When I was young, reggae was a central part of pop-music—everyone had heard it, and although it wasn’t the most…
In black and white
Having dipped into Kim Stanley Robinson’s work at intervals during his career (whether retrospectively as here, or contemporaneously), I’m starting…
Periodic themes
My two main topics of research for my soon-to-be commenced fantasy novel are baking and medicine, since they’re the activities…
The not done
The Beastie Boys landed in the public consciousness with Licensed to Ill, an album of spoof hip-hop over cartoon metal…
Babylon to Chorleywood in thirty-two pages
Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series has staked out a territory for concise introductions to a bewildering variety of…
A parabolic parable
I will freely admit my ignorance on all matters bandes dessinées. My first comics were Asterix and Tintin in French…
Warts and all
I’m on a long-term project to read all of Michael Moorcock’s classic fantasy-fiction, which comes together under the general rubric…
No hubris
Having loved Snow Crash a long time ago, and having decided after reading Anathem in 2012 that Neal Stephenson is…
I waited thirty years for this holiday
I used to play tabletop role-playing games, teen nerd-punk that I was. This was the 1980s, when RPGs enjoyed a…
Read this now
We don’t live in a temporal silo, separated from the past and future by an impermeable barrier. Indeed, when you…
Menacing angles
Certain times in certain places almost produce stories by themselves. Post Second World War Vienna was one such, a city…
Beautiful movement
Running has been a part of me since I was in my early twenties—not competitive running, but thrashing along rural…
Imagine if everything was exactly the same…
Imagine a world in which the tasks which once provided gainful employment to millions were increasingly carried out by automated…
Entertaining contrivance
What little I’ve read of Neal Stephenson’s work has made me want to read more of it, but I don’t…
