BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD
At the close of the 1960s, pop culture came under the spell of psychedelics. You didn't need to drop acid to see rainbow colors and floating flowers blossoming in the sky. You found psychedelia in Peter Max posters, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine animated feature, Robert Corman's movie The Trip , even on TV sets for The Dating Game and Laugh-In ....
In the last few years, I've run into a new genre label. "Cli-Fi," for the uninitiated, refers to science fiction stories built on global warming scenarios. Many of these works are formulaic, and as predictable as a Meryl Streep Oscar nomination, but the best of them—say Ian McEwan's Solar or Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-Up Girl —transcend genre labels and rank among the finer literary offerings of the current day.
REPORT ON PROBABILITY A
A long time ago, some prehistoric innovator made up the first story. Then along came the clever inventor of the meta-narrative, who gave us the "story within a story." But it took Brian Aldiss to come up with a story within a story within a story within a story within a story...