Science Fiction
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21.10 Ursula K Le Guin
You can read Le Guin’s classic short story in a single sitting. But the moral questions it raises might stay with you forever.
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06.10 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lord Tennyson’s wake? Come and share a dram with Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, James Clavell, and the cast of Star Trek – Captain Kirk will at least be there
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20.08 HP Lovecraft
Cthulhu’s done spectacularly well for an entity that seems to sleep like a teenager the day after a house-party. But sometimes the horror is far more personal and intimate … and all the weirder for it.
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13.08 HG Wells
Wells seems repeatedly fascinated by what happens when intelligence outruns sympathy. Are you thinking of AI when you read that?
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20.07 Cormac McCarthy
We probably all have a book or two we are frightened of reading. Exploring why makes me readier to hit ‘The Road’ with Cormac McCarthy.
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10.07 John Wyndham
Wyndham’s distinctively British Science Fiction is about much, much more than just man-eating plants or weird children.
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07.07 Jeff VanderMeer
Weird Fiction isn’t about impossible worlds. Perhaps it’s about discovering that we’ve been looking at the possible one through only a narrow slice of the spectrum.
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25.06 George Orwell
Try a small experiment. Stand in a garden, a park, or a woodland and look around you. How would your experience change if every colour had to be called “green”?
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23.06 Liu Cixin
The universe is infinite. The world is large. We are tiny. Which is one reason why reading fiction in translation can help us notice our own assumptions.
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22.06 Octavia Butler
The goal isn’t for students to think like me. It’s for them to think -properly- for themselves. Why? Ask Octavia Butler.