I inhabit a timeline in which the definitive version of Michael Moorcock’s huge fantasy sequence is The Tale of The … More
Category: Fiction
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
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
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
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
Warts and all
I’m on a long-term project to read all of Michael Moorcock’s classic fantasy-fiction, which comes together under the general rubric … More
No hubris
Having loved Snow Crash a long time ago, and having decided after reading Anathem in 2012 that Neal Stephenson is … More
Read this now
We don’t live in a temporal silo, separated from the past and future by an impermeable barrier. Indeed, when you … More
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 … More
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 … More
Expert hand-holding
Worldbuilder, storyteller—these are Philip Pullman’s great strengths for me. As a ‘novel-maker’ he’s stuck in a rather old-fashioned, comfortable mode … More
Thresholds
We cross thresholds, we readers. Each book we read is entered through a portal, and marking those portals—projected onto the … More
