I remember the first time I read Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It wasn’t just a story; it was an assault. A literary thunderclap. Most science fiction of the Cold War era promised us rockets, aliens, perhaps a better tomorrow wrapped in chrome optimism. Ellison, instead, offered us a world … Continue reading I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Tag: Writing
Grumbling My Way into the 21st Century: Reading Brat
Cover image © Gabriel Smith / Scribner UK (or Penguin Press) I’ll admit it: modern fiction and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. In fact, we’ve been glaring at each other across the room for years now, occasionally muttering under our breaths about how the other one’s gone downhill since the ‘90s. My own … Continue reading Grumbling My Way into the 21st Century: Reading Brat
In Which the Revolutionary Forgets His Own House Is a Revolution in Miniature
I must confess, I’ve always found Marx’s personal contradictions far more instructive than the reams of dense German prose in Das Kapital. Anyone can theorise about the inevitable triumph of the proletariat; it takes a truly remarkable mind to call for the abolition of the bourgeois family while quietly impregnating the maid and letting your … Continue reading In Which the Revolutionary Forgets His Own House Is a Revolution in Miniature
Dialectics, or How Karl Marx Ruined My Shandy
There are few things more dangerous to a peaceful evening than a Marxist in full flow. One minute you’re happily contemplating the head on your shandy, the next you’re being lectured about 'historical inevitability' by someone who’s never held a job long enough to be sacked. The conversation usually begins with the inevitable: “Dialectics is … Continue reading Dialectics, or How Karl Marx Ruined My Shandy
On the Philosophical Inch: Rabelais, Moderation, and the Peculiar Poetry of Bodily Measurement
It’s a curious thing, the way serious literature can sit happily alongside lavatorial humour. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais - physician, monk, and unabashed chronicler of the digestive tract - offers us not only giants, feasts, and bawdy theology, but also the sort of detail one might overhear in a backroom surgery over a … Continue reading On the Philosophical Inch: Rabelais, Moderation, and the Peculiar Poetry of Bodily Measurement
Wording 