Category: Books
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Everything that Worldcon taught me about indie authors that I didn’t know I needed to ask
Well, so that was a Worldcon. Oof. I mean, it was wonderful. It was intense. It was people. It was information. It was magic. It was science. It was huge. It was joyful. It was exhausting. I haven’t quite put it into order in my head yet. Worldcon, if you…
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Mind blown, thinking changed
In The Dawn of everything I found a great deal of food for my confirmation bias. This is often a problem for me when I’m reading popular science writing, since my prejudices frequently seem to be in line with the results of statistical research, and the theorisations of researchers. When…
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Representing
This third and final part of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science In The Capital series maintains the very consistent tone established in its predecessors. It is a low-key account of the onset of ecological crisis, and of the responses made by a group of scientists, science policy wonks, and politicians, largely…
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Eating the world
Not many of us, I suspect, think of the British Empire much in terms of food. I certainly didn’t, before reading Lizzie Collingham’s book, The Hungry Empire. I mean, I was certainly aware of the economic importance of sugar and tea, and the horrific human cost of producing the former…
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A shotgun blast of flawed brilliance
Seveneves is Neal Stephenson in his pomp. This book combines all his most splendid qualities as a writer: his febrile inventiveness, his meticulous technical research, his appealing and idiosyncratic characters, his fabulously convoluted plotting, and his exemplary pacing of event and revelation. It’s a gripping a thriller, an intellectual riot,…
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Necessary questions
Fifty Degrees Below takes over more or less exactly where Forty Signs Of Rain leaves off, but it shifts focus slightly, both in terms of which of its characters are given the most time, and in the way it examines the impacts of climate change. This time, we are still…
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True history
This small book, published in 404 Ink’s ‘Inklings’ series, covers a subject close to my heart—since starting to listen heavily to hip-hop I’ve always been drawn to women MCs, mainly because the mainstream of the music has been dominated by such egregiously toxic patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality. There…
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Founding a field
Finally, an academic has written a book about what I spend most of my time doing. Well, I say finally… it would be more to the point to say that I’ve finally got around to reading the book I bought several years ago. However, it is a very new thing…
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Deniable plausibility
I’ve been on a mission recently to catch up with the output of two of my favourite writers, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson. With Termination Shock, Stephenson makes a foray into territory more usually to be associated with Robinson—which is to say that the book is a piece of…
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Action stations
Kim Stanley Robinson keeps coming back to what might be described as ‘environmental fiction’, and ecological themes are never far from the surface even in his more fanciful SF writing, but I would guess that it was his Science In The Capital series that put him on the map as…
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A world of experience
I’m not too sure why it’s taken me so long to get around to reading Hilary Mantel’s novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell—I probably found the whole award-winning thing a bit off-putting, as I have a variety of reservations about prizes and awards. I do know, however, a lot…
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History of tradition
I think I’ve burnt myself out on research now. There’s a lot more I could read to expand my thinking on the areas that will feature in the stories I plan to write, but I’ve been working on the background for so long, and I am so close to being…
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An orrery of thought
Having finished reading Neal Stephenson’s epic historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle it’s quite hard, on reflection, to recall everything that’s in it. It has to be one of the densest, most detailed, and most complex works of fiction I’ve ever read. It is also really a single novel, although each…
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Putting medicine in its place
The historian Roy Porter was known during his lifetime as a ‘one-man book factory’, a prodigiously productive scholar who wrote or edited over 100 books—proper books, mind you, not light novels dashed off in a weekend, but major chunks of work based on original research. He took early retirement in…
Oliver Arditi 