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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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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. When the title of the… Read more
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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 doubtless missed a few chapters,… Read more
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Sweet reasonableness
Having had occasion to excavate some of my East Anglian roots in response to watching The Dig recently, I was well-primed to receive some insights into the history of my family in Norfolk, courtesy of my cousin Simon Gooch. His slim biography of Edwin Gooch is a fascinating account of a pioneer of Labour politics… Read more
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