Search Results

“... Two days after the announcement of the shortlist for last year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, Christopher Priest wrote on his blog that part of the award’s purpose is to prove to ‘the larger world’ that science fiction ‘is a progressive, modern literature, with diversity and ambition and ability, and not the pool of generic rehashing that the many outside detractors of science fiction are so quick to assume it is ...”

“... What​ kind of emotions will we have after the end of the world? When we’re fighting over cans of dog food in the shadow of half-collapsed overpasses, will we observe, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘how differently the human drives have grown and still could grow depending on the moral climate’? The American writer Jeff VanderMeer seems to dangle two possible answers to this question, and it is at some cost to the distinctiveness of his work that in the end he chooses neither ...”

“... At what point​ does Ned Beauman’s Glow become fantastical? There’s a kid from South London called Raf who likes drugs and raving. From a girl he meets at a party, Cherish, he learns about Lacebark, an American mining company in Burma that mistreats its workers while its executives swagger ‘like conquerors through the town ...”

“... rhinoceros, kangaroo. I shudder to imagine the dreariness of prose deprived of these terms! Ned Beauman can’t go without. His fifth novel, Venomous Lumpsucker, is full of the language of animal life. Several characters play word games with the names of species – see the genetically engineered ‘yayflies’. The monosyllabic bluntness of the ...”

“... the size of a tricycle. He didn’t respond to my wink. I went to a lecture by the novelist Ned Beauman who compared the OK Cupid experience to Carl Sagan pondering the limits of our ability even to imagine non-carbon-based extraterrestrial life, let alone perceive when it was beaming signals to us. We troll on OK Cupid for what we think we ...”