Category: Reading Journal

  • Ravens, reductionism and consciousness

    We’ll never find proof for the existence of consciousness by picking the animal apart, or by looking at its parts in isolation. That’s like trying to understand the caching behavior of ravens by grinding them up, examining ever smaller parts down to the molecules, and studying them through the laws of physics or chemistry. That’s…

  • What kind of bomb

    “For a long time I have suspected there is no way out. I can do nothing I am not. I have been living destructively towards the writer in me for some time, guiltily conscious of doing so all along, cf. the critical justification in terms of the objective death of a historical tradition: a decadent…

  • Gun Machine by Warren Ellis

    If Warren Ellis is to be believed – and why wouldn’t you believe a grumpy and grizzled man wielding a cane who looks like he eats dogs just for the fun of it, and whose legions of followers refer to him, at his command, as Internet Jesus? – the first three chapters of Crooked Little…

  • 253 (Print Remix) by Geoff Ryman

    I’ve known of 253 (a.k.a. Tube Theatre) for quite some time, but I’ve only just read it, after stumbling across the (Philip K Dick Award-winning) “print remix“ in the dealer’s room at Eastercon. Its original incarnation was as a website – which still exists, seemingly untouched and untweaked since it was built in 1996. Wikipedia…

  • A Glass of Shadow – Liz Williams

    Apart from a few chance encounters in mags and anthologies, this is my first condensed experience of Liz Williams in the short form, in a handsome (and rather genre-ambivalent) collection from NewCon Press. Nice font size and simple layout… though the fancy font for the story titles errs a little too far toward the unreadable…