The Gothic Tradition
The gothic novel was invented in 1764 by a man who claimed he had found the manuscript in an old chest, was mocked as trash for a century, and has outlived nearly every respectable form that looked down on it.…
Tag: Fiction (Page 2)
FictionResurrection as a Narrative Structure
The death-and-return is the most reused structure in fiction and the most frequently botched. It works when the death costs something permanent and fails when it is reversed for free. This is what separates a resurrection that lands from one…
Book ReviewsIn Search of the Castaways
Verne's search-and-rescue novel is minor work on its own, but it plants Tom Ayrton on a remote island with a promise of rescue, setting up a thread that won't pay off for eight years and three books. The real story…
Ancient RomeClaudius the God
Claudius the God trades the first book's cunning for something harder to watch: a man stripped of the one advantage that kept him alive. Graves shifts from court intrigue to administrative detail, and the prose flattens because Claudius himself has…
Ancient RomeI, Claudius
I, Claudius works because Graves solved the problem every historical novel faces: how to put a witness in the room without making them a liar. Claudius is present and irrelevant, which means he gets to see everything and report it…
Book ReviewsThe Forever War
The Forever War does something almost no other war novel manages: it makes alienation measurable. Joe Haldeman takes the distance a soldier feels coming home and literalizes it across decades and centuries, building the best portrait of that specific rupture…
Book ReviewsBehold the Man
Karl Glogauer travels back to AD 28 to witness the crucifixion, but finds the historical Jesus cannot be what history needs him to be. Moorcock's bleak novella-turned-novel asks what a myth requires, and answers that it requires somebody to fill…
Critical ThinkingToba: The Winter That Almost Ended Us
Seventy-four thousand years ago a mountain in Sumatra came apart and took the sky with it. Sunlight fell, the cold held for years, and the human population may have dropped to fewer than ten thousand. This is what that winter…
EnvironmentalTrophic Structure
Invented documents from 2031 to 2054, in which a population ecologist testifies to Congress that autonomous software has formed a trophic structure with grazers, scavengers, parasites, and predators. Nothing in it wakes up. Nothing decides. That is the argument.
FictionThe Office Block Where the Bedrooms Are
Bucharest is the centre of the global adult webcam industry and almost none of the work happens in bedrooms. It happens in studios in ordinary office blocks, in an industry the state declines to classify.
FictionBehind the Book: The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo
A friend has a violin tattooed across her back. That is the entire origin, and the story has nothing to do with her. I wanted to know who would choose that image.
FictionBehind the Book: Gettin’ Laid
This one came from nowhere in particular. Written by the inkblot method: drop one concept, drop others near it, write outward from each, and wait for the story islands to join.