Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating (sic) such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? Robin Hanson, 1996 or 1998 During the Cold War, it was a commonplace…

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is a hard book to describe. Many people will want to read it because it’s a finalist for the 2026 Booker Prize. At around 200 pages, it’s a quick read in print, and just under four hours on audio. However, before buying, I highly recommend reading the sample offered by Amazon. I also recommend reading the reviews in Locus Magazine and The New York Times. The writing is clear and excellent, but the story is surreal, metaphorical, and ambiguous. The End…

VisionQuest, like its narrative forerunners, WandaVision and Agatha All Along, dips in and out of reality and asks us to believe in a digital world as well as a real one. With AI suddenly front and centre in the news it makes the show even more timely than the previous chapters. For those who may be less up to date with the lore relating to this most unusual character, the first episode of this new miniseries provides a succinct update, with clips, that tells you what you need to know. It’s an…

Originally Written July 2001 For nearly three years now, Kenneth Hite has been writing Suppressed Transmissions – a column which can be found, each and every week, in the digital pages of Pyramid Magazine. For those of you unfamiliar with the column, I find it almost impossible to explain the experience: Hite takes a plethora of historical fact, teases it out with imaginative alternatives, spices it with every possible nuance of conspiracy, stirs in a bit of secret history, adds a touch of…

I didn’t know until recently that Marco Polo’s travels through China during the 13th Century weren’t in fact written down by him. They were dictated to Rustichello de Pisa, whom Polo shared a prison cell with in Genoa. It’s important here to remember that despite Rome being a hugely important empire, after its fall, Italy was not a singular place until the 19th century. Even though Pisa, Genoa, and Venice seem basically neighbors today, that was not the case for most of their respective…

Karen and I are unusually in sync with our club reads this time. Not only did we both visit Beverley Nichols’ All I Could Never Be earlier in the week, we are both finishing with Emma Smith’s The Far Cry. (Here are Karen’s thoughts.) Apparently I bought my copy in February 2012, so it is good to finally get it off the shelf – and it was nothing like I expected. This isn’t my first dance with Emma Smith. Years ago, I loved her childhood memoir and another memoir about working on the Grand Union…

A new-to-me favorite TV series of mine… My Life Is Murder New Zealand murder solver retired yet contracted by the copscatches the culpritevery single timeof what use are the police?

The Devils is almost exactly as old as I am, which is something I had to keep reminding myself as I watched the new restoration of the director’s cut, currently running in major theater chains under an NC-17 rating. The restoration is so clean, and the picture quality is so flawless, that it can be easy to treat it like a new release and forget to put yourself in the mindset of someone watching it fifty years ago. Ideally, the movie wouldn’t require that kind of translation. It’d be timeless.…

This month's IndieWeb Carnival is being hosted by Marisabel on Pages. Which is a fantastic prompt. Very provoking for bloggers. Here I am trying a digital palimpsest - hover or click to see the text underneath. I've got no idea how it will look in an RSS reader - probably horrid, sorry. We talk about the blank page. How full of potential it can be. How intimidating. How the potential is intimidating. Parchment and vellum were expensive. So people used to recycle. Scrape or wash the ink off and…

📚 Finished reading: The End of Everything: A Novel by M. John Harrison. An anti-narrative which resembles the best parts of Harrison’s short story collection You Should Come With Me Now. Similar themes to Sunken Land…, only more comedic than Lovecraftian. And, to my amazement, on the Booker Prize shortlist for this year. Read it if you can.

Here’s some comics I’ve read over the past few weeks. I’ve had almost no time to read comics lately… When translating/collecting works from prolific artists, publishers wisely publish the best material first. I mean, you want the people who pick up the first volumes to be impressed and keep buying. So what are we getting in the tenth volume of Fantagraphics’ monumental collection of Guido Crepax stuff? More than three thousand pages in? Yes, “Surreal Stories”, as the cover says, but I’m not…

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***It does strike me the number of times random strangers in the street demand to know just how I achieve my stunning levels of fitness.And, of course, it's because I'm still in training for the Olympics, knowing, as I do that, one day, if I keep plugging away at it, I'm bound to get selected.People who have already managed to get selected are the people who took part in the 1988 Seoul…

“When the great etch-a-sketch is shaken”, Gregor Hens writes in The City and the World, “and the public streets are erased, this microcosm always remains, the memory of the most familiar paths, of the sun falling at a certain angle on the breakfast table, of a window reflected in a window. Carpet bombing doesn’t destroy the experience of the city, its grid or aspect, because it’s within us.” (p. 205, emphasis in the original) Carpet bombing does not, and neither does a nuclear bomb, nor however…

At least they're human. Biologically human, anyway. 1. Civilization ends at the Hudson River — everything to the east of it is a howling barbarian wilderness. It's dotted with quaint barbarian villages, especially in the self-appointed "greatest city in the world" — like the 1700 block of Broadway, most of the Avenue of the Americas, and virtually the entirety of Madison Avenue.

Those of you holding out hope for a masterpiece released in October 1971 are out of luck (unless you want to pick up the hardback version of Le Guin's excellent The Lathe of Heaven). Still, read on—maybe one of these four SFnal titles will tickle your fancy… by Fiona Moore Grendel by John Gardner Cover … Continue reading [October 18, 1971] The Master of Miracle (November Galactoscope #2) → The post [October 18, 1971] The Master of Miracle (November Galactoscope #2) appeared first on Galactic…

This front cover design for The Unicorn Hunters is very good, I think it captures the vibe reasonably well. Jacket design by Irene Ng and jacket illustration by Serena Malyon. She’d imagine how it would be, wakeful in bed, and sometimes in quiet moments, walking through Rennes or in long, tedious councils. How warm it was, to be so near someone else, how it burned to touch. His knowing eyes and knowing hands, the calluses of rein and swordhilt. How he’d taken the sacrifice upon himself, a gift…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Erin Belieu’s career-spannimg poetry collection Cocklebur showcases her inimitable talent for ever lyrically capturing darkness through whimsy. Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:…

As a former copyeditor and proofreader, I found one article of particular interest in this week’s newsletter from Culture.pl: Alicja Zapalska’s (2021) Pen to Paper: Mastering the Quirks of Polish Writing. Excerpts follow. Periods in unexpected places, paragraphs full of dashes, and mysterious abbreviations abound in Polish writing. Here are a few tips to make sense of the Polish language’s unique style and punctuation (language proficiency not included). Reading and writing might be the bane of…

We don’t go back, because if we go back, we enter a realm of superstition and madness! -Adam Scovell. “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” – Søren Kierkegaard Dream the myth onward and give it modern dress … Continue reading Rituals, Ruins, Reckoning and the Roots of Terror: Unearthing the Magic and Madness of Folk Horror.

Sometimes, you feel physically better with someone. You know there’s a spark between you, a chemistry so perfect it feels almost unreal. Even though you aren’t exactly in a relationship, the spark never lets you stay away from each other. There’s a pull you cannot define. It makes you do stupid things sometimes, but you don’t regret them because that’s what such attraction does to you. There is no definitive name for this feeling. How would you define a feeling where you cannot stop thinking…

By FARHA GUERRERO In correspondence with a fellow writer, I shared an idea for an epistolary novel that has been dwelling inside my mind for some time. But in thinking about this, I also remembered watching Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges's very good friend, speak about something I might call the enduring imaginative life. In a 1983 interview with Martín Caparrós, Bioy Casares said: “Yo vivo con seis, siete, ocho cuentos por escribir y dos o tres novelas...” I live with six, seven, eight…

I first covered Scragtag, the verminous mid-1980s puppet operated by Marcus Kimber, in 2013. I must have watched him in programmes such as T.T.V and Scragtag and his Tea Time Telly, but I couldn't remember him at all. No matter, I eventually discovered he was an excellent character, even if his BBC vehicles were weak. Since 2013, however, little else regarding Scragtag has surfaced. So, I decided to go digging. I can't promise you a plethora of footage. Neither can I finally reveal Marcus…

ComicHawkgirl Vol. 2 No.1 Cover date: September 2023Release Date: July 18, 2023Script: Jadzia AxelrodArt: Amancay Nahuelpan Colors: Adriano LucasLetters: Hassan Otsmane-ElhaouCover: Amancay Nahuelpan (art), Adriano Lucas (colors)Editing: Dave Wielgosz Bird's Eye View Kendra Saunders (Hawkgirl) has resettled in Metropolis and is fighting alongside the Justice League. During a battle against some cute gas-fireball villains, she meets Galaxy, an "alien princess" who is "kind of a hero." Galaxy is…

As you probably noticed, for the last few weeks I have been focusing on autumnal or spooky stories in keeping with the season. This one isn’t a romance, rather a horror story about a young woman who realizes her best friend is actually a predatory monster, published way back in 1872. Most people already know Carmilla as a precursor to Dracula (published 20 years later), and credit it with establishing the idea of a vampire in popular fiction. It is also known for being extremely sapphic. That…

Well. What a bunch of self-pitying bullshit that was. ::snicker:: While there was truth to it, a day later it feels like writing that isn't more than empty calories, as it were. It felt good to articulate the notion, elaborating a bit on it, and — this is key — concealing the coagulant particulars. But at the end of the day (yesternight, and 24 hours later) I can see how truly dimwitted it was; I suppose it validated its own damn self, one might say. [ self-flagellation, ironically, in…

An end-of-week, start-of-the-next madcapper in place of my usual recapper “One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.” – G.K. Chesterton (All Things Considered) I’m back. Sort of… A day late, somewhat dishevelled and without a wind up to make amends, but I do at least have a few bookish bits and bobs to share with you. In the USA, it is National Chocolate Cupcake Day and, from today until 24th October, it is National Friends of Libraries Week. Meanwhile, in these…

I’ve struggled with finding one passion and niching down. Until I find out it’s OK to have multiple interests. It was reassuring to learn there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just driven to multiple interests. Recently, to avoid the niching down trap, I’ve switched to “umbrella” all my interests under a mission or projects. One of them is writing books. A book is a perfect project to combine talents. Design for the cover. Research for the content. Storytelling for making it compelling.…

Translated from German into English by Ilse Lasch. This is a reread for me. I originally read this book 10+ years ago and thought it was just okay. Because this book gives a lot of people strength, and I didn't get much out of it, I though maybe it just wasn't the right fit for that phase of my life. Maybe I should reread it once I was older. More than a decade passed by, now I've reread it, and I'm surprised to find that I liked it even less this time around. The author survived the Holocaust,…

Let's continue our investigation of 1959 with Judith Merril, reading the sole "J" and two of the "K" stories from her list of Honorable Mentions at the back of the fifth of her famous Year's Best anthologies. Damon Knight's "What Rough Beast?" is a third "K" story that merited the Merril nod, but we read it way back in 2015. That leaves us with Shirley Jackson's "Strangers in Town," Colin Kapp's "Breaking Point," and Gerald Kersh's "The Oracle of the Fish." The titles of the stories in the…

I noted in my IBR2026 Opening post last January that I was taking a different approach this year: I was eager to read a pile of what I called ‘Big Books’ on my table, so I moved Pushcart to the summer. This was an experiment, and what I got from it was that it was a Bad Idea. I’m still feeling the repercussions: I have several half-read books that I’m just not going to finish this year. I’d hoped to fit in at least two more, but BASS drops in four days and I need a little breathing space. So…