Reviews

This a book you read as you might swim in an ocean. You submerge yourself at this point or that, absorbing it, living it.

PHILIP K. DICK, by the Exegesis

BY D.F. McCourt

There are three books, actual bound paper artifacts, that sit near at hand on my desk: Webster’s New Explorer Dictionary and Thesaurus, the King James Bible and the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare. Though all three of these texts are available freely online, I find great value in having them within reach to flip through. Not only do they represent the foundations of modern literature but they, all three of them, are inexhaustible wellsprings of inspiration and reliable remedies to all flavours of writer’s block. For the first time in many years, there is a fourth book I am thinking of adding to this company: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.

AE Interviews: Nalo Hopkinson

BY Paul Jarvey

I met with Nalo Hopkinson in the Merril Collection of the Toronto Public Library, just minutes before she was to participate in a reading of select works from science fiction’s late visionary Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was one of the most prolific and influential writers of his time and he remains the most anthologized. Hopkinson’s oeuvre does not share the universal recognition (or impressive size) of Sturgeon’s, but she has mastered the art of subtle narrative. Her works are nuanced tales that are celebrated for their power to weave the unique mythologies of the Caribbean with complex social and political themes in the unusual settings of speculative fiction.