SF Mistressworks

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent months about the lack of visibility of women sf writers, particularly within the British context, and the ease with which classic sf texts by women can disappear. Some of this discussion is linked from this post by Nicola Griffith, where she also suggests taking a pledge “to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed”. She calls this the Russ Pledge. I’m not really interested in opening that debate here, rather simply to...

Reading Ulysses with Bishop Brennan

I decided that this would be the year that I would read Ulysses. I’ve made two attempts on it before, but stalled a little before 200 pages in (my edition is 700 pages long): so, after Lestrygonians. This time round I’ve got myself an audio reading to help me through. It’s an unabridged reading from Naxos Audio, read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan. (You will perhaps know Jim Norton as Bishop Brennan from Father Ted.) Anyway, this has definitely been the way to go. I started a couple of days before Bloomsday, and after a month I’m halfway...

England and nowhere

This weekend my friend A. kindly did all the driving so that we could attend the Sixth Annual TS Eliot Festival at Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire. Yes, a TS Eliot festival. You can see the programme here. So a mixture of poetry readings, academic papers, music, and fannish squee, all a hundred yards from the church that inspired Little Gidding (which long-term followers of my life will know is my favourite poem). Ted Hughes reads: here and here. The dull facade and the tombstone Inside the church Simon Armitage did a fantastic job reading Little Gidding. He came...

Some questions…

…for World Book Day: The book I am reading: Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles. The book I am writing: Currently exists on the back of two pieces of A4 printout, and is made of hope. The book I love most: Hardly original, but it is The Lord of the Rings. The last book I received as a gift: I will say Jeremy Dyson’s short story collection The Cranes that Build the Cranes, because I have just finished reading it. The last book I gave as a gift: Philip Kerr, The One From the Other, due to be dispatched via BookMooch tomorrow. The nearest book on my desk:...

Two octogenarians

Last Friday I went to hear Chinua Achebe give the first Annual Lecture in African Studies at the Law Faculty here in the Unreal City. On Monday I went to hear Russell Hoban speak about his novel Riddley Walker, which is thirty years old this year. The Law Faculty was packed for Achebe (eighty years old). I got there forty minutes before Achebe was due to speak, and found myself at the end of a queue of several hundred people, with more arriving. We were directed to an overflow room that had been arranged with a video link, but I sneaked past the stewards and grabbed a...

Fifteen writers

The Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors who’ve influenced you and will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Play if you want to play. Here are my fifteen. I’ve taken ‘authors’ to include novelists, poets, and non-fiction writers. You don’t necessarily have to, though. Jane Austen: Again and again you go back – to all the books – and you’re delighted and awed. I like Persuasionbest, although Mansfield Park has absorbed me most. Chris...