As an author, I’m always reading, both for research and general interest. The book reviews here are therefore a mixture of non-fiction (philosophy, psychology, science and technology, history, politics) and fiction (literary, sci-fi, graphic novels, and basically anything with a speculative element).
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Interior States is a collection of her journalistic essays. A former evangelical Protestant, what themes many of these pieces is the psychological dislocation brought about by the loss of her faith. The title of the collection puns on…
Sarah Thornton’s “Seven Days In The Art World” is a subtly observed, meticulously researched, fly-on-the-wall account of the world of contemporary art. The “seven days” of the title are in fact the seven different arenas in which art world professionals…
Sci-fi has long agreed that the one thing missing from Artificial Intelligence is emotion. From Star Trek’s Data to Arnie’s Terminator, the capacity to feel anger, sadness, joy, etc, has been taken as a milestone past which robots and computers…
“It’s like the West reflected in a crooked mirror.” There are many that will argue – and sometimes with good cause – that the West itself is crooked enough, but the Russia of Pomerantsev’s book is more than a flawed…
First published in 1986, and updated in 1993, Roszak’s book is now dated in a number of respects – a danger likely to befall any account of contemporary technology. And so, even with the updated edition, this makes some of…
This is not really a follow-up to Pressfield’s The War of Art (reviewed elsewhere), but something to be read alongside. It draws at greater length on the author’s personal and professional life, offering lessons and interesting anecdotes from his work…
The dream of immortality is an ancient one, but it is only in comparatively recent times that the means of its realisation has shifted from a religious and spiritual concern to a secular and technological ambition. Its current incarnation is…