Well, I’ve just finished China Miéville’s superb new book, ‘The City and The City’. It’s utterly gripping, a noir-ish police procedural with an Eastern European feel that both builds on, reacts against and moves beyond the concerns and achievements of his previous novels. So you’ve probably worked out that I’d recommend it to anyone whoContinue reading “Reviewing ‘The City and The City’”
Category Archives: Genre
Friedman, Capitalism and Fantasy
Fantasy’s often condemned for ignoring reality; but much supposedly rational, descriptive writing can have a tenuous relationship with reality, and with the fundamental structures of reality, too. Stories of the fantastic at least have the virtue of being honest about their fictive nature. Take Milton Friedman, for example. I’ve just been reading ‘Capitalism and Freedom’Continue reading “Friedman, Capitalism and Fantasy”
Serial killing
A note today that’s not so much about horror as about thriller. I’m halfway through ‘The Lonely Dead’, the second book in Michael Marshall’s (better known to genre fans as Michael Marshall Smith) Straw Men series. It’s compulsive reading. Having finished the first one, ‘The Straw Men’, I went straight out and bought two andContinue reading “Serial killing”
(Un)Real city
Just been reading over yesterday’s post about Zola, and I realised that there’s an unstated assumption about the actual process of writing underlying it. I don’t think that any writer pulls something from nothing. Rather, I think that the act of writing is an act of interpretation. Details of the world are pulled into fictionContinue reading “(Un)Real city”
Reality’s a fantasy
Just finished Zola’s ‘L’Assomoir’ (‘The Drinking Den’), and once again been pondering the fantasy / reality gap. Zola saw himself as a Realist; closely allied with the Impressionists, he sought to create a prose equivalent to their vivid, journalistic depictions of everyday Parisian life. Zola and the Impressionists broke cultural and aesthetic taboos, and bothContinue reading “Reality’s a fantasy”
Myths to a flame
In ‘Mythologies’, Barthes notes – ‘it is well known how often our ‘realistic’ literature is mythical (if only as a crude myth of realism) and how our ‘literature of the unreal’ has at least the merit of being only slightly so’. Elsewhere, M. John Harrison has pointed out that, as soon as you’ve got aContinue reading “Myths to a flame”
Why Alan Moore is god #2,734
Quite apart from the fact that he’s actually met John Constantine twice (‘I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.’), and worships Paris Hilton headed puppet snake deity Glycon, Alan Moore is god because of the original comic version of ‘V for Vendetta’. It’s haunted me ever since I wasContinue reading “Why Alan Moore is god #2,734”
Stasis, dynamism
Well, I drafted an astonishingly perceptive and witty blog entry at home last night, which would have thrilled and amazed everyone as well as instantly doubling my on-site traffic, but I’ve left it on my hard drive at home, so instead of that I’m just going to blast slightly randomly about Cervantes and stasis. There’sContinue reading “Stasis, dynamism”