Pulse

•June 3, 2010 • Leave a Comment

If you’re in the UK and have Freeview, you can watch tonight the pilot of Pulse, a medical horror-drama by Paul Cornell (of Doctor Who/Captain Britain/Bernice Summerfield/54,082 other things fame). It’s actually been available on iPlayer for a while [1], but I’m old-fashioned enough to enjoy sitting down in front of the telly and knowing that lots of other people are having the same experience. It’s on BBC3 at 9pm as part of a season of drama pilots, meaning that if there’s enough enthusiasm, we might get more of it. No spoilers here, of course, except to say that it’s terribly well-directed (by James Hawes of The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances), that there are some terrific performances from Stephen Campbell Moore (The History Boys) and Claire Foy (Little Dorrit), and that it really did creep me out.

[1] If you’re not in the UK, sorry, but I think the iPlayer link won’t work for you and so you’d need some kind of magic to be able to see it.

Posted in tv

Excellent foppery

•June 2, 2010 • Leave a Comment

I’ve uploaded to a separate page my talk “Excellent Foppery“, which I originally gave at Readercon last year. It’s close on 4,000 words, so I thought adding it to the front page would be…unhelpful.  The blurb I wrote last year was:

Following on from his talk at last year’s Readercon (a potted history of the last twenty years in speculative fiction), Sleight now discusses the use of history in the fantastic—from John Crowley’s AEypt sequence to Tim Powers’s fantasies of history. Other works discussed include Road Runner cartoons, Harry Potter, slash fiction, and the stories of Elizabeth Hand, Russell T Davies, and Thomas Pynchon. Overarching theories may be suggested; gratuitous mentions of Shakespeare may also take place.

Comments very welcome on that page. As I said earlier, this year’s talk “And so…” is a sort-of sequel to it. (And, indeed, there’s a further one in the series brewing if the fine Readercon folks are interested next year…)

Posted in talks

Cat’s Cradle

•June 1, 2010 • Leave a Comment

I know I’m having a burst of posting enthusiasm, but I did want to note the arrival of the new Gollancz edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.  It’s a nifty little hardback (priced £8.99), with a short introduction by me. I don’t need to go on here about how good Vonnegut is or how much his works have become part of the culture – not just sf. Till I re-read it last year, though, I’d not quite registered that the book was from 1963 – just before Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. It’s very much from the same school of laughter-in-the-face-of-the-apocalypse, and the more I think of it the more I can imagine several characters in the Vonnegut being played by Peter Sellers.  Anyhow, Cat’s Cradle is a genuine classic and I’m very happy to have some of my words in the same set of covers.

Posted in books, sf masterworks

The sound of my own voice –

•May 31, 2010 • Leave a Comment

– is one that always seems weird to me, but I’ve found myself doing a bit of podcasting lately. Firstly, here’s me talking to Jonathan Strahan, reviews editor of Locus, about canons in sf (among other things) as part of Jonathan’s Coode Street podcasts. Secondly, at the kind invitation of Alex Fitch of Panel Borders, I wound up talking about this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award with various luminaries.

Posted in media, podcasts

Readercon

•May 31, 2010 • Leave a Comment

As I say on the About page, I go regularly to Readercon, the conference on imaginative literature held in Boston each July. This year, I’m going to be giving a talk, as follows:

“And so…”

Why do we read on from one sentence to the next? How and why do we construct narrative from these discrete units? And how does that work in the special context of fantastic fiction? Graham Sleight talks about extracts from a wide range of writers – including Ursula Le Guin, Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, William Gibson and M John Harrison – to try to answer these questions. If he has time, he may also get to other questions, like “Why is it so awkward when you’re told a joke but don’t get it?”, “Why are there no hard sf slipstream stories?”, and “Do you really want to know who Severian’s mother is?”

It’s a sort-of sequel to “Excellent foppery”, the talk I did at Readercon last year; I hope to clean up the text of the earlier one and post it here before too long.

Posted in cons

Welcome

•May 31, 2010 • 2 Comments

Hi, and welcome to my new website. My name’s Graham Sleight, and you can find out more about me from the “About” link on the right. This site is intended to be a replacement for my very out-of-date homepage here. I’ll probably keep the old one running for a few more months, though. In the meantime, feel free to use the comments on this post to let me know what you’d like to see on this site.

Posted in Uncategorized

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