This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This was my first two-book review, looking at Kristine Ong Muslim’s The Drone Outside and Madeleine Swann’s Fortune Box, first published Jun 21 2018. Kristine Ong Muslim ‘The Drone Outside’ It is not officially morning but everyone in the world has already reported waking up from dreams either completely or partially encrusted with black mold. The general consensus: it is black mold, all right. Herein, snapshot

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This week I review The Museum of Second Chances by AE Warren. First published, Feb 26 2018. Even more for the utopia and dystopia than many other forms of speculative writing, a fiction’s world is pivotal to a reader’s engagement. It can be elevated from a mere backdrop to the very (however disguised) subject of the book, its hook as well as its raison d’être; such a story’s characters are a means by which to exp

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This week's is a short review of a great book, Cyan Night's Girl, Fighter. It was first published Nov 12 2017. Girl, Fighter by Cyan Night is a coming of age story about Aliyah, an Australian expat residing and working in London from a mixed Kazakh-Chinese background. It is well paced and gripping, as the hero is soon led by her character and circumstances into a series of calamities almost reminiscent of a Helle

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. Another out-of-sequence piece, since it so complements last week's one; a review of George Eliot’s novel Romola. Published first on Jul 19 2019. Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character. ~ George Eliot One reason compelled me to pick up George Eliot’s early 1860s novel Romola

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This is the first of my reviews to merit a new lease on life, from Sep 23 2017. It concerns Erica Benner's excellent reading of Niccolò Machiavelli. Review ~ Be Like the Fox An apocryphal story relates that, before he made his confession, Niccolò told his grieving friends about a dream he’d had. In it he saw a crowd of people, emaciated and in rags. When he asked who they were, he was told that they were the bles

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of rereleased essays. This week's is published slightly out of sequence, but it's a personal favourite from Feb 22 2019. It explores the meaning of the interaction between the utopia and imaginative leaps proceeding it. utopian jouissance Cockaygne (and The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pomona and other lands of plenty) are the archetypal folk utopia. Cockaygne is an island of infinite plenty and voluptuous idleness, forever reiterated in

This is part of a new #FridayFlashback series of rereleased, re-edited and sometimes extended essays. This one is the oldest essay on my blog and, unless I try and republish something truly ancient, will likely remain so: it hails back to the distant age of December 14 2011. Despite the fact that my reading and ideas have somewhat progressed, I nonetheless feel like it stands up to the test of time—much like its nightmare undead subject-matter. One of our boogiemen has chang

This is part of a new #FridayFlashback series of rereleased, re-edited and sometimes extended essays. This one was originally published on the former iteration of the Rowan Tree Editing website, Jan 30 2017. It's a very concise piece on my love of the utopia as a genre. ‘The only safe way of reading a Utopia is to consider it the expression of the temperament of its author.’ ~ William Morris Finding a dystopia for our times is topical (Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here