Kathleen Jamie, “The Blue Boat”

How late the daylight edges
toward the northern night
as though journeying
in a blue boat, gilded in mussel shell

with, slung from its mast, a lantern
like our old idea of the soul

From Waterlight: Selected Poems. You can hear Jamie read from several of her poems at The Poetry Archive. The first third of Waterlight contains poems from The Tree House, a collection which won the 2004 Guardian Forward Prize for Poetry.

9 July 2007 | poetry |

Sci-Fi Speaks to Our Modern Condition

In an interview with The College Crier a month before his new novel, Spook Country, comes out, William Gibson (left) speaks to the cyberpunk world we live in. “When I was writing a novel like Count Zero I would just invent some other level of imaginary technology or invent some part of the back story of my future history that would account for me having a way to scoot past that bit of illogic in the story,” he reflects. “When you’re writing about a present, whether it’s imaginary or not, and there’s some major imaginary elements in Spook Country, the rules are different… I have to come up with something that allows me to suspend my disbelief in my fantastic narrative and which I hope will allow the reader to suspend their disbelief. So actually, it is more work.”

Meanwhile, Kim Stanley Robinson talks to Wired News about the real-world environmental concerns that propel the trilogy of near-future political novels that recently concluded with Sixty Days and Counting. “I’m hoping the scientific community continues to go off like a fire alarm in a hotel, just as they have for the last five years, and that that will do the trick. If they do, the democracies, the political leadership and even big business will all recognize that this is a real threat. And we’re seeing enough of the effects, even without catastrophic weather,” Robinson says. “Even India and China therefore have compelling reasons to get serious. Their own populations will be hammered by the loss of the Himalayan glaciers. So many effects are combining. I don’t think we need the kind of minus-50-degree winter I described in the books. “

9 July 2007 | uncategorized |