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 … More

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 … More

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 … More

The last man who knew everything (about bread)

Mostly if I want to find out about something (I call it ‘research’ when I’m feeling self-important), I look on … More

Nurture writing

I read an interview with Suzanne Simard in New Scientist and it brought tears to my eyes. Her description of … More

Hardy perennials

Kim Stanley Robinson is known for not writing stories about soldiers, or other stereotypically heroic figures—which in our deeply fucked-up … More

Central admixture

Having recently read and written about Quicksilver, the book which precedes The Confusion in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, there’s … More

For the bakers

I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state … More

Light touch, heavy themes

I inhabit a timeline in which the definitive version of Michael Moorcock’s huge fantasy sequence is The Tale of The … More

Everything happens only once

My exploration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre is proceeding in a kind of pincer movement, reading books alternately from either … More

My grandfather’s hats

It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five … More

A work of play

This Neal Stephenson dude likes to go large. Enormous books, with vast casts of characters, containing epic and sprawling storylines … More

Indulging in the immediate future

In Red Moon Kim Stanley Robinson turns his attention to the Earth’s satellite in much the same way that he … More

Mystery abides

First-person narratives often use the grammatical device of the first-person pronoun to solicit the reader’s close identification with the narrator, … More