he calls himself “seth edenbaum” and “d. ghirlandio” though i don’t think either is his name (her name? my instincts say no, but a mask is a mask is mask…); he may be an artist; this may just be a disguise
he&#8217[…]

Yes yes, swine flu. We are all wearing masks and batmanning the barricades against piggy pox. The news is all a flutter and how will we survive with the panicked prognostications of all major news outlets.
However the vectors of the spread of a disea[…]

aka web 4.0[…]

I am writing a piece for a market research mag on the current “hottest thinkers” that industry people like to namecheck. Inevitably many of these people are as much derided as loved, so I decided to ‘crowdsource’ a list of the[…]

Lem was a Polish SF writer, occupying a strange place within the genre. He despised most SF (Dick was the only American SF writer he admired – an opinion that was not remotely reciprocated) for its vacuity and shallowness, which accurately impl[…]

I’d like to propose a science historian’s version of Godwin’s Law: a historical conversation is over when a technology gets linked back to the Nazis in an effort to make it sound a bit sinister.
Actually it doesn’t have to be […]

I like a writer who defies real comparison with anyone else in their genre. The closest to Jim Thompson would be Dostoyevsky, I think, except Thompson is far bleaker, far more negative about human nature. He’s also a stranger and more experimen[…]

It’s hard to know where to start with Delany. He’s not really been much within SF for a long time, and my favourite novel by him (and probably by anyone), while published as SF, mostly isn’t. Still, he started in the field, writing […]

I like a good series character in my crime fiction, and no one has offered us more of these than Block, and they cover a range of styles.
Matthew Scudder (16 novels) is a private eye in NYC, whose best friend is a hardened criminal. The novels vary i[…]

To read the story, click here; to read about our ‘hauntography’ project, click here.
“See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named “The Gutter!” And despite its unceremonious title, the […]