Category: Fiction
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Complicated fun
In my current mission to read Neal Stephenson’s entire oeuvre, I’ve been zigzagging between his earlier and later publications. If there’s one difference between his early and late work that I can put my finger on easily, it’s the increasing prominence of female characters, and particularly female point-of-view characters. In…
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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 to get a handle on his M.O. The fact that he tends to do the same sort of thing doesn’t indicate that his books are repetitive however, although they are…
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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 of his Eternal Champion cycle, an idea influenced by Joseph Campbell’s study of mythological archetypes, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. I’m reading it in a now-discontinued series of bind-ups,…
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No hubris
Having loved Snow Crash a long time ago, and having decided after reading Anathem in 2012 that Neal Stephenson is among my favourite writers, I’m finally getting around to reading more of his books. Cryptonomicon was published in 1999, when Stephenson already had a reputation as a very smart science-fiction…
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Read this now
We don’t live in a temporal silo, separated from the past and future by an impermeable barrier. Indeed, when you try to pin down the meaning of ‘the present’, it becomes hard to say that it exists at all, except as an opening in the boundary between what we can…
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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 really know much about him as a writer. REAMDE certainly wasn’t what I expected from him, being essentially a pastiche of the modern, globe-trotting techno-thriller. I say ‘pastiche’, when it…
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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 The Book of Dust, I noted that certain elements appeared incongruous or tacked-on, but that I would withhold judgement on their value or necessity until I’d read the next volume.…
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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 which doesn’t respond well to an overly critical reading, and as a philosopher (which all but the most unreflective authors of speculative fiction must be) he has some blind spots.…
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Thresholds
We cross thresholds, we readers. Each book we read is entered through a portal, and marking those portals—projected onto the membrane between this and that, self and other, known and novel, given and made—there are images. I am not speaking metaphorically. For the last ten years, in my day job,…
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A game of madness
I’ve never paid particular attention to Nicholas Hawksmoor’s famous London churches, although I am familiar with some of them. I have, however, become embroiled as a reader in a complex literary game which has been articulated around them, through the work of several writers. My first encounter was through Alan…
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One face in a thousand
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, her important structural taxonomy of fantasy literature, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four key types of fantasy, defined by the way that they relate the fantastical to the prosaic. The first and most widely used is the ‘portal-quest fantasy’, in which the protagonists either pass through some kind…
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Worlds and authorities
I was spurred by the recent BBC TV adaptation of Northern Lights to re-read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, mainly because I couldn’t remember enough of the plot to grasp how they’d changed it, but also because when I read it before (aloud, to Spawn at bedtimes), it had…
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The magic of the real
My introduction to fantasy fiction was The Lord of the Rings, which I encountered surprisingly early, while visiting a friend whose mother was reading it to him as a bedtime story. I suspect her assessment of its suitability as a bedtime story for a three-year-old may have had something to…
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Energy and entertainment
My long-interrupted project to read or re-read all of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books has at last been resumed, after several years’ hiatus. Volume 3 in this 1990s omnibus series brings together the original four Hawkmoon novels, which were the first Moorcock I ever read, aged thirteen. I read the…
Oliver Arditi 