Among Ghosts and Giants

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David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leo Tolstoy, M.R. James, Rosemary Sutcliff

Yesterday evening I went in to London to see a conversation between Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell at the Southbank Centre. And very good it was, too.

Traitor’s Purse

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Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Benjamin Black, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Charteris, M.R. James, Margery Allingham

While I’m on the subject of crime fiction, I’ve also been reading another Margery Allingham novel.

Reprint: Death

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Alasdair Gray, Bob Shaw, Bram Stoker, Brian Stableford, Colin Greenland, Dante, Greg Egan, Iain Banks, Ian Watson, Jeff Noon, John Bunyan, Lucius Shepard, Ludwig Wittgenstein, M.R. James, Michael Swanwick, Philip Jose Farmer, Rudy Rucker, Russell Hoban, Sheridan Le Fanu, T.S. Eliot, William Gibson

More and more, as I read science fiction, I have become aware that death is the most consistent theme. You could almost say that science fiction is a literature about death. I wrote this Cognitive Mapping piece back in 1997 (it appeared in Vector 195, September-October 1997), I could write a similar column now just using works published since that date. In fact I could write it several times over, so pervasive is the theme. So this is just one aspect of a very much bigger conversation.