How Two Rebel Physicists Changed Quantum Theory
Quantum physics has permeated popular culture to the extent that we often see some of its complex concepts used as metaphors to explain life (e.g., the concept of parallel universes in science fiction novels like Dark Matter [2016] and the title of Ellen Gilchrist’s 1989 story collection, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle.) This article from research resource JSTOR covers quantum physics in some detail. You don’t have to understand all the physics in order to appreciate most literary references to its complexities, but, if you want to follow up, the article contains links to many related articles that are free to access.
How Schrödinger’s Cat Got Famous
“Fifty years ago, science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin popularized physics’ most enigmatic feline.”
And here’s the story of how one concept of quantum physics entered the popular literary sphere.
Introducing the Nautilus Summer Reading List
If all this scientific stuff has piqued your interest, science magazine Nautilus has 10 suggestions for your summer reading list. The topics covered by these books are wide-ranging: biology, evolution, astronomy, ecology, philosophy, memory, free will.
Genre Euphoria: Why More Poets Should Read (and Write) Romance Fiction
Here’s another entry in the never-ending discussion of the value of genre literature.
The whole idea of high and low art—the logic used to sift and separate so-called “literary fiction” from “genre-fiction”—is rooted in just about every ugly ism there is. Like any social construct, genre can be used to constrict and exclude, determining which forms of expression have merit and which should be relegated to the guilty pleasure bargain bin. But also like any social construct, genre can be a site of creativity and invention: let’s think romance as camp, romance as self-care, romance as erotic rebellion.
Focusing on the popularity of romance novels, writer and publisher Elaina Ellis explains how she and friend Amber Flame came to publish Someplace Generous: An Inclusive Romance Anthology.
Consider This Before Killing a Character
If you’re a writer who sometimes wakes up from nightmares about Stephen King’s Misery, you might find some comfort in this advice piece from writing guide K.M. Weiland. And if you’re a reader who has ever thrown a book across the room because of a character’s death, you can use this information to determine whether the death was necessary to move the story along or was an unnecessary gimmick.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s home will become a writers residency
“Literary Arts, a community nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, announced Monday that Le Guin’s family had donated their three-story house for what will become the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency.”
It’s always comforting to hear that a seminal writer’s legacy will be preserved.
What COVID Did to Fiction
“The early pandemic was a painful, lonely, and disorienting era in American life. It was also a chance to get some writing done.”
Katy Waldman discusses the characteristics she’s noticed in novels about the pandemic:
These works dutifully convey the facts of lockdown, yet they come most alive in side plots involving love and manners, the arts, or characters’ tussles with identity. The result is a class of novels about the need for memory which display symptoms of denial themselves. When the books turn to the pandemic directly, they struggle—some successfully, some not—to truthfully represent a period whose historical meaning has not yet come to rest.
The Best Detective Novel According to Fiction Specialists
This is kind of a throw-away piece about the book that comes in as #3 in my ongoing series 12 Novels That Changed How I Read Fiction.
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
