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

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 … More

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 … More