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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 remember and what we have Read more
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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 narrative affordance was in full Read more
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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 the course of my forties Read more
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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 speculative satire Dead End Jobs Read more
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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 might actually be fairer just Read more
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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 anyone who is not both Read more
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Oliver Arditi 