The Brain Is Wider than the Sky by Bryan Appleyard
14 Nov 2012 23:51:08
Pop-up ads and mechanised call centres may be annoying and faintly sinister, but they are whimsical delights compared with the technological cataclysm that some scientists believe could happen "around 2045". Known as the Singularity, it represents the moment when computers become so advanced that they "escape the limitations of the human brain", booting themselves into ever-higher levels of intelligence and rendering our current idea of humanity redundant. Taking his title from Emily Dickinson –... Read Full Story
Bloody Sunday by Douglas Murray
14 Nov 2012 23:49:08
The report of the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday runs to some 5,000 pages, so Douglas Murray's purpose in this well-written and balanced account is to digest its findings and make them better known. This is a British tragedy, but in his view too many British people prefer to forget it. Murray chooses some key figures to tell the story: a victim (Barney McGuigan), a soldier (known as F, who shot McGuigan and Patrick Doherty), a terrorist (Martin McGuinness), a politician (Bernadette Devlin), ... Read Full Story
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
14 Nov 2012 23:46:48
Briar Wilkes's father may be something of a saint to the criminal underclass living in this steampunk version of 1880s Seattle, but she can never escape the fact that her late husband is the man who brought the deadly Blight to the city, leading to it being sealed away from the rest of the world by a 200ft-high wall. Fifteen years before this story is set, Dr Leviticus Blue built his Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine to exploit the veins of gold buried deep beneath the rock and ice. Instead o... Read Full Story
The Trouble I've Seen by Martha Gelhorn
09 Nov 2012 23:23:30
In the early 1930s, before she was well known as a war correspondent, Gellhorn was sent to North Carolina by Roosevelt's Federal Emergency Relief Administration as one of a team of observers who would witness the misery being wrought by the great depression and report back to central government. These four novellas are a by-product of what must have been a harrowing experience. In these devastatingly quiet fictions, Gellhorn lays bare the psychology of abject poverty. More than the descriptions ... Read Full Story
The Speciality of the House by Stanley Ellin
09 Nov 2012 23:21:28
Ellin wrote his first short story, the title piece of this complete collection, in 1948. A macabre little tale about an unusual restaurant in Manhattan and its lonely patrons, it displayed both a debt to Edgar Allan Poe and an acute understanding of human nature that is the key to the success of his work. A further 30 years unfold between the covers, and Ellin's scope widens from the boroughs of New York, where freezing tenements and anonymous offices offer scope for all kinds of ingenious crime... Read Full Story
The Quest Daniel Yergin
09 Nov 2012 23:17:04
Yergin's doorstep of a book (more than 800 pages) charts in impressive if at times excessive detail "the quest for the energy on which we so completely rely". This is clearly a timely and even important book, describing the origins of our modern energy world and how our cars and computers will be powered in the future. Yergin is an optimist. There have been many Cassandras who have foreseen imminent energy crises. In 1881, Lord Kelvin predicted that "the subterranean coal-stores of the world" we... Read Full Story
The Twelve by Justin Cronin
01 Nov 2012 01:03:32
A government agency which mistakes ruthlessness for competence infects a bunch of serial rapists and killers with a rare virus and inflicts on America a scourge that combines master vampires with a zombie apocalypse. In a matter of months, hordes of brainless killers mentally controlled by the original 12 experimental subjects have eaten most of North America; a few isolated outposts try for most of the next century to survive and put things back together. In the first book, a group of adventure... Read Full Story
Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon
01 Nov 2012 01:00:58
When the Coldbrook project makes its breakthrough, forming a bridge between alternate Earths, the scientists know nothing can ever be the same again. What they don't expect is that the first humanoid to break through from the other side will launch a bloody attack, spreading disease that takes hold in seconds … or that his victims, like him, will refuse to die. Yes, what opens as a sci-fi thriller solidly grounded in science turns out to be a zombie story. However, Lebbon takes zombie apocalypse... Read Full Story
Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
01 Nov 2012 00:56:12
Lurching through Tom Wolfe's 700-page new novel with its cast of porn-addicts, body-builders, art-collectors, suave oligarchs and foxy jebitas, all sizzling together under the Miami sun, I understood Naipaul's qualms. It isn't that Back to Blood is entirely about sex and shopping, or even that it is entirely bad. But between its pandering tackiness, and its polemical grandstanding on behalf of its own supposedly realist aesthetic (it starts out with a newspaper editor on his way to a restaurant ... Read Full Story
The Forbidden Kingdom by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff
30 Oct 2012 16:01:00
Slauerhoff's novel, first published in 1932, is regarded as an important example of Dutch modernism. Vincent's translation presents a sophisticated form of double Dutch, as two parallel narratives slip back and forth, one concerning the 16th-century Portuguese poet Luis Camoes, the other a nameless 20th-century ship's radio operator who describes himself as "the most rootless and raceless person alive". Gradually, their trajectories are set on a collision course whereby Slauerhoff drops heavy hi... Read Full Story
New short fiction from Birkbeck
30 Oct 2012 15:58:49
This annual collection of short fiction from students doing the MA in creative writing at Birkbeck has reached its ninth edition, and, in keeping with similar collections by writers at the start of their careers, it has been sprinkled with stories by more established writers – no doubt to make it more saleable. This immediately creates a tension: can you tell which pieces are by the professionals (without peeking at the names)? The star writers are perhaps a tad more relaxed, their narratives pu... Read Full Story
The Revenge of History by Seumas Milne
29 Oct 2012 12:45:58
Although Milne's sympathies are more often with the Labour left than with anarchists or Trotskyists, it's not hard to see why he infuriates many on the centre and right. The political tradition he comes from could broadly be described as communist, albeit in the softly-softly Cuban or Italian sense – and he evidently sees no reason to reject entirely everything about that heritage. As a Comment editor at the Guardian he earned much bile and some appreciation from opponents (such as hard-right To... Read Full Story
