We've just lived through a hubristic presidency that delighted in staging propagandistic stunts to remake reality — Friday was the sixth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished" — and we don't need another.
Eventually the entire crew catches on, as Melville tries out his stories in nightly bull sessions, "expanding and contracting them as needed, enhancing their shape, sharpening their detail.... Nobody troubled to call him on the discrepancies, as they understood that truth requires a certain boldness of invention, a willingness to remake reality".
But when it hits its sweet-spot, The Windup Girl embodies what SF does best of all: it remakes reality in compelling, absorbing and thought-provoking ways, and it lives on vividly in the mind.
Whether a novel is based on historical fact or autobiographical experiences or leaps full-blown from the brow of its creator, Mr. Vargas Llosa has suggested, it performs a vital function: it remakes "reality — embellishing it or diminishing it" through the magic of words, he wrote in an essay in The New York Times Book Review in 1984.
Hodd - a story, we must presume, already only a version of itself - allows us to watch both processes as they remake a reality that, in a sense, never existed.
Not a line from the box-office topping Dawn of the Dead remake, but reality.
Or, as he once obliquely put it, "does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?" – by which he meant that we project narrative on to external reality, that the imagination remakes the world.
The stories and poems I loved said it wasn't enough to describe reality, one must remake it in order to be true.
In a world in which, regardless of recent advances in civil rights, homophobia remains the default setting, it is hardly unusual to want to remake in fiction a flawed reality.
But more and more, those who watch City Hall closely are saying Mr. Brown's grand vision to attract new residents and remake the school system needs a reality check.
After years spent in a wilderness that saw him variously host reality TV shows, hamfistedly remake Michael Caine classics and sell tins of chocolate pudding, it was clear he had a point to prove.
