On 15 November, independent literary press Penned in the Margins launches the much-anticipated anthology Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poems from the UK. The poems in Where Rockets Burn Through blast into the future, across alien worlds and distant galaxies, exploring fantastic technologies and imagining potential threats to humanity. The editor Russell Jones, […]
On 15 November, independent literary press Penned in the Margins launches the much-anticipated anthology Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary Science Fiction Poems from the UK.
The poems in Where Rockets Burn Through blast into the future, across alien worlds and distant galaxies, exploring fantastic technologies and imagining potential threats to humanity. The editor Russell Jones, a poet and academic based in Edinburgh, dedicates his anthology to the late Scottish poet and sci-fi poetry pioneer Edwin Morgan. The aim of the book, according to Jones, is to “provide a space for readers and poets to look to the future, to reconsider those final frontiers as Morgan had.”
Where Rockets Burn Through brings together science fiction and poetry at a time when both genres are becoming more popular and increasingly relevant in a rapidly changing world. The anthology features over forty contemporary writers from across Britain, including Ron Butlin, WN Herbert, Jane Yolen, Joe Dunthorne, Ken MacLeod and Kirsten Irving.
Celebrated author Alasdair Gray has written a preface for the book, which establishes science fiction poetry in a tradition of great verse stretching back to Dante and Milton, and praises the poems for “[asserting] our freedom to imagine excitingly different worlds, however agreeable or hellish.”
So jump in, strap up and switch on the photon cannon…
