Author: Oli
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Necessary questions
Fifty Degrees Below takes over more or less exactly where Forty Signs Of Rain leaves off, but it shifts focus slightly, both in terms of which of its characters are given the most time, and in the way it examines the impacts of climate change. This time, we are still…
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True history
This small book, published in 404 Ink’s ‘Inklings’ series, covers a subject close to my heart—since starting to listen heavily to hip-hop I’ve always been drawn to women MCs, mainly because the mainstream of the music has been dominated by such egregiously toxic patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality. There…
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So bad it’s… bad
We were on holiday in Northumberland, near Hadrian’s Wall, visiting lots of Roman archaeological sites, so we thought we’d watch a movie set in that part of the world and that sort of time. The film Centurion is based on the story popularised by Rosemary Sutcliff in The Eagle Of…
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Roman holiday
It’s a long time since I’ve been to a museum or a gallery, what with global pandemics and everything. We didn’t really set out to do so when we went to the English Heritage site Corbridge Roman Town, and to be honest we didn’t realise there was much of a…
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Founding a field
Finally, an academic has written a book about what I spend most of my time doing. Well, I say finally… it would be more to the point to say that I’ve finally got around to reading the book I bought several years ago. However, it is a very new thing…
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Doubling and singling
This is the second cook-book that I’ve read simply because it happens to be a comic published by Shortbox. Like the other one, Lucie Byron’s Food Baby, it’s aimed mainly at young people without a huge amount of culinary confidence or experience, cooking on a budget. In every parameter, I…
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Deniable plausibility
I’ve been on a mission recently to catch up with the output of two of my favourite writers, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson. With Termination Shock, Stephenson makes a foray into territory more usually to be associated with Robinson—which is to say that the book is a piece of…
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Party in the temple
I spent a while back there in the early noughties thinking that all the fusions had been tried, and that whatever new forms were going to emerge in music would be so outlandish I might find it hard to grasp them. Actually, it turns out there’s a lot of mileage…
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Aesthetic constructions
Bryan Talbot is a national treasure of British Comics, with a career that stretches from his underground Chester P. Hackenbush strip in the 1970s, through some of the most iconic stories in 2000AD, his extraordinary science-fantasy epic Luther Arkwright, and a whole range of work for major publishers, to a…
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Stop and look
I’m still undecided what I think the precise aesthetic or narrative effects are of using anthropomorphic animals as characters in comics. They clearly invoke a long tradition, which is dominated by materials produced for children, but that tradition is so varied in its contents that the mere presence of such…
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Action stations
Kim Stanley Robinson keeps coming back to what might be described as ‘environmental fiction’, and ecological themes are never far from the surface even in his more fanciful SF writing, but I would guess that it was his Science In The Capital series that put him on the map as…
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Risks and growth
There are a few bands or musical artists of whom it’s possible to say that ‘their first album is the best’. It can happen that the first chance that someone gets to record, they do so with a combination of energy and creative clarity that they will not match again—and…
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Truth is no fun
This one-shot comic, which is the first book I’ve pulled at random out of what is to be the last box from Shortbox Comics (although the imprint will continue to release individual titles) could be summarised, I guess, as an allegorical body-horror short story. As allegory I feel it stumbles…
Oliver Arditi 