This Neal Stephenson dude likes to go large. Enormous books, with vast casts of characters, containing epic and sprawling storylines…
The source
Reading the second volume of Rebellion’s sumptuous collected Nemesis The Warlock has been a real pleasure. It hasn’t been a…
A joy
One of the leading South American festivals of electronic and experimental music, I gather, is Novas Frequências, held somewhere in…
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…
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,…
Difficult questions
Josienne Clarke has a vocal style. Some of its appurtenances, such as its precise diction, its half-rounded vowels, its purity…
Needful history
A book with a title like The Cambridge History Of Medicine makes an obvious claim to be definitive, but also…
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 than its parts
Neither One Of Us was the last album Gladys Knight & The Pips recorded for Motown, released after they’d left…
Still hidden
Hidden Figures tells the long untold story of the black women who worked as mathematicians at NASA in the 1950s…
Culturing flavour
The world of ‘elite food’ raises certain questions. It would be easy to write off entirely, from a social justice…
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…
Root access
When I was young, reggae was a central part of pop-music—everyone had heard it, and although it wasn’t the most…
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…
