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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, which compiled the many and… Read more
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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 writer, but I surmise that… Read more
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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 were my preferred literary form.… Read more
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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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