Christopher Tayler

Julian Barnes’s new book of short stories is concerned with old age and death. Barnes – who was born in 1946 – should have a few years to go before he experiences either condition, but his fiction has always been precociously interested in both. He visited the afterlife, in the person of a cartoon suburbanite, in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). In Cross...

Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his later books...

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines;...

“But Yellow Dog also indulges in the sermonising that emerged so cantankerously in The Information. ‘General thoughts are not my strength, but here’s a general thought,’ Xan writes in a clinching letter to his wife. And the novel is much concerned with general thoughts – general thoughts dramatised, discussed and, finally, leadenly explained. PC is a bit pious. Porn is a bit gay. Muck-raking tabloid journalists are wankers. The monarchy is an ‘incestuous and narcissistic’ institution, and kings and princesses would do better to abdicate. Even delivered from the somewhat diminished pulpit of the Ironic High Style, these observations don’t strike the reader with the visionary force of a revelation; nor are they dramatised with much subtlety.”

“’Cyberpunk’, as Gibson’s brand of SF soon became known, found a cultish following in the 1980s. Then the Internet hit the mass market, and he found himself routinely hailed as the ‘unchallenged guru, prophet and voice of the new cybernetic world order and virtual reality’. Not all of his admirers were fully aware of the satirical or dystopian aspects of his work, however. Among the solitary, pizza-encrusted supermen of the World Wide Web, ‘meatspace’ became a derogatory term for anything that can’t be accessed via a keyboard.”