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

Needful history

A book with a title like The Cambridge History Of Medicine makes an obvious claim to be definitive, but also … More

Complicated fun

In my current mission to read Neal Stephenson’s entire oeuvre, I’ve been zigzagging between his earlier and later publications. If … More

Culturing flavour

The world of ‘elite food’ raises certain questions. It would be easy to write off entirely, from a social justice … More

Speculative non-fiction

In the interests of easing myself gradually into research, I’ve continued my investigation of historical bread-baking with quite a modest … More

In black and white

Having dipped into Kim Stanley Robinson’s work at intervals during his career (whether retrospectively as here, or contemporaneously), I’m starting … More

Periodic themes

My two main topics of research for my soon-to-be commenced fantasy novel are baking and medicine, since they’re the activities … More