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Light On Light Through


You'll hear a little of this and lot of that on Light On Light Through - my reviews of great television series and movies, my interviews with authors and creative media people and their interviews of me, my media theory and political commentary, thoughts about my favorite cars and food and space travel, discussions of my music, and a few of my readings from my science fiction stories. In the first years, starting in 2006, I put up a new episode at least once a month.  More recently, it became more or less often than once a month, usually less often.  But in the Summer of 2020, I began getting more in the mood to podcast, and on 17 October 2023, I began publishing a new episode of the podcast every Tuesday at 12:01 pm -- a minute after Noon (New York time).  - Paul Levinson 

24 October 2021: Interview about Light On Light Through podcast

26 December 2023: Chuck Todd interviews Paul Levinson about Alternate Realities on The Chuck Toddcast  

The Power of Meta-Fiction

Aug 8, 2007

Sarah Beth Durst has written a delightful fantasy novel - Into the Wild - which details the adventures of fairytale characters ... who have escaped the fairytale.  I'll post a proper review, soon ... but, in the meantine, I wanted to say a little about "meta-fiction," in general...

What is "meta-fiction"?  Well, it's fiction in which the story is in some sense about the very telling of the story.  You could have characters escaping from one story into another - as in Durst's novel - or discovery of a novel within a novel that tells the story of the first novel ...

There's something intellectually delicious about this.  Indeed, any time there is any action around the boundaries of stories - whether from characters leaving stories (also seen  in Arnold Schwarzenegger's Last Action Hero), or between stories and external realities, you usually have something good and important on the pages or the screen.  In fact, in Schwarzenegger's case, this meta-energy may have spilled over into his successful political career...

I guess my own novel, The Plot to Save Socrates, is a little meta-valent ... Certainly since Sierra Waters sent me that letter...