Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Mark Bould
Revenance Event
And then, after Railsea (2012), it was like he was gone. There were still traces: a collection, a couple of novellas, a nonfiction book that presented as fiction and another that didn’t. And in Salvage, the Marxist journal “for a communism of the ruins” he cofounded, an occasional essay and lots—lots—of photos. But no novels. The thing we first learned to love him for. And then, vexation for some, for others delight: the unheralded collaboration with Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere (2024).
This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook
Science fiction as a vital bridge between technoscience and culture, an early warning system, a method for imagining differently. In the new millennium, science fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. At the same time, it has undergone massive transformations. No longer can it be derided as indigestible technobabble or escapist trash or a white man's playground—not that it ever really was. Sf is rich and diverse, serious, and fun.
The New Old Geography
In its thousands of years of history, humanity has evolved from the coexistence of many modes of production, each adapted to the particular constellation of resources available to a collective, toward a singular mode of production divorced from local resources and directed by the needs of the center of the system. In order for geography to contribute to this project, it had to adopt the precise numerical categories of modernization.
The Anthropocene Unconscious of “Shuggie Bain”
JANUARY 8, 2022 ALL TEXTS HAVE an unconscious. When you write, you select. This word, not that word. An emphasis here, not there. This particular sentence. When you write, you reject all those alternatives in favor of this one. So the text is trailed by all the things that were not said, including all the things that must not or cannot be said. A circumambient swarm. An eloquent jive of demurral and equivocation, circumvention and slippage, omission and repression.
Whose Anthropocene?
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
Whose Anthropocene?
Still from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Because it hinges on who will accept blame for causing climate change, there’s never been so much at stake in the naming of a geological era. Imagine a future of foreclosed possibilities. Haunted by all the worlds that were, and all the worlds that could have been. Imagine the world to come. Imagine we carry on doing too little too late.
Verso
The Anthropocene Unconscious Climate Catastrophe Culture -1 0 Hardback Hardback with free ebook $19.95$11.9740% off 176 pages / November 2021 / 9781839760471 How climate anxiety permeates our culture Today’s movies, television, and novels are pregnant with catastrophe, with extreme weather and rising waters, with environmental wildness and climate weirdness.
The Virus Has Seized the Means of Production
Image: Kate Winslet in Contagion In films such as Contagion, virology is often confused with the invisible workings of capital. Between 1918 and 1920, a strain of H1N1 flu infected 25 percent of the world’s population (500 million people) and killed between 1 and 6 percent (17–100 million people). The point of origin of that particular strain is unknown and probably unknowable. But its rapid global spread was enabled by the transport and communications networks of warring empires.
The Virus Has Captured the Means of Production
Image: Kate Winslet in Contagion In films such as Contagion, virology is often confused with the invisible workings of capital. Between 1918 and 1920, a strain of H1N1 flu infected 25 percent of the world’s population (500 million people) and killed between 1 and 6 percent (17–100 million people). The point of origin of that particular strain is unknown and probably unknowable. But its rapid global spread was enabled by the transport and communications networks of warring empires.
The Neighbors
The Spring 2019 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest Winner “The Neighbors” is the story of two women figuring out the nature of a desire they don’t have words for, inventing a world between them before bringing it down. Told in the spare language of a fairy tale, set a little outside of time, it is, sentence by sentence, a stark evocation of the game they make between them, the stakes of which are their entire lives.
Monsters vs. Empire
Image: Henrique Alvim Corrêa, Martians vs. Thunder Cloud (1906) Trump’s Space Force is a bad reboot of the old imperial fantasy of control from above. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s fall 2018 print issue Evil Empire. Order your copy! On June 18, 2018, President Donald Trump took everyone by surprise.
Monsters vs. Empire
Image: Henrique Alvim Corrêa, Martians vs. Thunder Cloud (1906) Trump’s Space Force is a bad reboot of the old imperial fantasy of control from above. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s fall 2018 print issue Evil Empire. Order your copy! On June 18, 2018, President Donald Trump took everyone by surprise.
The Rabbits
Apr 20, 2018 They expressed my desire To mount and be Mounted as they scurried Into the darkest parts of what This poem is featured in What Nature. Order a copy today. I caught a colony In couples on the lawn As I pulled into my driveway After a night of bare music, Of drinking on my feet Because I think I look better Standing. I should lie.
Dulltopia | Boston Review
Fredric Jameson’s essay in An American Utopia (2016) begins with the observation, “We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike).” Jameson recognizes the profligacy with which capitalism, its eye always on the main chance, belches dystopias.
Dulltopia
Image: A still from Dead Slow Ahead The monotony of slow cinema defamiliarizes our world and enables us to see it critically. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s print issue, Global Dystopias. Order your copy today.
Dystopia and Slow Cinema
Fredric Jameson’s essay in An American Utopia (2016) begins with the observation, “We have seen a marked diminution in the production of new utopias over the last decades (along with an overwhelming increase in all manner of conceivable dystopias, most of which look monotonously alike).” Jameson recognizes the profligacy with which capitalism, its eye always on the main chance, belches dystopias.
Murder Comes to SCOTUS
YESTERDAY WAS the first Monday in October — the official start of the US Supreme Court’s new term — so LARB thought it would be fitting to talk to an author who’s made a living plumbing the depths of our nation’s highest court. Anthony Franze is a Supreme Court litigator, a frequent media commentator on the high court, and an author of thrillers set in the insular world of the justices, their law clerks, and the elite lawyers who regularly appear in the venerated chamber of 1 First Street.
Hitting Budapest
Nov 1, 2010 21 Min read time A short story. Ed. note: On July 11, 2011, this story won the Caine Prize for African Writing. Known as “the African Booker,” the Caine Prize is awarded annually for a short story in English by an African writer. The winner receives £10,000 and a residency at Georgetown University. We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.
In Memoriam: Mark Fisher
I FIRST HEARD Mark Fisher’s name in graduate school at a time when I was just like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones: I felt like I was constantly being reminded of the obvious and painful fact that I truly knew nothing. While flailing around to get my dissertation started, I happened across Capitalist Realism just when I needed it most.
Still Tilting at Windmills
Actors portraying Sancho Panza, left, and Miguel de Cervantes take a break from entertaining tourists in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, the Don Quixote author’s birthplace. / Stephen Phelan On a recent Saturday morning, I caught The Cervantes Train from Madrid’s Atocha Station. Don Quixote greeted me on the platform.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Mark
Contact Mark, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack