Gwern — Literary Criticism↗

…More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought.

He was right, though NASA preferred the less flowery term “space euphoria.

Of course, music and animation need something worthwhile to adorn; you can have individual elements of music, animation, kindness, honesty etc.

Alice Sheldon’s SF short story ‘The Screwfly Solution’ is misread by most readers as an alien attack driving men to insane violence; a closer revisionist read shows that the alien attack...

The 2007 19ya film Timecrimes shows the horror & metaphysical implications of stable time loops: over a single day, the protagonist commits escalating crimes while trapped in a 3-iteration loop...

In the sprawling Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU), one of the most memorable characters was Grand Admiral Thrawn .

Italics are preserved from the original. I have added hyperlink references for obscurer terminology or references, & links to later commentary sections: As I was reading last night—reading a book, I...

Thomas [the protagonist] shrugged. “Why? For starters.