28SEP26 / accessions

Matt Hill’s Wrecks because Matt’s a good friend, but also because he’s a fantastic writer, not to mention one of the few still stubbornly carrying the flame of sf as a serious speculative literature. Based purely on the blurb and the conceit, I suspect there’s more than a bit of Ballard homage going on here… Mary Shelley’s The Last Man because I’ve never read it, but also because Last Man discourse is back in the mix thanks to Fukuyama’s new book. Now, Shelley’s Last Man of course long precedes Nietzsche’s, which was where Fukuyama found the image with which to personify the inhabitants of his End of History; meanwhile, the blurb suggests that this novel is Shelley’s working-through of the contradictions of Romanticism, through characters who are clear stand-ins for her late husband and his best buddy Byron. So there may be an interesting dialectic to explore there… but even if there isn’t, who can resist a good old fashioned apocalypse?