Pravic Magazine Presents Authors Ben Loory and Suhail Rafidi In San Francisco

On the evening of June 15th, in San Francisco, Pravic Magazine’s Science Fiction Extravaganza will unlock a trove of hot new fiction and ideas in the field.

June 5, 2013, San Francisco — What is the role of science fiction in the 21st century, predictor or reflector? Featured authors Ben Loory, Suhail Rafidi, David Gill and Ian Kappos will share their work and address that question.The authors will perform readings, participate in a panel discussion, and get a chance to spend some quality time with local fans. Other events include music by Wizard Master and Feral Luggage, trivia with prizes, and secret special guests. The event is all ages. Admission is free. Donations are welcome.

In this day of interplanetary travel and cellular technology, what was once considered science fiction is coming to life all around us. Instead of a Golden Age of flying cars and personal jetpacks, we find ourselves amid dark times. Pollution, technologies of distraction, overconsumption, and apathy afflict our now.

Ben Loory’s short fiction collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin) has been making waves nationwide since its 2011 publication. He has appeared in The New Yorker, as well as several heavyweight literary journals, and has been praised by none other than Ray Bradbury. Loory’s latest short story, “The Astronaut,” appeared in Pravic.

David Gill is the scholar who founded and maintains the Total Dick Head website, an authoritative Philip K. Dick resource. Gill organized the 2012 Philip K. Dick Festival. His fiction appeared in Pravic, The Speculative Edge, Theurgy Magazine, and 365 Tomorrows.

Suhail Rafidi’s science fiction novel, TJ & Tosc: A Field Guide For Life After Western Culture (Shelldive), explores the destiny of human values in a technological landscape. Billed as the first organic, free range novel, it encompasses themes of artificial intelligence, genetic design, and the power of mind. TJ & Tosc is also in development for musical adaptation into a prog rock opera, slated for release in 2014.

Ian Kappos is an up and coming fantasy and horror writer. He served as editor of the now retired Blue Monday Press. His short story “The Leper Colony,” was published in the Neon literary journal.

Pravic Magazine is a new grammar for science fiction, named after a fictional language in Ursula K. Leguin’s The Dispossessed. Pravic is edited by Nathanial K. Miller and David Gill. Ms. Leguin herself described the magazine as “brave, handsome, and intelligent.” Pravic will be planning a science fiction extravaganza every two months. Stay tuned for more information.

Pravic Magazine Science Fiction Extravaganza
Saturday, June 15, 2013 – 7pm
Brainwash
1122 Folsom Street
San Francisco CA 94103
(415) 861-3663
www.brainwash.com

Facebook Event Page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/267428140060776/?fref=ts

For more information, contact:
Pravic Magazine
Edited by Nathaniel K. Miller and David Gill
1551 Madison #308
Oakland, CA 94612
pravicmagazine@gmail.com
http://pravicmag.wordpress.com

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Perfect Beings Enter The Studio

TJ & Tosc: A Field Guide For Life After Western Culture, will soon come alive in music.

Prog Rock Collage, 2011 Artist: Abel Adames

April 20, 2013, Los Angeles — Producer and guitarist Johannes Luley, from his Westside studio, has been working on an unprecedented new project with L.A.-based composer Ryan Hurtgen. The innovative project is called Perfect Beings. It is a prog rock opus based on Suhail Rafidi’s science fiction adventure, TJ & Tosc: A Field Guide For Life After Western Culture.

Luley calibrating equipment…

Longtime prog talent Luley is a founding member of Moth Vellum. His latest solo release, Tales From Sheepfather’s Grove, is garnering much anticipated recognition. Composer Ryan Hurtgen is the frontman for L.A.-based experimental pop rock band, Rene Breton, a KCRW favorite. Author Suhail Rafidi’s science fiction novel, TJ & Tosc, supplied the skeleton of story around which Perfect Beings is composed. Much like Pink Floyd’s The Wall inspired the visually iconic motion picture, Luley, Hurtgen, and Rafidi are making a leap between media, bringing sci fi literary art into the dynamic, living world of rock music.

The three artist put their heads together in spring 2012 to incarnate TJ & Tosc in an epic soundscape as Perfect Beings, unleashing a surge of creative momentum. By summer 2012, Hurtgen and Luley laid down the demos for Perfect Beings. By winter, they assembled a band of talented, experienced, prog rock musicians. The group began playing together right away, driven by their own innate and exacting musical standards. Recording will commence with engineer Julian David, at My Sonic Temple studio in L.A.’s Westside, on April 26, 2013.

Rafidi and Hurtgen on New Year’s Day

Hurtgen composing…

“April 26th is also my birthday,” says author Suhail Rafidi. “This is such an auspicious coincidence that I couldn’t resist the urge to travel to L.A. to attend personally. I can’t wait to be in the presence of Perfect Beings.”

Slated for a Christmas 2013 release, Perfect Beings is an 11 song, 53 minute prog rock opera written to be played live, as a single dramatic performance, with no song breaks. It will be recorded live in the studio. Luley insisted upon an organic, undoctored musical experience for the studio sessions. All of the sounds come directly from the 5 live players. Perfect Beings consists of Johannes Luley on guitar, Chris Tristram on bass, Gunter Fliszar on drums, Jesse Nason on synthesizers and keyboards, and Ryan Hurtgen on piano and vocals.

Perfect Beings (From left to right: Gunter, Jesse, Chris, Ryan, Johannes.)

Stay tuned for more information.

For The Science Fiction Enthusiast – Bradbury, Dick, Zelazny, & The Technological Trinity

I admire the pulpy heyday of clear-voiced, under-edited science fiction writers like Roger Zelazny, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick. I feel their generation of science fiction writers will be looked back on as the first to establish science fiction’s literary caliber, possibly more so than Asimov.  In their stories, science fiction starts to exhibit interesting parameters, encompassing very visual and philosophical themes. In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the protagonist is a hunter of rogue cyborgs who is struggling with the implication that he may be a cyborg himself. Why isn’t assassinating an “artificial” intelligence also murder? In Zelanzy’s Lord of Light, Mahasamatman’s tangible, physical world can literally change with a thought. In Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, room-sized video game consoles are intellectualism’s death knell.

Science fiction negotiates the cultural aftershocks of mechanizing our society. By “mechanizing our society,” I refer specifically to the advent of the technological trinity – steam engine, electricity, and photography (and all of their implied technologies – trains, cars, planes, telephone, film, Internet, etc.). Science fiction entails placing characters into dilemmas based on their technological circumstances, or an alternate reality of what things might be like if science develops in a certain way. Science fiction asks: How can these characters use their technology to resolve the conflicts caused by the use of technology? Almost invariably, as the characters wrestle with the effects of the technology, they also confront philosophical problems in resolving their predicaments.

Ray Bradbury’s economical prose is an oracle of this mechanization of narrative. In Fahrenheit 451, the books, the robot dogs, the homes with X-Box walls, and surveillance wiring all act directly on Guy Montag, and he reacts to them, to lead us to the fruition of his character. The technological objects are not merely part of the setting, they are acting on him as characters. And even at the conclusion, when Guy Montag flees the city, escaping down the river at night towards the woods, the narrative is moved forward by the smell of plants and sound of startled deer. When he finally meets human characters again at the end, they are not only people anymore, each one is also a book. Each person dedicated to the verbatim memorization of one book, a living human library started over to salvage something from the havoc wreaked on intellectualism by fascism.

In an earlier piece, I wrote that science fiction is defined by the prevalence of fictional technologies, empowered by science, as a significant part of the fiction’s subject matter. In science fiction, the technology itself takes on the qualities of a character, blurring the lines between people and their arts. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the androids are the fictional technology. The technological environment is an essential element, acting directly on the characters, helping articulate their interior psychological conflicts. Furthermore, consider the dystopian wit of the mood organ in the opening chapters of the novel.  

Here’s looking at you…

Philip K. Dick’s …Electric Sheep? always takes me back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a classic tale of created striving to overthrow creator. The lightning powered machinery that made Frankenstein’s monster is not a leveraging plot point, it’s a formality. Shelley isn’t asking the question, “Is Frankenstein’s creation alive and intelligent?” He is. The point is moot. The question rather is “Does he deserve to live?” It’s Blade Runner. Like Roy Batty, Frankenstein’s creature is the fictional technology.

The characters of science fiction are not merely enacting a drama between characters and other characters, but between characters and the fictional technology itself. The technology is a character. In Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, a race of survivors from a planet of subtle high technology have colonized another inhabited planet and set themselves up as immortal gods. They’ve established technological reincarnation, using science to ghost themselves out of an aging or destroyed body and into a fresh strong one. Like the classic gods they emulate, they have powers and domains, based on their machines. Some are specialists at reincarnating, some at controlling the elements, some at flying in a fiery chariot. The uneducated agrarian indigenes to the planet worship them in awe, paying tribute with donation and sacrifice. As war brews among the pantheon, a savior, Mahasamatman, is pulled from the sky by computer, as if along the Bifrost, into the material world, into a new body, to tip the balance and reveal the flaws of his fellow self-made immortals.

“The technological trinity – steam, electricity, and photography.”

The first photograph. What is it?

The first photograph was taken in 1826. Think of photography as a demarcation point in literature, the first tilling of the fallow science fiction soil.  Photography is the most exact mechanical reproduction of imagery ever achieved. Photography captured light, that most elusive building block of reality, in a precisely sealed box. Photography made it possible to aggregate unprecedented numbers of high fidelity images, while steam engines and electricity allowed us to move those images all over the world at incredible speeds. Images of things beyond the horizon became commonplace. Modern writers begin emerging with the age of steam, electricity, and photography. It is no surprise writers with an otherworldly, technological bent, like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Johann von Goethe, and H.P. Lovecraft arose within a few decades of the popularization of this trinity of technologies. They are just a few of the nascent science fiction minds that paved the way for our modern masters.

Thank you for reading. Reading rules!