Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Welcome to Eight Clouds, the free magazine dedicated to promoting emerging writers and artists on the web!
Our current issue features many new writers, and welcomes back returning author Z.T. Burian. Also, it's my pleasure to present an interview with SF writer and literary critic D. Harlan Wilson, in which we discuss his critique Technologized Desire: Selfhood and the Body in Postcapitalist Science Fiction. Enjoy!
Cover art © 2010 Jude Coulter-Pultz.
An Interview with D. Harlan Wilson
“... I try to reevaluate the concepts of selfhood and subjectivity within a technological framework, i.e., within our increasingly science fictionalized world, which, I argue, pathologizes us with more and more efficiency and flair. I equate selfhood directly with technology. In my view, they are interchangeable terms that denote both a literal and metaphorical extension of the body. Subjectivity, then, is the mental realm that “speaks” to the body and tells it how and in what direction to extend its technology/selfhood. Desire exists and operates within the realm of subjectivity, although its effects emerge in technology/selfhood...”
Continue reading this interview
by Stephanie Wexler
Darkness conceals
Dusky light
Lit by soulless eyes
Can the flashlight illusion
Penetrate the viscous teeming
Voice
Gladdened by the sight of a gasping breath?
Can a claim rob sight?
Scrap skin till rough primer slips up your steps
Nails toughed gamely blamed to the stretched
Feelers of wire tipped cords
Tripping bark
Switch switching tracks guided by loose sets...
by Z.T. Burian
After the summer all the trees died I finally came home. Time, and our perception of it, is an unpredictable beast. I had only been gone since May, not even four months, but the world I knew had changed so very much that it felt like years had passed. And it was the trees I noticed the most.
They were lodgepole pine. It’s a tall and slender tree, stately and neat, like the statue of a Roman legionnaire. And the forests, they were the unending armies frozen in step but ready to march to Napoleonic victory as soon as you turned your back. As Jenny and I drove through the mountains I didn’t dare take my eyes off them...
by Donal Mahoney
Would an aphid reside in an onager’s ear
if the onager’s master spoke Twi?
Or a Gascony scop with a leper elope
if a civet leapt out of a tree?
You doubt it? Read Thomas and see...
by Andrew Fortier
It was turning into one of those mornings. You know the kind, where a client calls you to try and get coverage on a car that just got into an accident minutes before. Then another client calls you to complain that her premium has gone up by one whole dollar a month. From eight o’clock, soon as I sat my ass in the chair, I had been getting calls like that. Complaint, upon complain, upon complaint.
Adding to it all, Tim was on a rampage...
by K.C. Wilder
soaring over traffic in
impossibly jet-powered backpack,
groping for the zeitgeist
with unmitigated zeal,
he switches on a forcefield
that camouflages
what’s inside ... his heart looms
like spider on the mudflats...
All stories, poems, and artwork contained within are © the individual authors and artists.
‘Technologzied Desire’: An Interview with D. Harlan Wilson
‘Statue’s Gate’ by Stephanie Wexler
‘A Tree Falls in the Forest’ by Z.T. Burian
‘Jabberwocky Redux’ by Donal Mahoney
‘How to Feed a Meter’ by Andrew Fortier
‘#29: screenplay’ by K.C. Wilder
Download the entire issue as a PDF document