When I found out my favourite theatre director in the world had written his first novel I was intrigued, but also somewhat trepidacious. Tim’s theatre writing (which I talked about a bit here) is so strongly of and about theatre itself, would […]

The story in today’s Independent on manga is pretty telling about what the author thinks of “comics for girls”. Quote: “The [typical] manga reader was a man, and he probably liked SF and he could be a student. But then they decided, let’s s[…]

A bunch of FT writers and close associates have NEW BLOGS (or bloglike entities) which demand some of your attention: (more…)[…]

With Rubicon and Persian Fire, Tom Holland proved himself a master of narrative history with a sizeable weakness for relating the ancient world to the modern. His third history blockbuster, Millennium, dials back the parallels but finds its narrative[…]

“Each face is made of approximately 150 million tiny carbon nanotubes”[…]

I mentioned this in one entry in my Beginner’s Guide series, and rereading it now in this big collection, I think I may have undersold it a little. This volume collects all McCloud’s B&W Zot!s: it therefore omits the first 10 colour i[…]

this has been fairly widely linked in the last few days, but as a journal of record of such matters…[…]

Magnus Anderson joins the Slug Lords to talk about Arsen Darnay’s short story, “Such Is Fate”. It’s about a gypsy, a sailor, a tank of liquified gas, and what we can learn from the past. Music comes via Olivia Newton-John and […]

Victoria de Rijke joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to talk about “Aye, and Gomorrah”, a tale of sexless astronaut prostitutes and the people who worship them. I’m not making that up! It was written by Samuel R. Delany in 1966 a[…]

“Track 12” by J.G. Ballard gets Slugged this week, with Richard Thomas joining Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to discuss it. Elisha reads this odd story of revenge via home recording in case you haven’t; music comes courtesy of Joh[…]