Author: Oli
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The not done
The Beastie Boys landed in the public consciousness with Licensed to Ill, an album of spoof hip-hop over cartoon metal beats that established them clearly as some kind of humorous novelty act—however, nobody thought to tell the Beastie Boys that’s what they were. Their sophomore long-player, Paul’s Boutique, was a…
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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 topics, but for brevity they are no match for a series which will be familiar to many (if they are the right age) from museum shops across the British Isles—the…
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A parabolic parable
I will freely admit my ignorance on all matters bandes dessinées. My first comics were Asterix and Tintin in French (inherited from my Francophone father), so of course I’ve always been aware of Franco-Belgian comics, but my developing obsession with the medium was nourished in its early days by British…
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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 of his Eternal Champion cycle, an idea influenced by Joseph Campbell’s study of mythological archetypes, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I’m reading it in a now-discontinued series of bind-ups,…
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No hubris
Having loved Snow Crash a long time ago, and having decided after reading Anathem in 2012 that Neal Stephenson is among my favourite writers, I’m finally getting around to reading more of his books. Cryptonomicon was published in 1999, when Stephenson already had a reputation as a very smart science-fiction…
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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 huge explosion in popularity, and in the available variety of games and publishers. My playing years were quite few, but I continued to collect games obsessively afterwards—if I’m honest, they…
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Read this now
We don’t live in a temporal silo, separated from the past and future by an impermeable barrier. Indeed, when you try to pin down the meaning of ‘the present’, it becomes hard to say that it exists at all, except as an opening in the boundary between what we can…
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Menacing angles
Certain times in certain places almost produce stories by themselves. Post Second World War Vienna was one such, a city divided into administrative cantons by the four allied powers, from which they conducted a busy trade in espionage and back-channel diplomacy, until the occupation ended in 1955. This period of…
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Beautiful movement
Running has been a part of me since I was in my early twenties—not competitive running, but thrashing along rural footpaths in all weathers, just me and the world in physical communion. At one stage in my life my obsession with it made me extremely fit and lean, but through…
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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 devices animated by a mysterious and invisible force called AI. You may not think that you need to imagine very hard, and indeed that’s largely the point of Aminder Dhaliwal’s…
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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 really know much about him as a writer. REAMDE certainly wasn’t what I expected from him, being essentially a pastiche of the modern, globe-trotting techno-thriller. I say ‘pastiche’, when it…
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Thematic weaving
I don’t know that it’s an intentional parallel, but the protagonist of Emma Hunsinger’s She Would Feel The Same experiences a kind of social opprobrium in respect of the way she conducts a relationship, and that kind of community coercion has clear echoes of the treatment traditionally meted out to…
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A warm voice in a cold world
When I wrote down my thoughts in response to La Belle Sauvage, which is the first volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, I noted that certain elements appeared incongruous or tacked-on, but that I would withhold judgement on their value or necessity until I’d read the next volume.…
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Radically obnoxious
I’ve never before re-read Nemesis the Warlock, unlike most of the other legendary 2000AD strips, so revisiting it in this lavish Rebellion re-issue (the first of two volumes) was both a pleasure and a revelation, and in some respects a disappointment. Having read these stories in my weekly prog I…
Oliver Arditi 