'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.
Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.
I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.
As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.
I have scary eyes. I look like the guy in 'American History X,' yes. I remember coming home from school and asking my mum if I could get an eye transplant, and of course she declined.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like ...
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the m...
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and confl...
Eventually I did that, but it took a lot of twists and turns, and there were a year or two there where I was living with no money at all - no home, no car, no nothing. I was living in somebody's garage in Los Angeles at that point - for a year.
I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.
What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized, outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping...
Some have suffered death to make it possible for us to have the scriptures today. Historically, the scriptures in the Bible were reserved for the clergy, with the reading of them by others being denounced. At times, laws even prohibited the public or...
Having a soft major is nowhere near the career death sentence that so many make it out to be. The world is changing, and the U.S. economy with it. Our economy is shifting to a service- and information-based economy, and soft majors are already becomi...
Baseball always gets credit for the foundational part of masculinity - the father thing. The eternal game of backyard catch, 'Field of Dreams', the Ripkens, the Griffeys, the Bondses, so on. But football is the real paternal game, because it's a conv...
I'm a really hectic dreamer; I never wake up not out of a dream, and there's loads going on, lots of action, big blockbuster dreams, they're all major enterprises.
I have never seen a game's graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.
The virtue of gay equality has become increasingly recognized in the U.S. because people have been persuaded of its merits, not because state officials, acting like Inquisitors, forced people to accept it by punishing them for their refusal.
Okay, when you start to fight for equality, like Anand did in 1995, you could end up losing game 10, like he did, without putting up any kind of fight.
If it helps me in the way that if this movie is successful, I get to make more films, great, and the more films that I make and the more interest that I'm allowed to cover, the better for me and the better, hopefully, for the people who like to watch...
