Left two covers from The City, Not Long After; right Pat Murphy reading on the mound.

On Saturday September 28, 2008 science fiction author Pat Murphy read from her book The City, Not Long After at the SF Arts Commission Gallery. This was the third of six events that I produced as part of A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards to Utopia). Below you will find my brief recollection on the event, an interview between Pat Murphy and an MP3 download of Pat’s reading from The City, Not Long After.

There has been a long-standing relationship between grass and science fiction. In Ward Moore’s novel Greener Than You Think, the world is slowly taken over by unstoppable Bermuda Grass. This is the most common grass seen throughout the southern United States. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, a plague kills off all forms of grass threatening the survival of the human species. Grass can also be seen as the major signifier of Utopian suburban America, which has been the setting of much critical sci-fi during the 60’s from Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles to Philip K. Dick’s, Time Out of Joint. However when I was programming this event I was not really thinking about the relationships between science fiction and grass, rather I was searching for different perspectives concerning the role that art or creative expression plays in shaping and transforming our cities, and our world. When I read Pat Murphy’s novel The City, Not Long After, I was amazed to discover a novelist who had written a novel in which art, anarchy and creativity are the central themes in a struggle for independence and freedom set within a city in which I am currently living, San Francisco. More… »