I loved reading fantasy and horror and suspense as a kid, and I loved the literary fiction we read in school. As an adult, I started taking myself and my choice of reading materials far too seriously, staying away from anything too genre, making rare exceptions for Atwood’s Madd Addam series or Tolkien. [I know. Insert eye roll <<here>>] And then about six years ago, I read and loved Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and I started looking into his other books and found that […]
On Betrayal, Whimsical AIs, and Special Circumstances
I’ve been reading science fiction since I knew how to read. I’ve immersed myself in utopias, dystopias, parallel universes, and alien mating rituals. I’ve stood on the shores of an inland sea on Mars, plunged into the swirling depths of gas giants, and hacked the operating system of reality. And after thirty years in this genre, I’ve come to one conclusion: I want to live in the Culture. Fuck the Foundation, fuck the Metaverse, fuck Mars, fuck the Federation, and certainly fuck the Sprawl. The […]