British Books

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/20315955

The quintessential “bad place” is one of the staples of horror fiction. For Stephen King, the bad place – think the peculiar little town of Castle Rock or the Overlook Hotel in The Shining – most usually acts as a repository for a long-forgotten evil or injustice to resurface (often literally, like the dead cat from the desecrated Native American burial ground in Pet Sematary). For writers such as Robert Aickman, the nature of the bad place is more elusive, so deeply immured in time that its effects are felt more often than seen: a prickling at the back of the neck, a chilly intimation of doom that, when spoken aloud, is ignored or ridiculed by those who have so far managed to escape its spell.

So it is with Barrowbeck, a fictional village on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border that forms the centrepiece of Andrew Michael Hurley’s new collection of linked stories. We first approach Barrowbeck in midwinter. In First Footing, Celtic farmers have been driven from their homes on the Welsh border by Anglo-Saxon invaders. Desperately seeking shelter, they stumble into a narrow valley in a state of near-starvation. Their leader seeks counsel from the gods of earth, wind and water on whether he and his people will be allowed to stay. They are granted that permission, on the understanding that they will not own the land but be servants of it.

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As with Hurley’s previous work – his debut The Loney won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year, while his 2019 novel Starve Acre has recently been adapted for film – what distinguishes Barrowbeck as a piece of writing is its sense of place. Recurring characters and locations – Fitch Wood, Celts’ Cave, Pascal’s Fair – build the sense of a shared mythos, while the damp cellars and decaying outhouses, the teeming rain, the mossy roots of ancient trees, the grimly mouldering parlours and back rooms and hallways of houses in thrall to the past lend to the village itself a sense of inexorable decline.

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Barrowbeck began life as a series of 15-minute plays written for Radio 4, Voices in the Valley. Recasting them as a collection of stories has given Hurley the opportunity to bring greater complexity to his storylines as well as adding several new tales and strengthening the connections between them. There is also a deeper sense of darkness, with the elegiac tone of the radio series shifting towards outright horror: the passive memories of the pastor’s son in Pity morph into wilful deeds in An Afternoon of Cake and Lemonade. Similarly, the tragic accident that befalls a newcomer to the valley in A Celestial Event becomes a deliberate choice in the story’s written version. Even though some of these stories feel incomplete – Autumn Pastoral offers so many tantalising loose ends it could have been a novel in its own right – there is nonetheless a satisfying sense of continuity to the whole, a narrative arc that rewards the reader’s involvement and careful attention

Readers will be surprised if they see the title of James Hogg’s “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” and expect a straightforward account of religious belief: It’s far from that. The Scottish writer’s fourth novel, published 200 years ago, depicts a fatal sibling rivalry and one young man’s descent into evil and madness.

This multilayered gothic work takes bold thematic and formal risks. While British gothic novels had tended to feature Catholic settings and critique Papist superstition, Hogg sets his action in early 18th-century Scotland and incorporates (and satirizes) distinctly Protestant beliefs. The novel also integrates a variety of narrative forms, as well as competing accounts of events, to raise difficult questions regarding how we can arrive at the truth about the present, let alone the distant past. Indeed, the work dwells on uncertainty, presenting frequent instances of characters misled by their religious convictions, their senses, their reason, and even the written word.

In part because of its complex form and narrative contradictions, Hogg’s novel sold poorly when it was first published and was largely neglected for more than a century. Only in the mid-20th century did readers and scholars, conditioned by decades of literary modernism, recognize it as a fascinating depiction of religious fanaticism, psychological horror, and the limits of human knowledge.

The novel tells of the troubled life of Robert Wringhim and the murder of his estranged brother, George Colwan. We see this fraternal feud through two narratives. In the first, a fictional, unnamed editor presents an account based on the historical record, court documents, and local lore. In the second, we encounter Robert’s memoir, which begins as a strident statement of self-righteous religiosity and ends as a guilt-ridden account of psychological terror.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18077375

A well-known comics writer once told me that the mistake almost every conventional novelist who takes a turn writing comics initially makes is trying to put too many words into a panel. I wonder whether the opposite applies to writers who hop art forms in the other direction: freed at last from the rigid discipline of the speech bubble, they go bananas.

When Alan Moore, the graphic novelist best known for Watchmen, wrote his 2016 novel Jerusalem it was 1,200 pages long. Although his latest book, The Great When — the first in a projected series of “Long London” novels — is a manageable 300-odd pages, the style has something about it of a man who has spent a career writing in a medium where you don’t get to use similes or adjectives much and is now making up for lost time.

So, when a character smiles, we discover that “her smile was sunrise on a renderer’s yard, its dire light creeping into every crevice and uncovering each gruesome spectacle. The corners of her mouth crawled back towards pendulous ears, exposing the magnolia cemetery of her dentition.”

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The Great When, then, is both gothic and baroque. But so is its subject: the jostling, chaotic, crosspatch, antic and overstuffed city where it is set. It’s 1949. Moore’s version of postwar London is a landscape of bombsites furzed with wildflowers (“London rocket”), smoky pubs, voluble whelk-vendors, Oxo ads, Lyons Corner Houses and men in fawn raincoats, where a cup of weak tea and a sausage sandwich or a dinner of pilchards on toast is never far away.

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The plot kicks off when Dennis is sent to Soho to collect a handful of old Arthur Machen editions from a dealer. He returns to Coffin Ada to discover that, slipped among these volumes, is a copy of A London Walk by the Rev Thomas Hampole. Coffin Ada goes nuts. A London Walk is a book that shouldn’t exist — a book that appears in one of Machen’s stories. It has come from Somewhere Else. And it’s trouble.

The premise of The Great When is that the London we know is shadowed by — or, to be more precise, is the shadow of — a boisterous and dangerous eldritch counterpart, The Great When or Long London, peopled with hallucinatory demigods. The unfortunate or deranged can tumble into Long London through hidden portals when they’re not paying attention. Worse, other things sometimes tumble out. The Ripper murders, we learn en passant, were the result of a “Pope of Blades” (a hideous insectoid thingy) escaping into our London in 1888. The book that shouldn’t exist belongs to that realm, and if it isn’t returned quickly something very bad will happen. The last time a book escaped, the person into whose possession it came was turned inside out.

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The cast hops in and out of Long London — and in and out of their wits. It’s a romp, and it’s full of loving attention to the past. That postwar London is deeply imagined and Moore’s literary influences — as well as Machen, he tips the hat to Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock in an afterword — are warmly acknowledged.

As for the style, the reader will find of it, I think, what Dennis finds of Machen: “At first, he struggled with what he perceived as stuffiness in the tale’s presentation, although by the time he’d read a page or two, the burnish of its language and its atmospherics had seduced him.” Just like the old pulps that are so close to the author’s heart (torn pages of Sax Rohmer people the gutter outside Ada’s shop), there’s a delirious and generous campness to The Great When. Freed from the tyranny of the speech bubble, you sense Moore is really, really having fun.

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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17881805

A mysterious cosmic emblem hangs over the entrance to a building in Bloomsbury, at the heart of London’s university quarter. Depicting concentric circles bound by intertwined arcs, it represents the four elements, seasons and temperaments, as mapped out by Isidore of Seville, a sixth-century bishop and scholar of the ancient world, as well as patron saint of the internet. What lies within is not a masonic lodge, though, or the HQ of the Magic Circle, but the home of one of most important and unusual collections of visual, scientific and occult material in the world. Long off-limits to passersby, the Warburg Institute has now been reborn, after a £14.5m transformation, with a mission to be more public than ever.

“We are essentially devoted to the study of what you would now call memes,” says Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg. To clarify, the institute is not a repository of Lolcats and Doges, but of global cultural history and the role of images in society, with a dazzling collection ranging from 15th-century books on Islamic astronomy, to tomes on comets and divination, not to mention original paintings used for tarot cards (about which a show opens here in January). At least half of the books can’t be found in any other library in the country.

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The expansion has also enabled the full reinstatement of Warburg’s unique cataloguing system, with four floors each dedicated to Image, Word, Orientation and Action – “uniting the various branches of the history of human civilisation,” as his close collaborator, Fritz Saxl, put it, breaking culture free from the confines of its usual disciplinary silos. There are few other libraries in the world where you might open a drawer of photographs marked Gestures, to find thematic folders labelled Fleeing, Flying, Falling, along with Denudation of breast, Grasping the victim’s head, and Garment raised to eyes (Grief). Warburg’s unusual system might not have caught on elsewhere, but it still provides a powerful way for artists, writers and researchers to make unexpected connections and pursue fertile tangents – preceding our world of swiping through hashtags, links and recommended feeds by a century.

“It’s a building filled with literal magic,” says novelist Naomi Alderman, who has spent much time writing here. “A place to sit amid books that are almost definitely emanating auras of sorcery … One brief stroll through the shelves and I always find some new wyrd inspiration.” The reading rooms themselves are still limited to card-carrying researchers, but through the new exhibition and event programme, the public can finally get a taste of Warburg’s weird and wonderful world for themselves.

Three screen adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s works have been cancelled or had their production paused amid reports accusing the author of Coraline and The Sandman of sexual misconduct.

Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives, based on characters created for DC Comics by Gaiman and Matt Wagner, has been cancelled after one season. Production of the third and final season of Amazon drama Good Omens, based on the 1990 novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, has been paused, according to US website Deadline.

Meanwhile, development of a Disney film adaptation of Gaiman’s 2008 young adult novel The Graveyard Book has been put on hold. None of the streaming services has confirmed that these decisions were taken because of the allegations, but Gaiman apparently offered to step back from his involvement in Good Omens, according to Deadline.

Previously:

• Neil Gaiman denies sexual assault allegations made by two women

George Orwell’s archives provide an invaluable insight into one of the most influential British writers of the 20th century, casting light on how he produced his most memorable books, his sensitivity to criticism, and his fears that legal threats could ruin his work. Now the treasure trove that is the extensive archive of correspondence and contracts amassed by Orwell’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, could be scattered to the winds in what has been described as an act of “cultural vandalism”.

Crucial correspondence involving the Nineteen Eighty-Four author and Observer correspondent is being offered for sale on the open market, following a decision in 2018 by the publisher’s parent company to sell the archive because the warehouse was closing.

Richard Blair, 80 – whose father Eric Blair wrote under the pen-name George Orwell – is dismayed by the loss: “It’s terribly sad … Once Gollancz material is acquired by private collectors, it could disappear into the ether for ever.”

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Rick Gekoski, a leading antiquarian bookseller, was asked to dispose of the archive, which included correspondence with Kingsley Amis and Daphne du Maurier, among other Gollancz authors. Last week, he dismissed criticisms of the disposal as “misguided”, saying: “The whole thing was sanctioned by Malcolm Edwards, publishing director of Orion, and it was sold at the request of the board.” In Gekoski’s 2021 book Guarded by Dragons, he wrote: “No one on the Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.”

He recalled a warehouse full of tens of thousands of volumes as well as dozens of filing cabinets – “rusty and dusty, stuffed with all of the production, editorial and rights files of Gollancz publishers, the vast majority unopened for perhaps 50 years”.

After he tried in vain to sell the entire archive to various institutions for around £1m, it was divided up between dozens of dealers, private collectors and libraries: “All the board asked us to do was to get rid of as much material as possible… and the rest… had to be thrown away.”

Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation, said: “That nobody had opened those filing cabinets for 50 years was because they were idiots and didn’t understand the archive’s value. Why didn’t their board consult experts and historians, who would have understood that they needed perhaps to make some revenue from it, but would have understood the real public worth? Instead, they have dispersed a national archive.”

It was 1984, and the publisher Macmillan was holding a small event for booksellers, and had invited a tiny handful of journalists along as well. They would be announcing upcoming titles, trying to get the booksellers excited about them. I was one of the journalists, but I only remember one author and one book from that afternoon. The author’s editor, James Hale, was thrilled about a first novel, which Macmillan would soon be publishing, and which James had discovered on the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. The author had been asked to say a few words to the assembled booksellers about himself and his book.

The author had dark, curly auburn hair and a ginger beard that was barely more than ambitious stubble. He was tall, and his accent was Scottish. He told us that he had really wanted to be a science fiction writer, that he had written several science fiction books and sent them out to publishers without attracting any interest. Then he had decided to “write what he knew”. He had taken his own obsessions as a young man, his delight in blowing things up and his fascination with homemade implements of destruction, and he had given them to Frank, a young man who also liked blowing things up but went much further than the author ever had. The author was Iain Banks, of course, and the book was The Wasp Factory.

The story, he told us, began when Frank’s brother, Eric, escaped from a high-security psychiatric hospital, and let Frank know he was coming home. But, Iain warned us, that wasn’t what the story was about. He told us that he didn’t like telling people what The Wasp Factory was about – but he would tell us. The Wasp Factory, said Iain Banks, with a straight face, was about 250 pages. The 100 booksellers and the half a dozen journalists were charmed and won over.

The book came out and immediately divided reviewers: some of us loved it while some seemed to feel that they had been personally attacked. Some saw it as an updated gothic romance, some as nothing more than a parade of nastiness, viciousness and monstrous things for their own sake.

In a stroke of PR brilliance, when the paperback came out, it carried quotes from both kinds of reviews on the cover, alternating those that heralded a remarkable new talent, that applauded the book for its imagination and its imagination and daring, with those that stopped just short of suggesting that the author should be locked up before he wrote another novel.

Neil Gaiman — the best-selling author whose work includes comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens and American Gods — has denied sexual assault allegations made against him by two women with whom he had relationships with at the time, Tortoise Media reports.

The allegations were made during Tortoise’s four-part podcast Master: the Allegations Against Neil Gaiman, which was released Wednesday. In it, the women allege “rough and degrading sex” with the author, which the women claim was not always consensual.

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According to Tortoise’s investigation, K did not file a police report. Scarlett filed a complaint to New Zealand police in October 2022.

Gaiman told Tortoise that the police did not pursue his offer to assist the investigation regarding the complaint, claiming that this showed the lack of substance of the complaint. But New Zealand police told the outlet it made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing,” adding that there are “a number of factors to take into consideration with this case, including location of all parties.”

The Tortoise Investigates series

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Novelist and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce has been announced as the new children's laureate.

He will take on the role, which involves championing reading and children's books, from this year until 2026.

Cottrell-Boyce said he was "so proud" to be the new children's laureate, adding: "Writing and reading has transformed my life."

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"I write children’s books because I think they help build the apparatus of happiness inside us," Cottrell-Boyce said in a statement.

"I’m privileged to be part of those intimate, crucial, person-forming moments when people share stories with the children in their lives."

But he also warned the benefits of children's reading had not been taken seriously enough, adding: "We risk losing a generation unless we act."

Liverpool-based Cottrell-Boyce said his tenure as laureate would be about "urgency", with the intention of "addressing invisible privilege and inequality".

"It will be about the increasing number of children in poverty being left further and further behind," he said.

"It will be about calling for national provision so that every child – from their earliest years – has access to books, reading and the transformative ways in which they improve long-term life chances."

A Short History of the Apocalypse by Frankie Boyle and Charlie Skelton is an upcoming satirical novel about a time traveller giving us tips on how to survive the impending Apocalypse. And it will be illustrated by one Frank Quitely. Comic book artist known for All-Star Superman, Flex Mentallo, Jupiter's Legacy, Sandman, The Greens and Judge Dredd.

Comedian Frankie Boyle has had quite a comics history in recent years himself, writing comics for Mark Millar's Clint magazine, interviewing Grant Morrison for television and radio, performing with Josie Long at the Lakes Comic Art Festival and the like. And now he had dragged in Vincent Deighan's nom de plume for his latest project.

A Short History of the Apocalypse imagines a grotesque and bizarre future where society has collapsed and it is everyone for themselves. Well, maybe not so bizarre then . . . Covering subjects from gangs and government to bunkers and cannibalism, A Short History of the Apocalypse is a journey into our impending and doomed future. Guided by Alonso Lamp, a traveller in time, who has returned from the late 21st Century to impart to our cursed age his hard-earned wisdom and survival tips to give us some future perspective, Frankie Boyle and Charlie Skelton's sketching of the end times is full of dark humour and the macabre. Featuring exclusive illustrations by legendary comic book artist Frank Quitely, A Short History of the Apocalypse is your guide to overcoming this hellscape.

Co-author Charlie Skelton of Have I Got News For You, 8 Out of 10 Cats, 10 O'Clock Live and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year and collaborator with Charlie Booker, tells us, "Just to clarify, the genre is non-fiction future history, so you should be able to find it in the non-fiction future history section of every good bookshop." Next to Nostradamus?

The novelist and short story writer JG Ballard, is known for conjuring warped and reimagined versions of the world he occupied. Dealing with strange exaggerations of realities and often detailing the breakdown of social norms, his unconventional works are hard to categorise.

Sitting on the edge of reality, these unsettling visions often provoked controversy. Eschewing a science-fiction of the distant future, Ballard described his own work as being set in "a kind of visionary present".

Today, as we contemplate generative AI writing texts, composing music and creating art, Ballard's visionary present yet again has something prescient and fresh to tell us.

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The topics in Ballard's fiction frequently reveal just how highly attuned he was to the subtleties of the emerging technological and social shifts that were, as he puts it, just below the surface. The fuse box of society was often rewired in his ideas.

And with generative AI there is undoubtedly something odd going on, to which Ballard's attention seems to have been drawn long before it even happened.

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Looking through the archive of an old arts magazine which Ballard used to edit, I discovered that he was writing about this futuristic concept way back in the 1960s, before going on to experiment with the earliest form of computer-generated poetry in the 1970s.

What I found did more than simply reveal echoes in the past: Ballard's vision actually reveals something new to us about these recent developments in generative AI.

Listening recently to the audiobook version of Ballard's autobiography Miracles of Life, one very short passage seemed to speak directly to these contemporary debates about generative artificial intelligence and the perceived power of so-called large language models that create content in response to prompts. Ballard, who was born in 1930 and died in 2009, reflected on how, during the very early 1970s, when he was prose editor at Ambit (a literary quarterly magazine that published from 1959 until April 2023) he became interested in computers that could write:

I wanted more science in Ambit, since science was reshaping the world, and less poetry. After meeting Dr Christopher Evans, a psychologist who worked at the National Physical Laboratories, I asked him to contribute to Ambit. We published a remarkable series of computer-generated poems which Martin said were as good as the real thing. I went further, they were the real thing.

Ballard said nothing else about these poems in the book, nor does he reflect on how they were received at the time. Searching through Ambit back-issues issues from the 1970s I managed to locate four items that appeared to be in the series to which Ballard referred. They were all seemingly produced by computers and published between 1972 and 1977.

The first two are collections of what could be described as poetry. In both cases each of these little poems gathered together has its own named author (more of this below), but the whole collection carries the author names: Christopher Evans and Jackie Wilson (1972 and 1974). Ballard described Evans as a "hoodlum scientist" with "long black hair and craggy profile" who "raced around his laboratory in a pair of American sneakers, jeans and denim shirt open to reveal an iron cross on a gold chain".

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Ballard's view of the poems in 1974 seems consistent with the more recent comment included in his autobiography. A short introductory note to the second collection of pieces opens with what is said to be the "text of a letter from prose editor JG Ballard advising rejection of a well-known writer's copy". Apparently, Ballard wrote the following, which is quoted in brackets before the short pieces:

B's stuff is really terrible – he's an absolute dead end and doesn't seem to realise it … Much more interesting is this computer-generated material from Chris, which I strongly feel we should use a section of. What is interesting about these detective novels is that they were composed during the course of a lecture Chris gave at a big psychological conference in Kyoto, Japan, with the stories being generated by a terminal on the stage linked by satellite with the computer in Cleveland, Ohio. Now that's something to give these English so-called experimental writers to think about.

Whether these little computer-generated texts are stories, novels or poems is unclear and probably is a secondary issue to the automatic production of culture on display here. Ballard seems to have been taken with the new possibilities, and also seems to like the provocation it presents to other writers.

Alan Moore - the genre-defining writer behind works including Watchmen, From Hell, Jerusalem, and the short story collection Illuminations - has officially announced his next project, The Great When, revealing the book's mind-bending cover. Moore has long teased his plans for the 'Long London' quintet - a series which will follow an 18-year-old protagonist whose story will stretch across several different time periods in the UK's capital city, beginning in 1949.

Publisher Bloomsbury has now confirmed The Great When will release October 1, revealing the book's cover and blurb. The novel will follow second-hand bookseller Dennis Knuckleyard as he discovers that one of the rare books he's been asked to acquire doesn't exist, plunging him into the hidden magical underworld of London, known as the Great When. Now, fans get to see the full wraparound cover, exclusively shared by Entertainment Weekly, with Moore calling it "a small illustrative masterpiece that perfectly reflects the book's hallucinatory mood and storyline, along with that of the post-war decade the work is set in."

This year marks 200 years since the birth of George MacDonald, whose fantasy writing and ideas on faith inspired literary greats including JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.

MacDonald, who was born in Huntly and grew up on a farm, wrote more than 50 books.

They included children's fairy tales which were read by Tolkien - author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - when he was a boy.

Some of MacDonald's work remains in print today, but Amy Miller of Aberdeenshire Museums Service said the Scot had been largely forgotten.

Hello. I'm UKFilmNerd, you can usually find me at !homevideo@feddit.uk. While I usually review films on my little blog space, I occasionally branch out and try reviewing other forms of media.

Here's a review of the book Aliens: Phalanx by Scott Sigler. It's an Aliens adventure, based on the popular film franchise, but in this story, the people under attack are a primitive type with no guns just spears.

Canadian actor Keanu Reeves will publish his first novel this year in collaboration with British author China Miéville.

Their joint novel is titled The Book of Elsewhere and is set in the world of the BRZRKR comic book series created by Reeves, first published in 2021. It follows an immortal warrior on a millennia-long journey to understand his immortality.

The novel is due to be published on 23 July by Penguin. Reeves, who is best known for his roles in The Matrix and John Wick franchises, said it was “extraordinary” to work with Miéville. “China did exactly what I was hoping for – he came in with a clear architecture for the story and how he wanted to play with the world of BRZRKR, a world that I love so much. I was thrilled with his vision and feel honoured to be a part of this collaborative process.”

Miéville’s novels include The City & The City, Embassytown and Perdido Street Station. He is the only writer to have won the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction three times.

The UK’s beleaguered public libraries have been let down by years of indecision and delays over how to spend millions of pounds in funding earmarked for a nationwide website.

This was among damning criticisms voiced on Saturday by campaigners who have lost patience with the government, the British Library and Arts Council England (ACE) over their longstanding failure to develop a nationwide scheme. The “Single Digital Presence” (SDP) – renamed LibraryOn – was meant to bring together public libraries in one website to enable the public to access collections across the country.

Philosopher John Gray chooses as his great life the iconic British writer of dystopian and speculative fiction, J.G. Ballard, in conversation with the author's daughter Bea Ballard.

For a while, it looked like his name and reputation were going to be hijacked by absurdly wealthy, self-regarding tech doofuses. In his pre-X days, Musk claimed to be taking inspiration from Banks's sci-fi visions, declaring himself a "utopian anarchist" while gesturing vaguely toward the Culture universe. Amazon big cheese Jeff Bezos also publicly declared himself to be a Banks fan in 2018 when Prime Video unveiled plans to turn sprawling galactic doorstop Consider Phlebas - the first Culture novel, published in 1987 - into a live-action streaming series. That adaptation was quietly cancelled in 2020 . (My hot tip? Secure the rights to 1990's Use of Weapons, the most badass/emotionally shattering Culture book, and do it as kinetic, stylised anime: a real Machiavellian turbo-screamer!)

A little more than ten years after his death, we are experiencing a timely, double-pronged Banks bump. His 13 sci-fi books as Iain M Banks are being reissued this month with eye-catching new cover art - I'm getting cool synthwave vibes, but also maybe a bit of Tarot? - that will hopefully get them into the hands and brainpans of a new generation of readers. Even more exciting: the recent publication of behind-the-curtain coffee table tome The Culture: The Drawings, collating his earliest conceptual designs for what would become his signature sci-fi creation. Banks was apparently a habitual scribbler and doodler, conjuring crude but detailed geographical maps, architectural drafts, spaceship designs, weapons prototypes and the sketched-out foundations for an entire glyph-based language. (That last requires you to rotate the landscape-orientated art book 90 degrees to puzzle over Banks's exploratory stabs at nonary encoding.)

The result is a chaotic intergalactic blueprint - the Culture in skunkworks form - self-annotated in cramped chickenscratch. Banks was a dude who loved his whisky and his amateur draftsmanship has some of the character of cask spirit: raw and unrefined but heady and intoxicating. It occasionally reads like graffiti scrawled in the margins of a runaway imagination: Banksy Woz Ere. An extended chapter cataloguing increasingly ginormous Culture spacecraft sees old-school Elite-style wireframe models paired with astonishingly detailed tables of their dimensions, crew complements and capabilities. It seems obsessive and perhaps a little redundant, the sort of crammed, maniac dream journal an art department intern might be required to produce while working on a grim serial killer movie. But then you catch another dashed-off Note To Self: "Nothing is so obvious that you might not have to explain it to somebody sometime." The details matter.

A pig will be named after Bob Mortimer’s debut novel, The Satsuma Complex, as the comedian’s book has been announced as the winner this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.

Mortimer, who found fame as one half of Reeves and Mortimer alongside Vic Reeves, said he was “really chuffed” to have won the award. “I still have no idea if I can actually write but this award gives me fresh hope,” he added.

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The award seeks to recognise the funniest new novels that best evoke the spirit of PG Wodehouse’s witty characters and comic timing. Along with the pig (which will continue to live at Oaklands Farm in east Sussex), Mortimer will also win a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and the complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection.

"The Culture: The Drawings* by Iain M. Banks. I was blown away when I first read Banks’s The Wasp Factory and met his unreliable young narrator, Frank. When I discovered, in The Player of Games, that adding an M to his name brought you a universe run by benevolent AI minds (with brilliant names: I’m thinking of you, Mistake Not…), he shot to the top of my list of favourite writers. Banks died in 2013 – this is a collection of his drawings from when he was creating the Culture universe, reproduced from his 1970s and 1980s sketchbooks, which shows the “ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language” he dreamed up to tell his stories with. I mean, I’d rather have a new Culture novel – but this will do nicely instead.

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cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/374706

In many ways, the First Folio made Shakespeare Shakespeare. The narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece had appeared in 1593 and 1594 to wide acclaim, and in 1609 the Sonnets further established Shakespeare’s reputation as a poet. But Milton’s epitaph speaks of a “Dramatick Poet”—a playwright. By and large, the plays had not been published during Shakespeare’s life. Had they been published, anyone could have staged them. Performances brought money, so it behooved the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to keep the plays to themselves.

Complete copies of plays were hard to come by, even for the actors who performed them. Paper was expensive, and pirating was rife, so actors received something more modest than a script. On a long, narrow cylindrical sheet—a roll, from the French rôle—each player received his lines only, framed by very few cue-words. Thus, the actor playing Hamlet would know little of Gertrude’s or Claudius’s lines or motives prior to rehearsal.

Even so, by the time Shakespeare died in 1616, some of his plays had been published in editions known as quartos—four pages folded to produce eight leaves, sixteen pages in all. Some of these plays seem authentic, printed perhaps to make money during times of plague when the theaters were closed. There are also “bad quartos,” pirated or constructed from actors’ memories of their individual rolls. Other quartos were falsely attributed to Shakespeare in order to monetize his reputation. It was an important event, then, when the authorized First Folio appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death. This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of its publication.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/4174620

Wading into other people’s fights has proved a theme for the co-writer of Father Ted and writer-director of The IT Crowd. A vociferous critic of the transgender rights movement, Linehan’s views have, in recent years, cost him friends, his livelihood and, he claims, his marriage. But, despite having been given a verbal warning by police after a complaint from a trans campaigner, he remains uncowed. Tough Crowd is, then, his memoir-cum-defence statement in which he recounts his years making TV sitcoms before he was “perceived as toxic” and lays bare his grief at all he has lost.

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But all charm evaporates in Linehan’s exhaustive recounting of the past five years as an “activist”, during which memoir is largely replaced by polemic. He is oddly sage-like on the early dangers of social media, though this doesn’t prevent him from being hypnotised by the heated online exchanges between trans campaigners and gender critical feminists. In 2018, while lying on a hospital trolley, of all places, fresh from surgery for testicular cancer, he picks up his phone and posts a series of tweets “[nailing] my colours to the gender-critical mast”.

The more he is abused for his opinions, the more entrenched and maniacal those opinions seem to become. Here, as on his Twitter page, he makes a show of misgendering trans men and women, and says he is stunned at his “inability to make people care about the daylight theft of women’s rights, or the greatest safeguarding scandal since Rotherham, or the greatest medical scandal since thalidomide”.

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Tough Crowd reads less like the story of a man heroically cleaving to his principles than a document of a peculiar and self-defeating obsession, a sad coda to a once towering talent.

Since it’s impossible to read Partridge without hearing his voice in your head, this is a book best enjoyed in audio where, courtesy of Coogan, his pompous pronouncements and warped self-analysis take flight. As ever, the writing is atrocious in the best possible way. In Big Beacon, Partridge is in his element, which is to say swimming against the tide and convinced of his reasonableness in an increasingly bewildering world.

Two books I have read by author Chris Baker as they popped up cheap as ebooks via Amazon.

WRONG! Retro Games, You Messed Up Our Comic Book Heroes! - This was a fun read, as the title suggests, looking at vintage games of the past on consoles and home computers and how superheroes were routinely misrepresented on our small screens. Anything from using blatantly wrong colours or even stripping a superhero of one of his most iconic abilities.

X-Wings, Lightsabers, and Scorpion Vader: Celebrating 40 Years of Star Wars Video Games (From a Certain Point of View) - This reads more like a series of web articles. To be fair, Chris admits this but they have been fully updated. This book covers all electronic Star Wars games right up the the present day with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. There's the bizarre Japan-only release of Star Wars for the NES and a list of all the games that feature the Battle of Hoth and how they changed due to the evolution of technology. An entertaining read for any Star Wars gaming fan.

Happy reading.