining how healthy we are. Maybe almost insignificant. Could it be that when our bodies have enough macro and micro nutrients available most of the time, other determinants of health kick in. The houses we live in. The stress we are under. The pressure of financial and social inequalities. Stigma, abuse and mental illness. Social isolation. And a million other factors with the capacity to make us sick.”

Mass Authentic

“Authenticity seems to stand for the truth behind the curtain, but it is really just the curtain. The presumption that only some feelings in some situations are real, and other feelings, though felt, are somehow false, is authenticity’s main ruse.”

Stickeen: The Story of a Dog

“However great his troubles he never asked help or made any complaint, as if, like a philosopher, he had learned that without hard work and suffering there could be no pleasure worth having.”

The Early History of Smalltalk

Far more here than I could find suitable excerpts for.

The Radical Implications of Luck in Human Life

“The less credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you believe our trajectories are shaped by forces outside our control (and sheer chance), the more compassionate you will be toward failure and the more you will expect back from the fortunate. When luck is recognized, softening its harsh effects becomes the basic moral project.”

It’s Harder Than It Looks To Write Clearly

“Everything we write is, in a sense, translated from another language, from the chatter we hear inside our head, translated from that interior babble (more or less comprehensible to us) into (what we hope will be) the clearer, more articulate language on the page. But during the process of that translation, basic clarity often suffers—sometimes fatally!—when, for whatever reason, we feel that we are translating our natural speech into a foreign language: in other words, when we are writing.”

It Isn’t About The Technology

“Yet the decentralized Web advocates persist in believing that the answer is new technologies, which suffer from the same economic problems as the existing decentralized technologies underlying the "centralized" Web we have. A decentralized technology infrastructure is necessary for a decentralized Web but it isn't sufficient. Absent an understanding of how the rest of the solution is going to work, designing the infrastructure is an academic exercise.”

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

“For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.”

If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism?

“Freedom from exploitation. Freedom from control and domination. Freedom to find, develop, and realize ourselves. The freedom to live lives which really sear us with meaning, purpose, and fulfillment — instead of being crushed with anxiety, bruised by competitiveness, and suffused with fear. So here is the real question. If these are things we are really after — why don’t we just give them to one another?”

The Lax Habits of the Free Imagination

“The lax habits of the free imagination exhibit an appealing open-door policy. But to counterbalance this extreme permissiveness, the celestial process had better employ some sort of disciplinarian, an enforcer, to maintain order. Where else does the famous restraint and brevity of the short story come from? In other words, there must be a plan, an outline. Mustn't there?“

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

“It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you. People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.”

I’m Broke and Friendless and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life

“When you’re curious about your shame instead of afraid of it, you can see the true texture of the day and the richness of the moment, with all of its flaws. You can run your hands along your own self-defeating edges until you get a splinter, and you can pull the splinter out and stare at it and consider it.”

Mistakes About The Meaning Of Life

“Noting this close relationship between meaningfulness and value is important, since it allows us to draw many implications that can be helpful for people who consider their lives insufficiently meaningful.”

[steamedtangerine]

Haven't been to a library in a while? Then see if the nearest one to you has this.

This one will spark the imagination.

Seriously, this is the closest to viewing a parallel timeline in vivid detail as it gets.

Hitchcock’s Kaleidoscope

Kubrick’s Napoleon

Orson Welles’ Don Quixote

Miyazaki’s Pippi Longstocking

Jodorowsky’s Dune

Spielberg’s Night Skies

Tim Burton’s Superman

Lynch’s Ronnie Rocket (a few others David never got around to)

-and many others including the many failed attempts at “Confederacy of Dunces”

Now procrastinators and fellow ne’er-do-wells of cultural contributions don’t have to feel so bad when they see some of the ambitious works of geniuses that fell by the wayside.

-or just read it for fun....I mean, do I have to make up any more reasons why?

[blighbct]

I knew that I would like this book.

I have been looking for a copy of it for quite a while now, mainly in libraries and bookshops. After I won a gift card though for mightyape, I was happy to find that they sold the book, so I ended up buying it from them.

I loved the level of detail in this book, I found myself reading slowly just so I didn’t miss anything interesting about the world setting, or the subtleties in conversations.

I really didn’t want to spoil the book, so I avoided looking at the dune movie. After I finished reading, I searched it up, to see what the worms looked like in the film (to use as reference for our “centipede”).

I ended up finding a documentary called “Jodorowsky's Dune”

It was really interesting to watch, as this movie gave a lot of inspiration to other films, such as Star Wars, and Alien, but it was never actually finished. Instead the inspiration was derived from the concept images, and documentation of the film.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and finding out about the impact it has had on science fiction. I knew I would like it, but it ended up being better then I imagined.

[pascale-montandon-jodorowsky]

Repost• @humanoidsinc The Jodorowsky Library is a collection of deluxe matching volumes showcasing the iconic works of the legendary Alejandro Jodorowsky. Included in this volume are the bawdy secret agent tale ANIBAL 5 (illustrated by Georges Bess) and the sci-fi epic MEGALEX (illustrated by Fred Beltran), along with a selection of stories from SCREAMING PLANET with artwork by Adi Granov, Axel Medellin, and other comics art legends. In stores everywhere. https://www.instagram.com/p/CW1kzI9MPB5/?utm_medium=tumblr

[oliverarditi]

Heroically strange

And so The Prophet concludes. What started as the ostensible re-boot of a retired and obscure superhero can take its place on the library shelves as one of the most extraordinarily inventive science-fiction comics in the English-language tradition, and hopefully as an enduring element of the canon that is being forged in this second Golden Age of the medium. It is unusual for such a singular vision to emerge from a collaborative process, but this volume is the work of two writers, Brandon Graham and Simon Roy, who are also among its four artists, along with Grim Wilkins and Giannis Milonogiannis. All its contributors have their feet firmly in the underground, and the story has the feel of a space-opera epic shot on hand-held Super 8, with all the colliding sensibilities that implies. Its most obvious antecedents are in the psychedelic bandes dessineés of the 1970s, notably Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud’s The Incal and Phillippe Druillet’s Loan Sloane series, but this is clearly a work that emerges from the burgeoning avant-garde of the contemporary American scene, and it’s good to see a publisher like Image standing behind it.

Earth War could be quite an opaque book, I imagine, to a reader who brings too many generic expectations to it: this is the kind of story that is usually straightforwardly told, particularly if its plot is relatively baroque. The plot of this book is extremely simple, and its telling is not exactly gnomic, but it is far from predictable – at times it feels capricious or whimsical, but for the most part it simply feels as though we are observing a future so alien that we are not qualified to ascribe cause and effect. Visually it is often confusing, but this is more a function of the bizarre biomorphology of its characters than of any particularly avant-garde or experimental approach to the art: this is cartooning, simple, iconically representative illustration, but it is the cartooning of bizarre and impossible forms.

Its potential opacity, its refusal to offer an easy interpretation to the casual reader, does not indicate a work which asks to be decoded however. It is not ‘difficult’ in that sense. Instead it offers other pleasures than those that are conventionally associated with space opera or with SF comics. Earth War demands that its reader set aside any desire for clarity or for specificity, and instead immerse themselves in the experience of looking at a sequence of images: its narrative is an affective one, a psychedelic tour through the fevered imaginations of its authors, and in this sense it is a pure comic, one which emphasises only those formal features that are the exclusive preserve of its medium. It is a place of visual immersion and of disorientating motility, in which visual aesthetics supplant plot and dialogue as the motive forces of the narrative. If you want to experience beauty through the medium of science-fiction, don’t look to the highly polished and technically audacious products of the mainstream, but here, to the fringes, where the strange is elevated to the status of the heroic.

[wishmachines]

sorted alphabetically by first name dates are when I began and finished reading

currently reading Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire [28.12.2020 —] Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf [28.12.2020 —]

on pause

Andri Snær Magnason, LoveStar Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, translated by William Weaver Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

finished

Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin [18 — 26.12.20] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, translated by Olena Bormashenko Asja Bakić, Mars: Stories, translated by Jennifer Zoble [11 — 1.12.20] Cormac McCarthy, The Road [26 — 29.12.2020] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver [20.11.20 — 9.12.20] Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight, translated by Achiblad Colquhoun Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan [4.12.20] Lord Dunsany, The Book of Wonder [14.11.20] Marie Darrieussecq, Our Life in the Forest, translated by Penny Hueston [28.12.2020] Rodrigo Fresán, The Bottom of the Sky, translated by Will Vanderhyden [20 — 23.12.20] Stanisław Lem, Solaris, translated by Bill Johnston [21 — 24.11.20] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed [24 — 26.11.20]

to read

Alejandro Jodorowski Aleksandar Tesic, Kosingas: The Order of the Dragon Alex Dally MacFarlane, Feed Me the Bones of Our Saints Andrus Kivirähk, The Man Who Spoke Snakish *Angélica Gorodischer, Trafalgar Anjali Sachdeva, All the Names They Used For God Anna Kavan, Ice Annalee Newitz, Autonomous Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard To Be A God Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Noon: 22nd Century A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few Berit Ellingsen, Not Dark Yet Beth Plutchak, Liminal Spaces Carmen Boullosa, Heavens on Earth Carol Emshwiller, Carmen Dog Carolyn Ives Gilman, Dark Orbit Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White Catherynne M. Valente, Space Opera Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed Charles Yu, How To live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky Charlie Jane Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night Christina M. Rau, Liberating he Astronauts Cixin Lui, The Three-Body Problem Dan Simmons, The Hyperion Cantos Daniel Kehlmann, Tyll Daniel Mallory Ortberg, The Merry Spinster Eleanor Arnason, Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens Ellen Kushner, Riverside Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven Guido Morselli, Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing Herbert Rosendorfer, The Architect of Ruins, translated by Mike Mitchell *Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas Ian McDonald, Luna: Wolf Moon Isaac Asimov, Foundation James Blish, Cities in Flight Jan Morris, Hav *Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation Jeff VanderMeer, Authority Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance Jeff VanderMeer, The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories Johanna Sinisalo, Troll: A Love Story Joe Haldeman, The Forever War John Conolly, The Book of Lost Things John Keene, Counternarratives Kameron Hurley, The Stars Are Legion 
*Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go Leigh Brackett, The Big Jump Linda Nagata, Vast Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor *Lola Robles, Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist, translated by Lawrence Schimel L. Timmel Duchamp, Love’s Body, Dancing in Time L. Timmel Duchamp, Alanya to Alanya Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake Marlen Haushofer, The Wall Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night *Patricia A. McKillip, In the Forests of Serre Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn Samuel R. Delaney, Nova Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 Samuel R. Delaney, Return to Nevèrÿon Samuel R. Delany, They Fly At Ciron Sergey & Maria Dyachenko, The Scar Sergey & Maria Dyachenko, Vita Nostra Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant Seth Dickinson, The Tyrant Baru Cormorant Sjón, Codex 1962 Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories
 Stanisław Lem, His Master’s Voice Stanisław Lem, Return from the Stars Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries Tanith Lee, Space Is Just a Starry Night Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx Vladimir Sorokin, The Ice Triology Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake Yoss, Condomnauts, translated by David Frye Yoss, Red Dust, translated by David Frye Zoran Zivkovic, The Library

**

Anja Sachdeva, All the Names They Used For God Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: Selected Stories
 Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams Diana Wynne Jones, Believing is Seeing Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics John Ajvide Lindquist, Let The Old Dream Die and Other Stories *Kanishk Tharoor, Swimmer Among the Stars Karen Russell, Saint Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath: Stories Kelly Link, Monstrous Affections Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen Leena Krohn, Collected Fiction (translated by various) Leigh Brackett, Sea-Kings of Mars Peg Alford Pursell, A Girl Goes Into the Forest Tatyana Tolstaya, Aetherial Worlds
 Ted Chiang, Exhalation Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

** Desirina Boskovich (editor), It Came from the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction Eugenio Lisboa and Helder Macedo (editors), The Dedalus Book of Portguese Fantasy Eric Dickens (editor), The Dedalus Book of Flemish Fantasy Johanna Sinisalo (editor), The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy Margaret Jull Costa and Annella McDermott (editors), The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy Mike Mitchell (editor), The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: 1890-2000 David Connolly (editor), The Dedalus Book of Greek Fantasy Richard Huijing (editor), The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Yvonne Howell (editor), Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction