External links
- The Heat Death of the Universe at the Wayback Machine (archived March 8, 2007) (short story)
- Telluride Institute
- Photo of Pamela Zoline
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Pamela Zoline (or Pamela Lifton-Zoline; born on June 20, 1941) is an American science fiction writer, painter, and activist.
Zoline was born in Chicago, Illinois [1] but lived in the United Kingdom, especially London, for the first two decades of her life. [2] She studied at the Slade School of Art in London. [3] She then moved back to the United States, planting roots in Telluride, CO, where she has now lived for almost 50 years. [4]
Zoline is admired for her experimental approach to both the form of the short story and the genre of science fiction, especially for using the language of science to interrogate the scientific world view. Among science fiction fans, she is best known for her short story "The Heat Death of the Universe", published in 1967 in New Worlds under the name P. A. Zoline. [5] Called a "classic" of the genre by contemporary scholars, [6] [7] [8] it has been frequently reprinted since its original publication. [9]
"Heat Death" is structured in a loosely encyclopedic style, with 54 numbered paragraphs narrated in a deliberately matter-of-fact third-person voice. It centers on a day in the life of middle-class housewife Sarah Boyle as she goes about preparing her children's breakfast and organizing a birthday party. Boyle's domestic sphere is presented as a possibly closed system analogous to the universe itself, and Boyle as subject to the ravages of literal and metaphorical entropy. [2] As the narrative veers back and forth among scientific explanations, descriptions of household events, and philosophical speculation, the cumulative effect is of a mind and a culture on the verge of collapse.
Zoline went on to publish further stories in magazines including The New SF, Likely Stories, and Interzone. She has also written a children's book (Annika and the Wolves), libretti for two operas (Harry Houdini and the False and True Occult, The Forbidden Experiment), and original science fiction radio plays for the Telluride Science Fiction Project. Along with science fiction writer John Sladek, she was an editor of and contributor to two issues of Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry (1968). [2]
Zoline was formally trained as a painter during her time at the Slade School of Art. Her style blends the natural and supernatural, often experimenting with the interplay between the two. In Zoline’s words, “Art is meant to be practical and illuminating, to move the furniture of the world around.” [10]
She is the Mountainfilm Festival 2024 mural artist and very active member of the Telluride art community. Zoline’s mural for this year’s festival depicts a man dwarfing his parents and their home during a visit to their New York apartment. [4] It is modeled after Diane Arbus’ 1970 photograph A Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents in the Bronx, New York. [11]
Zoline has long been a defender of murals and other art in Telluride’s public spaces. She is a believer in the conversations they spark and perspectives they challenge. In defense of allowing murals painted for the Mountainfilm Festival to remain on local buildings beyond the dates of the festival, Zoline argued, “The fact that we’re a historic district doesn’t mean that history stopped in the era of significance. We, right now, are making the history for the folks who come after us.” [12]
Zoline is an advocate for environmental education and protection at the grassroots and institutional levels, particularly as it relates to the Rocky Mountains. In addition to her co-founding of the Telluride Institute, her writing and art are also reflective of this. [13] In a 2024 interview, Zoline summed her philosophy on activism stating, “I don’t think there’s going to be any future that’s not radical.” [10]
Zoline and her husband, John Lifton-Zoline (also known as John Lifton), have lived in Telluride, Colorado since the late 1960s. [3] [14] She and John raised three children here, Abby, Jos, and Gabe. In 1984 she co-founded the Telluride Institute with Lifton and others.
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Alastair Preston Reynolds is a Welsh science fiction author. He specialises in hard science fiction and space opera.
John Frederick Clute is a Canadian-born author and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy literature who has lived in both England and the United States since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part of science fiction's history" and "perhaps the foremost reader-critic of science fiction in our time, and one of the best the genre has ever known." He was one of eight people who founded the English magazine Interzone in 1982.
Interzone is a British fantasy and science fiction magazine. Published since 1982, Interzone is the eighth-longest-running English language science fiction magazine in history, and the longest-running British science fiction (SF) magazine. Stories published in Interzone have been finalists for the Hugo Awards and have won a Nebula Award and numerous British Science Fiction Awards.
David Pringle is a Scottish science fiction editor and critic.
Colin Greenland is a British science fiction writer, whose first story won the second prize in a 1982 Faber & Faber competition. His best-known novel is Take Back Plenty (1990), winner of both major British science fiction awards, the 1990 British SF Association award and the 1991 Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as being a nominee for the 1992 Philip K. Dick Award for the best original paperback published that year in the United States.
Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky is an American author who works primarily in speculative fiction genres, writing under the name Elizabeth Bear. She won the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for "Tideline", and the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Shoggoths in Bloom". She is one of a small number of writers who have gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards for fiction after winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
Fictional depictions of Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System, have gone through three distinct phases. Before much was known about the planet, it received scant attention. Later, when it was incorrectly believed that it was tidally locked with the Sun creating a permanent dayside and nightside, stories mainly focused on the conditions of the two sides and the narrow region of permanent twilight between. Since that misconception was dispelled in the 1960s, the planet has again received less attention from fiction writers, and stories have largely concentrated on the harsh environmental conditions that come from the planet's proximity to the Sun.
Lavondyss also titled Lavondyss: Journey to an Unknown Region is a fantasy novel by British writer Robert Holdstock, the second book in his Mythago Wood series. Lavondyss was originally published in 1988. The name of the novel hints at the real and mythological locales of Avon, Lyonesse, Avalon and Dis; within the novel Lavondyss is the name of the remote, ice-age heart of Ryhope wood.
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is an American sci-fi and fantasy author and filk musician. As an author, she collaborated on several novels in the Batman and Star Wars franchise with Michael Reaves, and as a filk musician, she is a three-time Pegasus Award winner.
The Telluride Institute (TI) was founded in 1984 in the resort town of Telluride, Colorado, by John Lifton, Pamela Zoline, John Clute, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, authors of the Megatrends books, and Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.
Mountainfilm is a documentary film festival that showcases nonfiction stories about environmental, cultural, climbing, political and social justice issues in Telluride, Colorado. It has been held every Memorial Day weekend since 1979.
Eugie Foster was an American short story writer, columnist, and editor. Her stories were published in a number of magazines and book anthologies, including Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Interzone. Her collection of short stories, Returning My Sister's Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, was published in 2009. She won the 2009 Nebula Award and was nominated for multiple other Nebula, BSFA, and Hugo Awards. The Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction is given in her honour.
"BLIT" is a 1988 science fiction short story by the British writer David Langford.
Nina Allan is a British writer of speculative fiction. She has published five collections of short stories, multiple novella-sized works, and five novels. Her stories have appeared in the magazines Interzone, Black Static and Crimewave and have been nominated for or won a number of awards, including the Grand prix de l'Imaginaire and the BSFA Award.
New Worlds: An Anthology is an anthology edited by Michael Moorcock published in 1983.
Suzanne Palmer is an American science fiction writer known for her novelette "The Secret Life of Bots", which won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2018. The story also won a WSFA Small Press Award and was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.
Judith Clute is a Canadian painter, graphic designer, print-maker, and illustrator who has created cover art and illustrations for a number of well-known science fiction authors and magazines. Clute has British citizenship and works in London. She is also a tour guide with the Original London Walks.
The New Women of Wonder: Recent Science Fiction Stories by Women About Women is an anthology of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and a poem edited by Pamela Sargent. The collection reprinted work by contemporary female science fiction authors, originally published from 1967 to 1977. It was published in 1978.
Women of Wonder, The Classic Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s is an anthology of short stories, novelettes, and novellas edited by Pamela Sargent. It was published in 1995, along a companion volume, Women of Wonder, The Contemporary Years: Science Fiction by Women from the 1970s to the Present.
"The Cutie" is a science-fiction short story by Australian writer Greg Egan, first published in Interzone #29 in May/June 1989. It was his first to be published in Interzone. The short story was included in the collection Axiomatic in 1995. It also appeared in the anthology Interzone: The 4th Anthology edited by John Clute, David Pringle and Simon Ounsley in 1989.
