Stop Reading This Book

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Christopher Priest, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Konrad Walewski, Marek S. Huberath, Michael Kandel

A little while ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Konrad Walewski for the Polish version of F&SF. Along the way, he pressed upon me Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath. The novel is apparently successful in Poland, but they have been unable to find any publisher to take it in this country, despite the fact that there is a very fine translation by Michael Kandel. Having now read the book, I find this mystifying. Not that this is an obvious bestseller: it is very weird, as I shall endeavour to show, but at the same time it has the sort of bravura conceit that should win it an appreciative audience.

The problem is: how to describe the book without giving too much away. Or maybe I shouldn’t worry too much, because if this really is Nest of Worlds everyone will read a different novel anyway.

Reprint: Magic Realism

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Adolpho Bioy Casares, Alejo Carpentier, Angela Carter, Carlos Fuentes, Franz Roh, Gabriel Garcia Marques, H.G. Wells, Isabel Allende, John Campbell, John Crowley, John M. Ford, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Lucius Shepard, m john harrison, Mircea Eliade, Neil Gaiman, Peter Carey, Robert Graves, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Salvadore Allende

The recent death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminded me of this Cognitive Mapping piece I wrote for Vector 191 (January-February 1997). I’d probably view magic realism somewhat differently if I were to write this column now. But then, I’d probably do all of these columns very differently.

Reprint: Gormenghast

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Brian Aldiss, Carter Scholz, Cordwainer Smith, Daniel Defoe, Elizabeth Hand, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, James Lovegrove, Jorge Luis Borges, Lucius Shepard, Mervyn Peake, Michael Marshall Smith, Robert Silverberg, Steven Millhauser

It is, I promise you, pure coincidence that today’s reprint begins with the same writer featured in the last one, Steven Millhauser. But then, it is time to come to another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was first published in Vector 213 (September-October 2000).

Reprint: The SFWA European Hall of Fame

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Andreas Eschbach, Arthur C Clarke, Bernhard Ribbeck, Claude Dunyach, Cyrano de Bergerac, Damon Knight, David Hartwell, Eleni Aresenieva, James Morrow, Joao Barreiros, Joelle Wintrebert, Johanna Sinisalo, Johannes Kepler, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Antonio Cotrina, Jules Verne, Kathryn Morrow, Lucian Merisca, Marek S. Huberath, Ondrej Neff, Panagiotis Koustas, Pedro Jorge Romero, Philip Jose Farmer, Ricard de la Casa, Sergei Lukyanenko, Stanislaw Lem, Strugatskis, Valerio Evangelisti, W.J. Maryson, Zoran Zivkovic

My recovery of old reviews continues with another from The New York Review of SF, in this instance The SFWA European Hall of Fame edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow. The review appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction 234, February 2008.

Life in the Labyrinth

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Edwin Williamson, Jorge Luis Borges

For someone who led such an uneventful life, Jorge Luis Borges seems to have attracted an awful lot of biographers. On our shelves at home we already have Monegal’s Literary Biography and Woodall’s The Man in the Mirror of the Book, now we add Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life (Viking 2004).