Author: PGR

  • tre år i Malmö

    I arrived in Sweden three years ago today. I’ve come to realise that one of my persistent discursive tics—one that very much predates the pandemic—is to observe that a given stretch of time “seems like a lifetime, but at the same time like a blink of the eye”. I say it because it feels true,…

  • structure & narrative

    Turns out that sometimes the old, non-metaphorical form of cut’n’paste is the only way to zoom out from the details of a complex story and see how you might fit it all together and make it work. I like to think I’m leaving this for myself as a sort of warning regarding excessive creative ambition,…

  • yet the market approved

    There’s a lot to be said for relying on the FT as your dominant source of world-scale news, but that it will make you a happier person is not among them, unless perhaps you are already a member of its target demographic (which I am decidedly not). Here’s a bit from a medium-long read about…

  • 12FEB23 / accessions

    Bonus weekend shift for the accessions department, here. The Giles because it sounds like the most interesting Clarke winner in a long long time, and lots of people whose opinions I value are speaking highly of it. Plus, y’know, sf poetry? Rare it even gets published, let alone wins awards. Gotta be worth a punt.…

  • the prestige (as seen from the props room)

    Reading a Matt Webb post all the way to the end has the effect of revealing him as a sort of genre artist—a term I do not intend as insult. In much the same way as the golden age sf short story authors, he has a fairly standard suite of conceptual strategies; the excitement of…