Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • The book closed, the world continues

    The book closed, the world continues

    The best speculative fiction, particularly of the secondary-world variety, immerses its readers in its setting, often in initially quite baffling ways, and lets them work out the details of its imagined cultural and social milieu as they go. Sadly Flamesong doesn’t do this, but takes very slim pretexts from the earliest pages to indulge in Read more

  • The building which commemorates itself

    The building which commemorates itself

    We were advised by our Airbnb host that the Chiesa del Gesù is one of Palermo’s most beautiful baroque churches from the outside, but he warned us against the interior. In a city where so much has been destroyed and rebuilt, I imagined that we might see something unsympathetically or ineptly restored, but I think Read more

  • Moments of erasure

    Moments of erasure

    Facing across a busy Palermo street narrow enough to deny its facade any commanding sightlines, the Palazzo Riso-Belmonte is also situated in a city endowed with an embarrassment of Baroque riches. Despite the twin catastrophes of the WWII Allied bombing campaign, and the mafia construction scams of the ‘Sack of Palermo’ from the 1950s to Read more

  • Solitary movement through a hauntological palimpsest

    Solitary movement through a hauntological palimpsest

    Aloy moves alone through her world. Geralt in the Witcher series is constantly bounded and motivated by his social relations and obligations, despite his fundamentally ronin status; in contrast, although the protagonist of Horizon Zero Dawn is provided by her back-story with a social context that explains who she is and why, the earliest stages Read more

  • A positive view from the doldrums

    A positive view from the doldrums

    I came across this book on the website of Lib Ed, formerly the Libertarian Teachers Association. It is one of their own publications, written by an author who had also written on topics more obviously relevant to their core mission. Given my interest in all things comics, and 2000AD in particular, it was fairly obvious Read more

  • Thoughtful speculation

    Thoughtful speculation

    This is a small-format, short, perfectly-formed science-fiction story. Its basic premise would probably be quite implausible technically, if it was elucidated in sufficient detail to get a handle on it, but the way in which its implications are explored is absolutely exemplary as speculative fiction. A spacecraft propulsion technology uses memories, supplied by a willing Read more