Stan's ​Kitchen 1 csillagozás

Once during my year in Boston
I was walking alone at sunset by the Charles
The riverbank all covered with snow
The trees black spikes against the sky
The river's surface an orange gloss

Cold hand thrust into down jacket pocket
I felt a book I had left in there
Title forgotten just a book any book
But suddenly all I saw was joy

5. oldal, What’s in My Pocket

And I have a strong memory of her sitting immediately to my left when the class went to see the new movie Star Wars, we laughed our heads off. As a space opera spoof it was even better than Buck Rogers in The Twenty-fifth Century.

97. oldal, Happy Birthday Ursula

But the writers I really loved were all in the New Wave generation of the 1960s and 1970s. My favorites, then and now, were these: Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, the Strugatski Brothers, and Stanislaw Lem.

77. oldal, Lem in California

Did you come over in that storm?
Yes, I said, I left my life on the other side
And now I'm not afraid.

128. oldal, Six Poems from If Wang Wei Lived on Mars/Crossing Mather Pass

    In other worlds, when speaking of a novel's ideological intent, it is possible to write historical fiction for the same reason one writes science fiction; to take adventage of the psychological power of the estrangement effect, which in pulling readers momentarily out of their ordinary world views, gives them the chance to see things anew.
    This shared purpose is the strongest link between science fiction and historical fiction.

68. oldal, Notes for an Essay on Cecelia Holland

Furtwängler flowed on. He was taking the adagio even slower than usual, no doubt as a rebuke to Goebbels and his gang. You people are here for the fire and glory of the other movements, Furtwängler's tempo said, but I'm not going to hurry for you. Now you're the captives, caught by Beethoven, and the music that we bathe in is precisely the world that you have taken awy from us. This is the meadow in the forest, this is Sunday at dawn in the clean washed street. This is the flow of slow time, the empty hour, contemplation itself. These are things you have taken from us with your vicious stupidity. Listen and remember, if you can. If you ever knew.

297-298. oldal, The Timpanist of the Berlin Philharmonic, April 1942

Once we're in a Stan Robinson story, we don't want to be anywhere else.

16. oldal, Stan's Kitchen

With the Soviet Union desintegrated, we live in a global capitalist economy that if not changed will wrwck the Earth's biosphere and the lives of several generations of humanity. Confronted with this frightening prospect, and with the sorry spectacle of the Soviet attempt to grasp history and change it, all leftists and indeed all thinking people need to reconsider how we can best struggle for fundamental social change.

86. oldal, Animal Farm in 1992

    "There were people in the workshop writing excellent stories out of their own lives, heartfelt things that seemed to me to put science fiction to some ultimate existential questions. Why write science fiction at all, when people could say things so clearly and directly? What was the point? I talked to Ursula about these questions, and afterward pulled out a backpacking story I had started and abandoned two years earlier. Three friends in the high Sierra, one of them recovering from a head injury. The more I understood that the brain damage rapair was both a science fiction device and an image for how I felt, the more 'Ridge Running' became its own thing, separate from my trip while still relying on what I had done and seen up there.
    "'I like this one best of all your stories,' Ursula said when the story was workshopped. 'You should think about doing more like this one.'
    „Thar was an important moment for me.”

14. oldal, Stan's Kitchen

My Swiss benefactor was blond and good-looking, and seemed capable and sympathetic. In my hitchhiking days whenever women picked me up I pretty much fell in love with them immediately. Now I was remembering how that felt, and kind of feeling it again. She was saving my day. She asked me politely where I was going, and in my broken German I told her about my disrupted morning, and my plan for the afternoon.

248-249. oldal, Kistenpass