other sides

Infinite Thought, porn & a pig.
& if you really want to do science-&-the-arts, transforms like this –invisibility to light = invisibility to waves–should make the structure of what you write. The formal & metaphorical possibilities are huge for young, genuinely C21 writers who can sail these kinds of seas.
Reviewing: The Other Side of the [...]

written abroad

There’s this feeling that if I don’t capture something–take a photograph, write a paragraph–I will be “wasting” this trip. if I don’t record it, when I’m home again I’ll have forgotten most of it & won’t really have been anywhere.
I send C an email. “I remember us walking around the city.”
In fact waves of nostalgia [...]

an imaginary review (2)

The humanity of the world is maintained only through constant effort. If you learn to grow flowers as a child–if you understand how quickly they die without water–you become a better adult. People think of love as a given. Love is made. Maybe it does come out of nowhere but it can’t support itself here, [...]

the aleph of east sheen

B knelt down to look at the foot of the wall. He seemed to have found something there among the ivy, the dead leaves, the litter of discarded condoms & wrappers trodden into the ground beneath the yews. After a moment he scratched energetically among this stuff with both hands. Then he said, “Oh. [...]

interview

A new interview up at Concept Sci Fi.

dying to be someone

Competent or not, the other four-year-olds were aggressively in charge of themselves: they did up their own coats. I let an adult do mine, so I could remain preoccupied by the colour of the buttons. At eight, I was staring into ponds, bemused by the way there seemed to be more clarity in the [...]

an imaginary review

In this curiously involuted thriller of the near future, the father is not dead but absent, if only temporarily. The son must act for him, whether he wishes to or not. They exist in the most ideal loop of anxiety, the father a ghost in the son’s brain, the son a sub-routine of the father’s [...]

mars

Our ears were bleeding and one of us had lost an arm: but what did that matter ? We had arrived on Mars, simply by pinching the bridges of our noses and wanting be there.

a visitor

A squirrel arrived on my balcony yesterday afternoon, carrying an unripe fig as big as its head, & tried to get in through the window. Each time it banged the fig against the glass, the glass produced a kind of soft booming noise. I found it hard not to laugh. I pointed at the squirrel [...]

on the couch

Simon Chapman reads “The East” at Starship Sofa.