The Elements of Dark Academia, stories selected by ME

It lives! The Elements of Dark Academia, my next anthology, publishes on August 27th from Vintage Classics.

Here’s where to find it:

• Blackwells 

• Bookshop.org

• Waterstones

• Foyles

• Amazon

These are all UK-only links, as the book is currently a UK-only type deal. (American publishers, our agents are standing by and awaiting your call.)

I would like to point out that Blackwells continues to offer free international shipping, so if you did want a sexxxy British hardcover, you can get one without resorting to inappropriate methods.

This book promises to be an absolute beauty. Vintage Classics do an amazing job of making amazing books. From the start, we agreed that any book about dark academia has to be beautiful: not only is it a genre about aesthetics, it is particularly and specifically devoted to the aesthetics of books.

The content? Also great. Elements is almost two dozen stories, ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Olivie Blake; Evelyn Waugh and Dorothy Sayers to Carmen Maria Machado and M.L. Rio. There’s murder and romance and art and magic. Elite institutions, sinister cliques, and secrets galore.

For all intents and purposes, dark academia didn’t even exist until a decade ago. Even then, it was born and popularised as a fashion aesthetic before it later retconned some literary roots (retgrew?). But, whatever it is, and however it came about, we love it. Elements is my best attempt at uncovering what it is about dark academia that makes it so special and so resonant.

The anthology weighs in at about 140,000 words - not counting my various (rather bonkers) introductions, recommendations and rambles. Or the comic.

I believe Elements presents a very good case for the why and how of dark academia - something that both existing fans of the genre (or aesthetic) can enjoy, as well as those who are interested in uncovering what the what this thing is all about. More importantly, it is a really good anthology, containing absolutely brilliant stories. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.

what I’m reading (online)

A smart piece in Collider about how we respond to stories now, and where fan theories are antagonistic rather than (stealing from Jenkins et al.) ‘convergent’:

If there’s one thing that appears in the Epstein files more than Donald Trump, it is … bran muffins? Correction: nothing actually appears in the files more than Trump. But the bran muffins are in there a lot. This dedicated soul baked them.

BBQ + Mahjong in Alabama. There’s a reference to the American Jewish mahjong tradition in here as well (my grandmother was super into it), which adds another whole wonderful cultural vector into the mix. Also in here, tantilising mentions of ‘pimento cheese wontons’ and other wonders. I have a whole ramble about how ‘real’ BBQ is localised (culturally and geographically) and this story is, I think, BBQ Done Right.

More food culture! (You can tell what I’m into right now) A terrific piece from Pit about an Irish expat’s relationship with potatoes:

Obligatory Amy Coombe update! There are Stay for a Spell events at the Ripped Bodice (13 April) and Vroman’s (15 April) if you’d like to meet THE AUTHOR. (I’ve met her. She’s very nice.)

I don’t know if this is common knowledge, and I hope it doesn’t get me in trouble for sharing it, but the first UK edition has SPECIAL FEATURES. I’ve peeked at the author copies and it has sneaky endpapers and secret boards and it is really lovely.

what I’m reading

I’ve been reading the Inspector Frost novels by R.D. Wingfield, and they’re a lot of fun. Frost is a dickhead. Brilliant detective, but kind of a terrible person. And the base levels of corruption, immorality, and sexism in the police are fairly terrifying. But these are also great examples of how to write disreputable, morally ambiguous characters that are, ultimately, ‘forces for good’ and get the reader on-side. They’re also a really amusing take on the police procedural, with Frost (et al.) tackling lots of cases at the same time, McBain-style. But in a much more erratic and whimsical way.

Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series. I love me some Ilona Andrews. I liked the world-building (as always) and enjoyed the Andrews-style epic scaling of the adventures. There’s also something … progression fantasy … about the whole thing, as the character(s) go from scrappy outsiders to building their political and magical dynasty. The six book series splits at the halfway point, and swaps narrators (although they have essentially the same voice and magical power, so, meh). The second half of the series has the weaker romance (he’s just not very interesting), but better epic fightin’. So your mileage will vary.

It is a relatively small part of the series, but what I was most impressed by was how Andrews deals with PTSD. A large number of the major and side characters are ex-military, and the series doesn’t shy away from the lingering emotional trauma of service. The characters discuss it overtly and talk to one another about what it means, and how it has impacted their lives. (Then they go explode some people with MAGIC.)

Tana French’s The Wych Elm is about the nature of memory and self-deceit, which is brilliant thematically, although less useful for composing a ‘fair’ mystery. Hard to say more, but… highly recommended.

what I’m working on

London’s first Food in Print Magazine Fair is on April 19th, and Kindling will be there. Sadly, I will not, but… the organisers are stocking my free, flammable newsletter for BBQ-side conversation. I’ve done a special run of The Keanu Reeves Issue just for this event. Please send me a picture if you go!

I’ve wrapped up a test run of the fourth issue of Kindling: The Gig Issue. This one comes with a fantastic guest essay by Dylan Kilby on his favourite live performance. I’ll be shipping some boxes for BBQ festivals this summer, but, as always, if you’re a bookseller / pub manager / festival runner / food-related-service-provider and you want some disposable newspaper action, let me know.

Did I mention The Elements of Dark Academia? 

Buster is unimpressed by your excuses.

One of the basic principles of behaviour change is the pledge mechanic. If you get someone to commit to something out loud, they’re much more likely to go on and do that thing. People are very happy to lie to themselves and to back out of things, but we hate being seen as hypocrites.

I actually think the pledge is now over-utilised: we had a few years where every. single. ‘behaviour change’ campaign drove a ‘pledge!’ CTA, and that watered it down to the point of meaninglessness. Pledge overload? Maybe it was just the sheepishness with which everyone removed the black squares and rainbow flags from their profiles? If countries and politicians can pull out of treaties why can’t I go back on my word to stop impulse buying on Amazon?! Whatever the reason/s, public hypocrisy is now much more acceptable.

However, pledges to smaller groups of known people are still effective, if only because we know that they’ll be around in our lives to judge us if we fail.

I’m hoping that being transparent about my 2026 schemes and ambitions will act as a means of holding myself accountable. It is also a very long-form excuse for taking so long between newsletters.

Anthologies and books

• Anthology done and delivered! I sent back the copy-edits this week. (Things I, rather shamefully, got wrong: Pazuzu’s wings and the plot of Jane Eyre.) This project will be announced soon.

• Anthology out on submission (dead)

• A non-fiction anthology* in the pipeline.

• Non-fiction book pitch with my agent (back with me for rewrites)

Sharing an idea with one’s agent isn’t exactly scaling Everest, but it does involve exposing one’s hopes and dreams to a polite Canadian man who says ‘not quite there yet’ and then gently encourages one to start again. But getting this over the line is one of my main objectives for the year, and having his (annoyingly insightful) feedback is a great start.

*The internet says this would be called an ‘anthology of essays’ which goes to show that anthology (of stories) is the normative assumption. ‘Anthology’, continues the internet, comes from the roots for ‘collection of flowers’. Which absolutely says fiction or poetry to me. Maybe a non-fiction anthology should be a ‘lapidarium’, for a collection of polished stones?

And now: a word from our sponsor

Speaking of books… Anne’s book, Stay for a Spell (US / UK), has been getting rave reviews - probably because it is really good. Also, have you seen the special edition?! If you’re interested in special editions and bonus content and upcoming events (and Die Hard?…): try her newsletter.

Articles

• Book review published. (Spoilers: Kate Golden’s Half City is great.)

• Book review delivered.

• More book reviews pitched.

• ParSec columns scheduled.

• Food piece pitched. (rejected)

• Food piece delivered; awaiting publication.

• Food piece pitched. (ghosted)

• Food piece pitched.

Food writing is still new to me, but I think my pitches are improving, and so, hopefully, will my success rate. I’m trying to ration (pun?) my food pitches, as they’re still new to me, and the articles take more work to polish. Compared to, say, book reviews. I have twenty years of practice of those. Terrifying.

PIVOT

Serious things

• University lecture (communications strategy) delivered. I now conclude with an exercise where we invent conspiracy theories on the fly. It puts theory into practice and embeds critical awareness skills. Or it trains the next generation of Q. Either way, I hope the students remember me fondly.

• Conference talk (community cohesion) accepted; coming this summer.

• Report published. I’ve spent the last year as one of the Independent Commissioners on Inclusion and Belonging in a Multi-Ethnic Newham, and our final report was released in March. This was a great project to be a part of, and the conclusions are suitably ambitious. I may write more about this later. No pledges/promises.

• TEDx film coming this spring. I’m not sure when. I’m at the mercy of BIG TED. As I told my mom, ‘if it is good, I’ll send you a link. If not, I’ll never mention it again.’

END PIVOT 
BACK TO GOOFY STUFF

BBQ

• Judging in May.

• Competing at Beefstock in August.

• Competing at Smoke on the Waters in September.

• Finishing paperwork and admin for Kindling, including commissioning three two more articles for new issues. (One’s in.)

If time permits, I’ll probably judge a few more - or Paul and I will just tag along and hang out with our buddies. Kindling-wise, I’d like to have the new issues ready for the summer competitions.

Shelfies

• Keep it up.

Shelfies ticks along nicely. We now have a list of books, a list of contributors, and actual instructions for people interested in submitting their own shelfies. Eighteen months in, it is such an electic mix, but we’re also starting to see some books (hi, Piranesi!) appear on a few different favourite bookshelves.

I have been feeding the local crows in the hopes that, when The End comes, they eat me last. (This is also why I feed Buster.)

what I’m reading (offline)

I have been objectively terrible at reading challenges for the past few years, but I’ve somewhat stumbled on two.

The first, I’ve mentioned before, is library-related. We are instilling Good Library Behaviour in the young goblin, and go every week. The Goblin gets some books and I get some books.

It turns out that our local library has a phenomenal collection of the Very Short Introductions series, and I check out a new one every week. Think of as the Very Short Renaissance Project. The Goblin chooses for me, which adds a certain element of dramatic tension. So far, topics have included: Pain, Home, Spartans, Superstition, Evil, The Suburbs, Citizenship, Decadence and Clausewitz. Which is sure a mix.

A couple have been genuinely great. (Clausewitz was fantastic.) But all of them have one or two sticky ideas in there.

The second is a Kindle house-cleaning. I have owned a Kindle since 2008. I still have my Gen 1 Kindle around because it is adorable and reminds me of that innocent time when Amazon was a slightly less obvious existential threat. That’s eighteen years of review reading, slush reading, manuscripts and awards submissions. Also reading challenges, late night ‘shopping’ trips to Project Gutenberg, chonky research documents, and test versions of my own books. Oh, and a lot of comics, as Comixology (RIP) was devoured by the Amazon machine at some point.

Anyway, early in January I spotted that I had 1870 ‘read’ items and 1916 ‘unread’ ones. I know! That stresses me out too! I will not get through all two thousand unread books this year, but I can get over the tipping point, so that R > TBR.

This has already lead to a lot of very strange reading - an 1895 Kosher cookbook? A Dragonlance module?! Ain’t She Sweet by Susan Elizabeth Phillips?! I honestly don’t know what goes through my head sometimes; this is white water rafting trip through two decades of fleeting obsessions.

Between these two challenges, my impulse shopping has declined a bit, which is undoubtedly rocking the bottom-line for the industry.

what I’m cooking

I’m pickling!

Last year saw me dabble in some strange culinary behaviours, and I think this probably rounds it off nicely. The URGE TO PICKLE is strong.

First, we now get a box o’ veggies every week that’s separate from our normal grocery order because it is fresher, cheaper and less plastic-wrapped. It is a LOT of veg, and I’m slightly twitchy about wastage. This has inspired a lot of stocks and soups, some of which are tasty and all of which smell terrible. Pickling is the next attempt.

Second, Paul and I have been working all year on perfecting a new dish for Perdido Street Bacon’s competitive BBQ repertoire. My suspicion is that something pickled might just be the secret ingredient it requires.

Third, it turns out, you can pickle, like, anything. I’m sure this won’t end badly at all.

Buster slinks by, reeking of vinegar.

Two newsletters in two weeks! Don’t worry, I’ll now go dark again until summer. Also, this is a long one, with a lot of links, so you may find it easier to read online. Sorry about that.

There were long weeks in 2025 that went by without me reading at all, which is one of those things where stress compounds stress. Reading is important! Read more, kids! I also didn’t have any awards to judge last year and Real Life Responsibilities overwhelmed all my reading challenge commitments. All in all, it felt like a year where I wasn’t reading enough.

(Coincidentally, one of my friends and role models writes about the challenges of reading in a responsibility-filled world in a recent Shelfie. She’s handling her Responsibilities with much more aplomb than I am, but that, in general, has long been the difference between us.)

All that said, according to my trusty Goodreads page, I covered a surprising amount of ground in 2025. Aided by - amongst other things - Bradford Literature Festival, some anthology background reading, and a fair amount of comfort reading.

A moment for introspective trend-spotting:

• Like the last few years, I read a lot of romance in 2025. Unlike the last few years, I wasn’t blown away by it. I could blame the way the modern romance genre is ‘maturing’ right now, but I suspect, in romance terms, it is ‘me, not you’ - my taste has moved to a different part of the cycle.

• In fact, my favourite books this year were all a bit weird. Fantasy books that subvert traditional tropes. Genre mash-ups. Books that don’t fit in categories neatly, or aren’t written in traditional ways.

• There’s still a lot comfort reading in here, but rather than finding it in new, squishy romances, it came from revisiting favourites from when I was a teenager.

• Fewer comics than usual. This is disappointing! Exactly a year ago, my holiday present to myself was a cheap tablet and a Marvel Unlimited subscription, with the notion of reading more comics this year. Spoiler: I did not. I found MU really user-unfriendly, and the tablet has now been repurposed as the ‘kid movies for train journeys’ device. I read a few comics, and I’d love to read more, but going digital was clearly not the solution. I have since unsubscribed to MU and will be trying to find another way forward. The library, maybe?

• As always, humour goes a long way. When I make these lists, the books I often remember most - and most positively - are the ones that made me chuckle.

Without further ado, some of my recommended reading from 2025. These are not all 2025 books (very few are). I’ve put in Bookshop.org links where I can, but some aren’t available there - either because they’re out of print or because I still don’t really understand how Bookshop.org get their stock. Happy hunting!

I was a guest on Josh Connolly’s Dysfunctional podcast this week!

We talk for an hour about the role that communications can play in preventing extreme violence. Josh is a phenomenal guy and doesn’t shy away from asking tough questions. One tiny caveat: I’m very … jiggly… which is entirely down to Foof being camped on my feet for the entire podcast. Cats!

Find it on Acast / Spotify / Apple / YouTube

Molly Aitken’s Bright I Burn - Historical fiction inspired by the first woman in Ireland to be burned as a witch. Both vicious and sympathetic, a look at a powerful, fascinating woman and her life. Somewhat fantastical, in the classic sense that ‘all history is a secondary world’, and the protagonist’s perspective is heavily inflected by her superstitious and omen-inflected perceptions of the world around her.

Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover - Another genre mash-up, although this time in the very way the book is written and presented. A coming-of-age story about two boys, their love of basketball, their adoration of their father, and the inevitable challenge of growing up and apart. Written in verse, it is really powerful. You can hear the rhythm of the ball on the court.

Ibn Razīn Al-Tujībī Al-Tujībī’s The Exile’s Cookbook - Translated ancient cookbook from Muslim Spain. I enjoyed this way too much for a fairly esoteric tome, and have adapted one recipe for the BBQ already. (I referenced this book in my TED talk, because, of course I did.)

Kent Babb’s Across the River: Life, Death and Football in an American City - Non-fiction, following a season with a high school football team in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is somewhat hopeful, as you see the discipline, passion and belonging that football provides to young men in a shattered city. But overshadowing that hope is the stark acknowledgement of the personal sacrifices by coaches, parents and teachers to provide these slimmest of lifelines. And, beyond that, the vast majority of young people in the system who don’t even have access to the faint hope that football can provide. Grim stuff.

Leonora Bell’s If I Only Had a Duke - I think I’ve read all possible permutations of ducal bonking at this point. They all tend to dance together in one big anachronistic ballroom of lustful hijinks. (It doesn’t help that Historical Romance’s penchant for punny titles and similar covers means that the books themselves are entirely interchangeable.) In this one, my favourite of the year, a young woman determined to not be married is made the talk of the ton when a popular Duke waltzes with her on a whim. Irritated by the attention and keen to return to her original plans (a cottage in Ireland, lots of books; you can see the appeal), she convinces the Duke to escort her overseas because… reasons? I dunno. Hijinks! Lustful hijinks!

John Bellairs’ The Face in the Frost - A forgotten standalone fantasy classic by the author of The House with a Clock in its Walls. Two middle-aged wizards of negligable influence are being pursued by a mysterious dark wizard of terrifying power. It is esoteric and entirely adorable. Not a book for people who like robust magic systems or detailed world-building; this is an atmospheric, academic, meandering adventure. No longer in print, but well worth finding.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup - This book won pretty much every genre award last year, and, having read it, it is a worthy winner. If you’ll forgive me the deeply annoying and hipsterish statement that is about to follow… this isn’t Bennett’s best book. It is really good, don’t get me wrong, but RJB has been steadily turning out clever, weird, genre-bending books for over fifteen years now. This book - a murder mystery in a Roman-inspired fantasy world dominated by fungal kaiju - is almost Bennett-lite. Read his other books! He gets even more clever and weird and genre-bending! Check out his first album, yo. I have it on vinyl.

(As an aside, this reminds me a lot of when A Game of Thrones came out and Ye Olde Fans were exasperated because GRRM had been putting out genuinely amazing and subversive science fiction, fantasy and horror for decades. But slap some dragons on it and throw in proper marketing and suddenly everyone’s a GRRM fan?! Bah! Read Fevre Dream and The Apocalypse Rag!)

(Counterpoint: if you turn this on its head, it is fantastic that authors like GRRM and RJB finally get the attention they have always deserved, if a lot later than expected. There is hope for us all!)

Olivie Blake’s Masters of Death - A charming standalone about gods and death and estate agents and ghosts and, above all, love. It reminds me a lot of Good Omens. I’ve not talked about Gaiman here, and it feels like a disservice to derail my Blake praise to have a rant about the impact of genre fiction’s most iconic figure being unmasked as a sex predator. So I won’t. BUT,… I see a lot of what-I-liked-about-Gaiman’s-work in Blake’s. Blake is funny and romantic. Her plots are winding and often melodramatic, and don’t shy away from people saying the Big Things to one another. She writes lovely books that don’t shy away from hard-hitting moments. Even her books about Bad People still portray them sympathetic and fragile, and always find reasons for redemption. Masters of Death is all that and funny, thus the Pratchett comparison as well. Also this is an actual true standalone fantasy with a big cosmic plot that starts, middles and ends tidily.

Katie Bohn’s Romance is Dead - A murder mystery on a B-movie set? With a romance between a bored scream queen and a foppish reality star? Sign me up. Very goofy, very fun.

Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow - I’ve read Brackett’s peripatetic, post-apocalyptic novel a few times now. It depresses me every single time. Then a few years pass and I think I should try again. And then it depresses me again! This is, basically, the plot of The Long Tomorrow.

Elise Bryant’s It’s Elementary - There’s a new sub-genre now of mommy-detectives. Mothers (usually single) who have to navigate the PTA and also MURDER. They’re outsiders in their social circles, have precocious kid/s who are facing their own issues, and there maaaaaay be a hot teacher involved. I hesitate to call these a type of ‘cozy’, as, although they’re often funny, they are very much rooted in the real struggles of modern motherhood, and they can be very stressful reads. Neither are they ‘noir’, although they do share that sense of isolation, and being trapped by circumstances. Whatever they are, they’re popular - and this is my favourite of the ones I’ve read.

Marcus Carter’s Treacherous Play - There have been a lot of studies about people that play violent video games. Does it make them bad people? (Spoilers: no.) But what about games where you’re encouraged to ‘play badly’ - e.g. use deceit and treachery to win? Or people that play games in a kinda mean way? As someone that has burned several friendships over games of Diplomacy, I thought this study into ‘treacherous play’ was absolutely fascinating.

Amy Coombe’s Stay for a Spell - Hey, this book isn’t out yet, but you can pre-order it! An overworked princess is “cursed” by a magical bookshop, and is forced to live amongst piles of delightful reading rather than be “free” to continue her grueling diplomatic duties. It is an ode to books, obviously. And a charming subversion of classic fairy tale tropes. It is also about making your own destiny. And roguish pirates. And bookshop cats. It is a delight. Above all else: if you make me laugh out loud, you get a place on this list.

Katie Cotugno’s Meet the Benedettos - This list is alphabetical, which is unfortunate as it ruins my need for drama. But, hey, this sassy Pride & Prejudice retelling featuring a family of former reality TV stars is my personal book of the year. It is a great story in its own right, as well as being a creative - genuinely surprising! - reintepretation of the original. Cotugno’s books (of which I’ve now read ALL of them) tend to feature deeply flawed characters, and often ‘reclaim’ villainous or unlikeable people - painting them sympathetically while still acknowledging their mistakes. Continuing this trend, Meet the Benedettos gives some pride back to the minor characters about whom we are prejudiced after eading Austen’s original story. That is a very poorly constructed sentence, but I was determined to make it work.

(You’ll note the US link for the above. This book is annoyingly hard to find in the UK, and I’ve had to smuggle back copies to give to friends. Cotugno - who I first ‘discovered’ in a library book! - deserves more attention the the UK. I absolutely get why her books aren’t fly-off-the-shelf popular: they’re pitched as conventional (YA or adult) stories, which is a bit of a trap, as they aren’t. Readers go fully Marmite when they encounter her deeply flawed, mistake-prone characters. The British crowd has traditionally been more accepting of moral ambiguity in its young adult fiction than the equivalent American readership. Thus my two cents: publish her more and better, Britain!)

Timothy Fuller’s Harvard Has a Homicide - 1936 murder mystery set at Harvard, and one of the first popular crime novels with a university setting. A locked room, of sorts, with a snarky protagonist. It is really a window into a different time, and the university experience of 1936 bears very little resemblance to 2025. Written by a Harvard student (who was amazed at its sales), it is perhaps most interesting as a historical artefact.

Kate Golden’s Half City - Another book not out until next year. The publisher blurb promises that this urban fantasy / magic school / demon hunter mash-up will be my ‘next obsession’ and… they’re not wrong. This book is stupidly fun.

Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series - My series of the year! I know it is fudge to have a book of the year and a series of the year, but my newsletter, my rules. This trilogy of mysteries (plus her new collection, Little Mysteries) is fantastic. In every sense. Yes, it is a down-and-out, booze-addled noir detective who balances self-destruction with a passion for the truth. But it is also really odd, with a whimsical approach to detection that is seemingly mystical, but deeply rooted in an appreciation of human behaviour. There’s a semi-magical book! There’s a trilogy-long subplot about girl detectives! There’s an existentialist Nancy Drew meta-mystery! Sara Gran is operating on a higher plane, and it shows.

These books are brilliant mysteries (and fair ones- which is important, especially in a crime novel that’s overtly weird) and also something else entirely. To make a very loose comparison: this reminds me Grant Morrison’s Mystery Play, where there’s the text you read, but the work itself is some sort of literary sigil: a metatextual creation with some sort of underlying paranormal intent. There are layers within layers to these books, and I’m not convinced they all even exist in our reality. How’s that for a blurb?

Helen Graves’ My Drunken Kitchen - Absolutely hilarious, and from one of my favourite writers (food and otherwise). Also the recipes are great. Unpretentious and delicious, and easy enough to make whilst squiffy.

Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword - I could write about this book AGAIN, but you’ve heard it all from me before.

Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road - Hey, this is not fiction. I don’t know why I thought it was? But after I read it, Anne told me this was actually a true story - a real collection of correspondence - and I got very teary. It is lovely, and a much-needed reminder that people are good.

Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char - In a year of reading some very Odd fantasy books (many of which skulk about on this list), this was, perhaps, the Oddest, and I think it is terrific. You see, there’s a sort of pandimensional conclave of, uh, orphaned suburban children who all have godly powers but are undeniably insane? And they work for, but also against, their omnipotent Father? And some random dude gets caught up in the plot? And also the President of the United States? And also a lion? It is incredibly violent and gross! But also, there’s a library!

(In the spirit of unsolicited feedback, that cover isn’t very good, is it? And the blurb of ‘ambitious!’ is both 100% accurate but also absolutely the definition of ‘damned with faint praise’. This limited edition has a much foxier cover, and is probably good for fans, but I’m not sure it makes any sense - or is very appealing to - people who haven’t read the book already. Flipping through the foreign editions there are some really bold interpretations, but I am not sure anyone comes close to nailing it. Especially not these guys. I don’t know what the answer is here. The challenge of selling a VERY WEIRD book.)

Elin Hilderbrand’s Swan Song - My first Hilderbrand! It is hot, rich people! Scheming and conniving and maybe even killing one another! How did it take me so long to find her?!

Shubnum Khan’s The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years - Another fabulous genre-spanning work, both comfortable and disruptive. A found family (of sorts) in a creaky old house in Durban. Everyone has their story and their secrets; some more than others. The combination of a child, a ghost and a disaster helps bring the story to its resolution. Stylishly written and extremely atmospheric.

Brigitte Knightley’s The Irresistable Urge to Fall for Your Enemy - This is ADORABLE. Yes, it is repurposed Harry Potter fanfic, but no, it is not Manacled and won’t make you bleach your soul after reading. A very proper and hardworking doctor-wizard is forced to buddy up with a very sassy and notorious assassin-wizard. There’s a plague or something, but who cares, they’re cute and the book is cover-to-cover BANTER, and it is great. This also made me laugh out loud.

Grace Li’s Portrait of a Thief - Museum heists with Chinese-American post-grads stealing colonial-era artifacts to return to China. Is it morally grey? More than a little. Are the heists ridiculous? Absolutely. It is fun? Immensely.

(I like the a lot cover, btw. It screams ‘modern heist’. Sleek and contemporary, but with an classy, iconic nod to it.)

Kirsty Logan’s No and Other Love Stories - Logan has long been one of my favourite authors. This is a deeply distrubing collection and I adored every story in it while also having nightmares as a result. Enjoy!

Will McPhail’s In - To quote Anne: ‘why are all cartoonist’s memoirs so depressing?’. And this is, in fact, depressing! An artist searches for connection, and stumbles on a shortcut to hasten and deepen his relationships with other people. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a Question he can ask people that unlocks them, encourages them to open up, and, ultimately, makes him feel less lonely. It is a lovely idea, but does it work in practice? And does it get him the answers he really wants? This is a beautiful book about the insidious power of loneliness.

Daniel Polansky’s March’s End - Polansky, like Bennett (above), has been banging out brilliant weird fantasy books for over a decade. I’m hoping he’s the next one to be ‘discovered’ by the awards, as it is long overdue. March’s End is typical Polansky: a deeply troubling look at ‘portal fantasies’, with the March family juggling their real world needs with absolute power in a (slowly crumbling) magical realm. It is a take on the authoritarian tradition in fantasy, and pokes holes in the divine right of kings and chosen ones alike. Not dissimilar to The Magicians, but, I think, a lot more kind at heart. There’s no true Evil here (any more than there is objective Good), rather a lot of bumbling mortals dealing with more authority and power than any individual should rightly ever have.

(You know what? I also don’t like this cover. The challenge of a VERY WEIRD fantasy again. The throne with chains is a good symbol, and actually captures the book well. But it is buried in a very generic aesthetic, and this looks like Any Other Fantasy, which it decidedly isn’t.)

Tamora Pierce’s The Song of the Lioness - I reread a lot of my favourite fantasy epics this year: Belgariad; Memory, Sorrow and Thorn; Harper Hall… This, despite being of the same general vintage, wasn’t a reread. Alanna is both the classic fantasy protagonist and very much a young woman. There’s something really important about the way that Pierce does both, and I think I missed out by not reading this at a more formative time. Better late than never.

Claudia Roden’s Picnics and Other Outdoor Feasts - An ode to outdoor eating, with lots of creative ideas on how to make it fun and memorable. I look forward to both days of summer in 2026.

Sofia Samatar’s Tender - Samatar is always magnificent. A diverse collection of stories and themes, united by her uniquely flowing style of prose.

Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings - Murder mystery/fantasy in a secondary world! A magically-empowered magistrate and his assistants try to solve a murder and get caught up in big ol’ political schemes. Vonvalt, the titular Justice, is a fascinating character: a crusader who truly believes in the importance of his work and the empire behind it. But is the society he fights for worth saving? Or is he the last good man? I’m not sure where the series is going, and I’m interested to see how it builds on this very promising start.

(This cover works for me. Big, imperial. Old school. It goes thonk. Works for the series format as well. This is an old school fantasy, and about people facing the challenge of becoming ‘heroic’ or iconic in some way. You feel that weight.)

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys - I finally read this book! It is good.

Benjamin Wood’s The Bellwether Revivals - I’ve read a lot of Secret History knock-offs over the past few years, and this is - in many ways - the closest to Tartt’s masterpiece. The protagonist is an outsider, invited into a close-knit group of elite Cambridge students. There’s the awkwardness and the anxiety. There’s also an academic obsession, something that demonstrates the group’s general divorce from reality. This is more reader-friendly than The Secret HIstory, with a ‘happier’ ending, something of a romance, and less overall contempt for its characters. But, as far as Dark Academia goes, this gets it.

(First published in 2012, it is surprisingly out of print as a physical book, but the ebook seems readily available. More unsolicited advice: with the Dark Academia boom, this one is worth rejacketing and chucking back out into the market. You’re welcome, publishing!)

Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow - I finally read this book too! It is also good!

because tis the season

Buy my book.

Or, if you’re in the UK, both books.

Above and beyond everything else: I hope your holiday season goes well, and you are happy, healthy and stress-free. Please take care of yourself, eat delicious things, and - as much as possible - get some rest! 2025 was sure a thing. Thanks for putting up with my intermittant rambling for another year, and look forward to oversharing more in the next one.

I was back in Kansas City briefly, and although a whirlwind trip, I did manage to sneak in visits to three different BBQ joints: Jack Stack (twice), Q39 and Joe’s Kansas City.

Jack Stack is not my favorite - my sister really likes it, because she swears by the sides. I had a rib-related disappointment there on my last visit, so I don’t trust them for those any more, and stick to the sandwiches. Given that I rate ribs above all other forms of BBQ, that’s the equivalent of the scene in a cop drama where the homicide detective is sent off to write parking tickets. All that said, they do a good sandwich, and their lamb ribs, although ‘exotic’, are great. I’m neutral on the sides, but my sister has very strong feelings about the cheesy corn and beans, and her endorsement is important.

Q39 is famous for the brisket, and, yup. That’s a great brisket. I also really liked the fries. (We sound very sides-obsessed as a family, which, I suppose, we are?) I also highly recommend the burnt ends.

And Joe’s is, well, Joe’s. Anecdote within anecdote: years ago, we did a blind taste test. My whole family split up and crawled over the city, bringing back from each one a) ribs, b) a pound of meat and c) a bottle of sauce. Anne and my sister-in-law (non KC natives, and therefore unbiased) then unpacked everything and set it out as a blind taste test. After a long afternoon of gorging and scoring, we discovered that there was a clear champion: Joe’s. This is backed up by, well, everyone else’s opinion.

‘Salads’ at Joe’s Kansas City.

Which is to say, last week, we ate the hell out of Joe’s. Sandwiches, ribs and one of every side (side obsessed!). We were there at a weird, midafternoon, surprisingly-empty time, and got to linger over the table - even going back for a tray of burnt ends. It was great.

And that - to land this particular anecdotal helicopter - is the point here. It was great. Capital-G-Great. The UK has an influx of BBQ places, because the arc of history bends towards tasty justice. Personally, I’ve also gotten pretty good at making my own BBQ over the past few years. Low and slow and smoked and hickory-scented is, although still not ubiquitous, at least not uncommon. I can now say that the BBQ available to me in London, whether that’s in a restaurant or off my own smoker is Good.

But… the BBQ I ate in KC? It was Great.

Apologies, as I use this example a lot but… Back when I was judging the Kitschies (pours rum in remembrance), I had to read a lot of books, very, very quickly. What I found is that, at the start, I was a harsher critic. But as time went on, I’d be tagging more things as ‘maybes’ or passing them to other judges as possibilities. The more I read, the more my standards gravitated to the mean. I don’t want to use the word ‘lowered’, but, ‘normalised’ perhaps. My qualitative taste was, ultimately, susceptible to context.

I wasn’t the only one facing this - and all the other judges over the years experienced a similar challenge. That’s why you have a panel, after all. We all had our own coping mechanisms, ways of dealing with the Creeping Mediocrity. For me, it was a reset; taking a break for some sort of external reminder. For the Kitschies, time-constrained or not, I would take a break and revisit a book that I truly found Great. The Hobbit, Perdido Street Station, The Crystal Cave, whatever. Or even a previous winner: A Monster Calls is a quick read and serves as a qualitative North Star. An award like the Kitschies wasn’t about celebrating the norm of goodness (that’s what prizes using popular votes mechanics do), it is about discovering the outlier of greatness. The best way of doing that is to remind yourself, occasionally, what greatness actually looks like. If you’re just starting at the good all day, you celebrate incremental improvements - that’s not bad, by any means, and there’s value to it. But the great lurks miles away, squatting on the mountaintop.

(I’ve also had the honour of judging prizes, where to be honest, I needed an external reminder of ‘goodness’. I don’t say this [solely] to be snarky, but to warn that the, uh, ‘contextual quality normalisation’ can slide into the negative as well. What’s the fiction equivalent of the Overton Window? The Overton Kindle? The Goodkind Door?!)

Incremental improvement is important! We should strive to be better every day. The arc of history is slow, after all, and there’s we should make things a little bit better, whenever and wherever we can. But… it is also worth taking that occasional step back from the context we’re in; getting the perspective we need to reset our standards. Remind ourselves not only what good looks like, but also that the great is possible. Whether that’s A Monster Calls or Joe’s ribs, these things exist in our world to inspire us to achieve the extraordinary.

The best part, of course, is that I had placed an order with my butcher before I even got on the plane back to KC. I want to make great BBQ. I am now fully, freshly aware of how far I have to go, and I’m excited to get there.

what I’m doing

I am now a TED speaker. Mostly! We’ll see how it looks on video. I think there will be something to watch in early 2026, so, watch this space. Thanks to everyone that turned up. Doing my extremism x BBQ x unintentional stand-up routine in front of two hundred people would’ve been a lot more awkward if everyone weren’t absolutely lovely. I made some amazing new friends as well.

Kindling is in the wild! There’s a website now, but, more importantly, I’ve already run through the initial print run. The next three Big Questions are briefed out to various experts, and I’ll be doing another print run in January.

Worlds of Wonder is out! For real now. A collection of essays on children’s literature. It has two essays by yours truly on some classic fantasy stories: “The Dark is Rising” and “The Sword in the Stone”.

Given the time of year, I should probably mention that The Big Book of Cyberpunk makes a REALLY GOOD GIFT for the reader / gamer / film buff / computer nerd / political activist / best friend / in your life. There's the floppy US edition or the stately two volume hardcover UK edition. Both look ravishing in a very large stocking.

My latest anthology is 95% delivered. All the authors and stories are in, and I’m just ‘tidying up’ (e.g. ‘writing’) the editorial matter. As I write this, I realise that it hasn’t actually been announced yet, so, uh, that’s all you get to now for know.

I have two (2) book pitches out on sub - one fiction, one nonfiction. In a perfect world, I’m always working on two (2) books at a time, one at the admin/rights/organisational stage and one at the writing/editing stage. This would, conceptually, mean I have exactly one book out every year. In our actual world: ROFL.

what I’m reading

We go to the library every week - both to Teach The Child and also make a tiny, worthy concession to the cost of living crisis (85% of our discretionary spending is on books; fun fact: going to the library has not cut that down at all). Our local library has a very cool thing, which is an entire bookcase full of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ series. I’ve been trying to get a different one every week, and have learned about topics as diverse as Clausewitz and Citizenship. They’re not all brilliant books, but even the less-than-great ones generally contain one or two interesting notions that stick with me.

I’ll try to do a pre-holidays list of reading recommendations, but here are some books I didn’t enjoy for various reasons:

Ali Hazelwood’s Problematic Summer Romance was, indeed, problematic. No false advertising there. It was also very slight: it felt like bonus content for the rest of her series. I suspect you need to be much more emotionally invested to find the romantic silver lining in a story about grooming. That necessary connection between reader and character isn’t there when it reads like an author’s fanfic of her own minor characters.

I think Hazelwood is a lightning rod for criticism, possibly because she’s one of the pioneering - and most visible - modern romance authors. Generally speaking, I think that criticism is unfounded. Her works - goofy, silly, filthy, over the top - are compulsively readable, and invariably good-natured fun. In this case, that good-natured niceness was a varnish over something so deeply, intentionally problematic and the resulting bon-bon of ickiness felt all the more troublesome for it. A thought experiment, maybe? I applaud her commitment to dancing across all possible tropes across the body of her work, but I think mining this particular one was a mistake.

I made a start on the Artefacts of Ouranos series. I enjoyed Trial of the Sun Queen a lot: it is by the numbers, but, by gum, I like those numbers. Rule of the Aurora King, however, lost me. The format was different - it changed perspectives and tenses - which was already a bit off. Then, by the second chapter, the author was feverishly ret-conning events and adding new ‘secrets’ and ‘powers’ that the character apparently knew all along but had forgotten to tell us and and and… It had undeniable momentum and the joyous ‘throwing the sink at it’ vibe never tailed off, but I’m afraid I don’t have it in me for book three. I feel slightly hypocritical as, with Throne of Glass, for example, I was happy to perservere through several ok-ish books to get to the wonderfulness. But I don’t have it in me for this one.

The Chamber by Will Dean was another library book (thanks, libraries!). I really liked about 95% of this locked room mystery featuring underwater welders. The most locked of all rooms: six people trapped deep underwater in a pressurised tank. But then they start dying! Aaah! The book was a concatenation of diving-related horror stories and gruesome anecdotes (awesome), but the actual mystery was pretty lacklustre. When it came to the reveal! Or was it!? The real reveal!!! OR WAS IT?!?! sequence of twists at the end, I was left a little, well, high and dry. (Zing.)

One recommendation, just to counteract that swathe of negativity: Michael Twitty’s The American South is a new cookbook from Phaidon. It is gorgeous, Twitty’s voice is a blast, and the recipes look amazing. The only thing I miss in it is a steer on portion sizes, as yesterday I accidentally made two gallons of soup…

I am giving a talk at TEDxBristol on 8 November! 

It will, genuinely, actually, for real, be about how BBQ is the solution to some of the world’s trickiest problems…

Bad guy is cooking hot and fast with that sword.

The meme really says it all.

There’s a whole day of talks! I’ve had previews of most of them, being that we’re a pretty chatty cohort, and every one I’ve seen has been excellent. If you just want to pop in for one session (perhaps the third one), I’m sharing the evening slot with Romy Gill, Stark Holborn, Martin Bisp and Amelia Howe, which is pretty incredible.

Not to spoil the whole thing, but I am painfully conscious that there’s a natural inclination to believe ‘I like a thing, therefore it must be good for everyone’. Be that herbal supplements, yoga, fascism or BBQ. And I’m not proposing that BBQ itself is the solution to all our problems. But BBQ - although not a metaphor for the solutions we need - does make for a really good analogy. I promise that will make sense after the talk. Well, hopefully. Please do come along if you can.

The most disappointing thing, of course, is that I can no longer make fun of people who give TED talks.

Here’s the thing though:

I think that BBQ itself actually is the solution to some problems. And not just an empty stomach. BBQ is a very accessible hobby and a mindful pastime and a quaint community practice with a rich and authentic history. It is all those things! As are knitting, Pokemon and Morris Dancing. But BBQ also brings some unique traits to the table.

One example: BBQ can’t be rushed. The relationship with time is intrinsic to BBQness. On one hand, that relationship can be a little fraught. There’s the dreaded, but inescapable ‘stall’ at the midpoint of a BBQ. There are competition tricks to cook ‘fast and hot’, so you’re turning out briskets in five hours instead of twelve. Hacks to try and pare off some of those empty hours.

On the other end, those empty hours are the point. BBQ is defined by being low and slow: the process and the purpose are inextricably intertwined. In fact, BBQ’s relationship with slow time is not only inherent, but also positive. It encourages you to embrace the moments where you have to do nothing. Take, for instance, one basic BBQ rule of thumb: ‘the amount of time it takes to light coals is the amount of time it takes to drink a beer’. This varies (coals light faster in Australia), but it shows that BBQ has, if anything, a positive relationship with downtime. You’re ‘stuck’ there: enjoy yourself.

That relationship with the empty hours is why BBQ makes for great hobby/mindful pastime/community practice. It forces you to engage with yourself and with those around you. BBQs are wonderful places for companionable silence. They’re also natural spaces to talk. You’re all stuck there. You’re all on the same side. You’re all distracted. You’re all waiting. It is, in fact, the best place to chat.

… and I’m putting this notion to the test.

Allow me to introduce my latest mad scheme:

Kindling 

Kindling is based on my belief that the best conversations happen around the fire. It takes the form of a four page, tabloid-format newspaper. Each issue is themed around one big, critical question: Which is the best Keanu Reeves movie? Who is the best athlete you’ve ever seen live? Who is your favourite member of the X-Men?* The really important stuff; critical for fireside discussion.

Each issue of Kindling also comes with some trivia and fun facts to help fuel the debate. And one guest perspective from an expert on that particular topic. These essays are fun and personal, they help inspire the conversation. They’re also, conveniently, meant to be about ten minutes long - about the length of time it take for your coal to start. Something to read with your beer.

Kindling is newspaper format because it is, in fact, actual kindling. When you’re done, toss it on the fire. Unlike my previous publishing endeavours, this one is designed to be ephemeral. There are no issue numbers or editions. The point of Kindling is to start the conversation. Once that’s accomplished, Kindling can go forth to Valhalla.

I’ll have some issues of Kindling with me in Bristol (see above) to show off. The ideal outcome is that Kindle becomes freely available through partners and distributors. Butchers, grocers, log deliverers, hardware stores: they can put their logo on it and drop it in with their outgoing deliveries as a fun, free surprise for their customers. (Chippies, pubs, cinemas also welcome.) I’m funding the first few print runs myself, and making sure the contributors get paid. However, I’m keen to find sponsors as well as distribution partners for the long-term.

If you’re interested in supporting Kindling as a writer, distributor, partner, sponsor, evaluator (I know, I’m fun at parties) or whatever, drop me a line. It may very well flare out after this first go, but, why not?

Honestly, it feels good to make something again, and if there’s one thing I believe in, it is BBQ.

_{*Constantine. Serena. Magneto.}

Tentacle cat!

I am obviously biased ‘cause I think the author is nifty, but I think Stay by a Spell is delightful. It made me laugh (a lot), there’s a great bookshop cat (with tentacles) and the whole thing is both incredibly sweet whilst also being gently subversive of ye olde fantasy tropes. Basically my cup of tea. You can now pre-order in the US (Barnes & Noble) and UK (Waterstones, Blackwell’s). And your local bookshop would undoubtedly gleefully pre-order it if you asked nicely.

I received an email last week from Typepad, announcing that they are shutting down their whole platform, effective the end of September. Back up yer assets before they are lost to the seas of time, etc.

I have been a Typepad user since it first began. In 2006, I had outgrown our primitive Blogger- based blog and needed to port it over somewhere. At the time, it was either Typepad or WordPress. The reason I went for the former was largely confidence (or lack thereof). I had, at the time, my domain name/s already purchased and Typepad had a relatively easy way of making the DNS work. WordPress involved an arcane process of intalling the platform on own server, or something like that. It was waaaaaay more complicated that I could do at the time. Repointing the DNS somewhere was already stretching my inelastic technical skills to the breaking point.

Typepad wasn’t ever great. The main selling point was a certain level of ‘ok-ness’. The ‘pro’ package let me do basically everything I needed to do, and - to give credit to the Typepad team - they certainly tried to add new features when they could. The social integration was never great, and I don’t think they even attempted to compete with the newsletter boom, so… the writing was always on the wall. For the $12.50/month I paid for the ‘Pro Unlimited’ plan, there always were far better ways to host and craft my contest if I could’ve ever been bothered to port it all over. But, like most subscription services, inertia proved an exceptional loyalty program.

RIP Typepad. You did the job! For two decades! That’s a millennium in internet years.

As Engadget cruelly eulogises, ‘there are probably only a few people [still] using it’, so this is a very small molehill for me to be mountaining.

But a-mountaining I will go:

There are very few blogs any more, and I think that is a Bad Thing. Blogs weren’t ‘all that’, and most of them were, of course, crap. But they were the feeder tools that taught people how to write original, well-written, medium-length articles (often on a deadline). Without the motivation or the opportunity, that capability has now disappeared. They tought us how to compose (and deconstruct) simple arguments, how to write for audience, and - conversely - to think about the composure and writing of other people.

Beyond blogs, even the corporate or commercial media that I used to read (emphasis on that particular verb) on the lunch break have now pivoted to AI-generated copy, vapid think pieces with Trumpian cadence, and noisy video extracts. There are still some very good places for longer reads (largely newsletters, paywalled sites, or paywalled newsletters), but the era of free, text-based platform sites that published original, well-written, medium-length articles, multiple times every day … well, that era is truly over.

For all the crap that the content marketing era produced, it was still fundamentally about leading people to places; away from the search screen. Now, with Google slurping everything into an AI output, there’s very little incentive to make your own digital place and put it out there in the hopes of having it found by an audience. I suspect Typepad fell into a terrible purgatory: the content is maybe good enough to get slurped up, but not prominent enough to earn a link back. Why pay $12.50/month for the privilege of publishing text that will never be read, and, at best, be stolen and barfed back to the unsuspecting?

Many (most) of you know more about this than I do, so all thoughts welcome.

I actually still have four (4!) blogs live on Typepad.

Apologies for the inside baseball, but because people are never transparent about this sort of thing, I’m going to indulge myself.

Cover by Jonathan E for The Best of British Fantasy 2019

The Best of British Fantasy was, to be totally transparent, one of those content marketing schemes. It meant to support the ongoing (in theory) Best of British Fantasy series that I was editing for NewCon. The URL happened to be available, and it really wasn’t hard to churn out or repurpose listicles or essays to bump the SEO. In practice, the ‘ongoing’ series turned out to be two volumes, and I couldn’t be bothered to maintain this after the second on published in 2019. Typepad says this site somehow earned over 30,000 total visits during its short run (all organic!), which is actually pretty impressive as a proof of concept. That is, for a concept that is no longer viable, for a product that no longer exists. Good times!

Jeffrey Alan Love art from The Extinction Event (the last Jurassic London title)

Jurassic London was the site for our publishing imprint. The imprint itself closed in 2016. A few years ago, I hid most of the book pages (frustrating a few bibliophiles in the process) and just used it as a one page personal site. After being caught in the wake of some GamerGate shenanigans, I took that down too. Thus its current, very terse, existence. Jurassic somehow accumulated over 60,000 lifetime visits. The VAST majority of these visits took place during the publisher’s active years, but it still has wee peaks when folks are searching for me for some reason or another. Why did 23 people wind up there last Sunday?! Who knows?!

Of all four sites, this is the one going to make the most work for me. Although I’ve unpublished the pages, the Jurassic site is still the best (only) repository of all information about the forty-odd books we published, including publishing details, reviews, awards, etc. That all needs to go somewhere. SF/F is the most bibliographically-obsessed subgenre of fiction, and I don’t want these books to disappear from the historical record.

I also need to make a personal website. I’ve said it before, but everyone should have a basic-ass website with basic-ass contact details on it. Especially in the creative industries. Don’t just rely on a social media presence (especially since that platform is 50% likely to turn Nazi at any even point). Anyway, I’ll need one myself now. Bleh.

The Carnivore Project was the first blog, and the one that came over from Blogger (qv). I wrote about this last year, but it was an old-school blog about meat. I miss this one a lot, and have wrestled with the temptation to bring it back as a physical product of some sort. Fortunately, that itch is scratched by the derth of quality magazines about food culture - even meat culture - that already exist. Magazines like Lucky Peach (RIP), Vittles and Pit are amazing, and they are already producing exactly the sort of stuff I’d like to read (and would aspire to produce). I can sit this one out. Carnivore’s been defunct since 2009, but in the three years it was on Typepad, we picked up 110,000 visits. We had a few regulars, but mostly our traffic came in fits and starts, when bigger fish linked to one of our reviews. The future of The Carnivore Project is to be archived and forgotten in a drive somewhere.

I can’t abide these Jawas.

Pornokitsch is the big fish here. 2,500 posts; 2m+ visits.

It still gets a shocking number of daily visitors. These come for two reasons:

First, because the reviews of Wizard’s First Rule or Wise Man’s Fear specifically will be shared on reddit or baidu or something, and we’ll get a thousand visitors overnight ‘cause the internet loves mean. These two reviews are the gifts that keep on giving, and I’d feel moderately bad about that I had any shame, but they still make me laugh and the works in question aren’t exactly suffering.

Second, Pornokitsch reviewed a whole lot of books, movies and games. Many - if not most - were pretty obscure. The majority of PK’s traffic always came from these ‘long tail’ searches (including being a delightfully frequent reference on Wikipedia).

With those two streams of visitors, Pornokitsch maintained a busy afterlife, despite being ‘defunct’ since 2018.

Here’s the irony part:

I’ve been making the site less usable for years. We felt it was important to keep the articles live, especially that long-tail content. We wanted to continue supporting the discussion around the stuff that was under-discussed. BUT… there was also a risk/reward balance that came from having millions of words of random rambling sitting out there, unrevised and unattended. As we all moved on with our lives and careers, we didn’t want some long-forgotten Snark of Damocles hanging over our heads. Adapting the site so it was ‘search-not-browse’ felt like a good middle ground, and that’s how it had been sitting for several years.

Recently, the site had undergone another change. Anne and I had been fretting about AI scrapers. We were particularly worried about unscrupulous entities training LLMs on the original fiction and non-fiction by guest authors, such as Becky Chambers, Molly Tanzer, Mazin Saleem, Stark Holborn, Adam Roberts and many, many others.

We had published Pornokitsch during a more innocent time, when the worst that could happen to someone’s IP was boring ol’ piracy. But, after some soul-seaching, we realised we were no longer in a position to be effective stewards of Pornokitsch’s content. We lacked the technological know-how (or resource) to protect the work that had been trusted to us. In May, we contacted the authors so they had a chance to download everything they wanted. At the end of July, we exported all the content and then removed virtually all of it from public view.

(Why ‘virtually’? Because I am a terrible person, I left up three pages: our ‘exit interview’ and the aforementioned two reviews. )

Anyway, Pornokitsch was backed up as part of the British Library’s UK Web Archive and is on the Internet Archive as well. I’m in a battle with an overstretched Typepad to download everything too. I’ve secretly always fancied the idea of a retrospective volume. It’ll be twenty years (!) in 2028, and, to be honest, the fact that the content is now no longer freely available may be the nudge we need to bring this about.

gonk but not forgotten

What is notable about all four of these projects is that they were already dead, declining defunct or some combination of all three. I wouldn’t say that any had a ‘legacy’; merely that they all lurked somewhere on a spectrum of digital purgatory. Typepad going under now means I need to take a more active role in shuffling them into the great beyond. To reference the immortal words of Terry Prachett’s Death, we probably should’ve left a little earlier to avoid the rush.

Quick round-up:

An actual book review! By me! The kind folks at The Fantasy Inn let me rave a bit about Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword. This won’t be entirely new (I wrote about this book in this very newsletter at an earlier time!), but I think - in an era of resurgant British nationalism, it is valuable to rethink our relationship with our national myths.

Rose Biggin’s Make-Believe and Artifice is out now - you can get a fancy signed copy from the publisher, but it is also on Amazon (et al).

Shelfies passed a year, and co-host Lavie Tidhar shared his favourite shelf to celebrate.

Some literary contributions, a belated event mention, a few things I had nothing to do with, and - of course - a BBQ update.

Make-Believe and Artifice

Make-Believe and Artifice, by Rose Biggin, publishing September 9th from NewCon Press

Rose’s long-overdue inaugural collection. Fifteen absolutely brilliant stories from an immensely talented writer. I don’t really have the words to describe Rose’s work (awkward, what with contributing the book’s foreword), because she is - in the absolute best of ways - ‘all over the place’. She can channel styles and substances and tinker with form and format and flow, but somehow it is always uniquely and immediately Biggin-y. I have an immense amount of respect for her work, and beyond that, I really enjoy it. Highly recommended. 

Worlds of Wonder

Worlds of Wonder, edited by Daniel Hahn, publishing October 28th from Princeton University Press.

A book of essays about the ‘beloved classics of children’s literature’. I had the good fortune to contribute two of them, covering The Dark is Rising and The Sword in the Stone. It was a pleasure to write about both of these books, and even more of a pleasure to re-read them. The Dark is Rising is a funny ol’ book, and, despite being structured as your basic chosen-one-goes-on-a-scavenger-hunt fantasy, really breaks a lot of rules. The emphasis isn’t about a wondrous kingdom away, but on the layers of the fantastical history that can be found in rural Britain. The result is a quest that involves little-to-no-travel, just a little more attention to the world nearby. The other tricksy thing is that the protagonist has virtually no agency. Will is a lump. Things happen to him, or, more often, near him. He watches. In short, it is a fantasy where nobody goes anywhere or does anything, yet it is, undoubtedly, a glorious book.

The Sword in the Stone remains an absolutely glorious book, and truly as good as it gets. I’ve been mildly obsessed with the notion of Arthur and of ‘national myths’ and if/when the twain shall meet, so it is nice to have some of my ramblings on that topic in print. (Somewhat related, I’ve placed an extended review of The Bright Sword, so there will be more on that too.)

Most importantly, of course, I’m now a PRINCETON MAN. Right? That’s how this works? 

As I haven’t updated since Bradford Literature Festival (aka the best of all literature festivals), I held court for a flow of Very Geeky panels, with conversations about witches, vampires (Castlevania: Nocturne - which I recommend so much), and magical histories. Also a less geeky, very serious conversation about surveillance states. As always, what I love about BLF is the food the commitment to mixing people with different backgrounds and perspectives, so all of the conversations went to surprising and delightful places. I say this every year, but it is always true: it was great.

A nice writeup of the panel about Witches:

Witchy Reads at the Bradford Literature Festival 2025

Witchcraft in fiction reveals the raw truths of power, patriarchy, and the enduring cost of being marked as ‘other’

yorkshirebylines.co.uk/society/witchy-reads-at-the-bradford-literature-festival-2025

The phrase ‘midnight leech party’ was lifted from Kirsty Logan, talking about some occultish traditions. The panel agreed it’d be a great album title.

Not sure if I ever shared this, but here’s a conversation from the 2024 festival, chatting about cyberpunk with EJ Swift and Lauren Beukes:

If you’ll pardon the abrupt gear shift, I also did a podcast about stratcomms (I have NO idea why my bandwidth was garbage, but I look like I’m calling in from a maximum security penitentiary) and contributed to some reports on very serious topics. I am, after all, a Princeton Man.

Obligatory Shelfies update. We’re approaching the end of an entire year of Shelfies, which is pretty good for something we started on a whim. Recent contributors include Katiee Hui, Dan Berlinka, Adam Roberts and my dad. Yes, you read that right. Nepotism in publishing! We wanted someone for our July 4th Shelfie that would have a favourite shelf that was about America, and, frankly, there are few people that know more on that topic than my father. (That’s not nepotism, that’s objective truth.) there’s also a tantilising glimpse into his pin collection, which is, in person, terrifyingly impressive!

Finally, something I can’t claim any credit for at all:

Power Play by George E. Osborn

My friend George Osborn’s book, Power Play: Video Games, Politics and the Battle for Global Influence, is now available for pre-order. Pre-orders, of course, make the world go round. So if you’re interesting in any of those topics (and if you’re reading this, I suspect you are), I suggest getting your copy now. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a few of the early chapters, and George’s work is provocative and accessible and a great deal of fun. If you’re a subscriber to his VGIM newsletter, you’ll know that already.

I have an uneven relationship with the Hugo Awards, in that, I don’t think very highly of them and they don’t think about me at all. But occasionally they (and by that, I mean the whole hand-wavey institution, voters and all) get something right.

In this case, it was ‘r/fantasy bingo’ being a finalist for Best Related Work this past year. Reddit has a bit of a nasty reputation, which is more or less reasonable: on one hand, it is the last place for actual human answers to questions on the internet. On the other hand, many of those humans are bog trolls. r/fantasy itself is a subreddit of almost four million fantasy fans. The moderation team has the unenviable task of wrangling millions of people who are united only by their love of dragons and somehow making it not a trashfire. The moderators are all volunteers, who give up their own time and peace of mind to try and make a space where people actually can talk about dragons without fear of being hassled by bog trolls. They do so very, very well. 

Last year’s r/fantasy bingo card

Beyond keeping the forum a safe and welcoming place, the moderators go a step further, and try to add some value with AMAs, resources, surveys and the occasional site-wide ‘virtual convention’. The annual r/fantasy Bingo is a long-running challenge that encourages people to read outside their comfort zone. It urges them to find books by LGBTQ+ authors, in translation, from small presses, or even (gasp) not fantasy. The prize for completing a bingo (or even a complete card) is nothing but pride, and there are no formal judging mechanisms beyond self-declaration. But tens of thousands of people participate; sharing recommendations and reviews on the way to ‘turning in’ multiple cards. The most common line is ‘I never would have tried this, but...’ It is one of the most successful discovery campaigns in SF/F today; responsible for broadening the horizons of readers and supporting midlist, forgotten, small press and marginalised authors along the way. 

r/fantasy didn’t win - although the excellent Speculative Whiteness did, so that’s forgivable. The four million strong r/fantasy needs the validation of the Hugos about as much as a shark needs a spoon. Frustratingly, it sounds like the ceremony itself was a bit of a disaster. I feel for all the finalists: that’s your moment (win or not), and it shouldn’t be ruined by bad tech / poor captions / ill-timed laughter / lack of rehearsal. 

Moderators are the invisible first-and-last-line of defense on the internet today. It is a thankless job, and projects like bingo go over and above on delivering it. So, in short: thank you. 

It has been strangely calm, settling back in to ‘ordinary’ BBQ after the competitions. That is, regular, but not continuous, backyard fires. I am, I think, a vastly better cook as a result of the 2025 sprint towards competing. I have also been thinking differently about cooking. The abstract idea of ‘competition’ gives me something to focus on, and encourages me to sharpen my skills in specific ways. 

I think that’s how my mind works. I exercise rigorously when I need to lose weight and have a specific target in mind. And the exercise class I enjoyed most was when I was boxing. I could connect the daily routine with the ultimate goal. Exercise more: weight lost. Exercise more: you punch harder (and hurt less). It isn’t gamification, per se - it is ‘tangibilisation’ (that’s a terrible word, sorry). There are real and positive consequences to my action that are relevant to my every life. Just (waves arms) ‘being healthy’ is unspecific and unmotivating. It is also, now that I think about it, a bit negative: being healthy is about preventing a worse thing, rather than taking steps towards a better thing. Perhaps there’s something behind SMART targets after all.

Anyway, to that end, I have, even in the ‘post-season’, tried to keep improving my BBQ skills - if at a slightly more sedate pace. To that end, I’ve taken a cooking class (with Migrateful, who are the best) to learn how to make dumplings. I’ve signed up for another (with Le Cordon Bleu, as one does, dah-link) to learn proper knife skills. And I spend a disturbing amount watching short videos on the Unilever Food Services app, which is - seriously - a hidden treasure. 

Because I will take any excuse to collect books, I’ve also been enjoying vintage cookbooks. I am particularly fond of the old spiral-bound ones that collect recipes from the ‘sisterhood of [fill in the blank] American religious organisation’. Some true treasures in there. I also came back from Bradford with a new translation of a very old Andalusian cookbook, and managed to tinker with that until I made a - if I say so myself - rather badass lamb dish. I’ll try to share it!

The other noteworthy success was some annoyingly glorious salmon. I say annoyingly because I am convinced that ‘being good at salmon’ is my Monkey’s Paw-style wish. ‘I want to master BBQ’ ... paw curls and (bamf) Jared is really good at fish. FISH! Why not ribs?! WHY, MONKEY PAW, WHYYYYY?! Anyway, curse or not, it was fantastic. I’ll share that too.

Anyway, we’ve got a few non-competition occasions coming up, not least of which is Thanksgiving. I’m excited about them. I feel like there’s a certain standard I’ve set for myself now. 

There’s also a non-food-related-but-BBQ-related thing coming up. I’m excited to share it when it is announced. Watch this space, as it is pretty ridiculous.

Go... (searches rapidly)... Tigers!

Well, my last newsletter, umpteen weeks ago, was a moan about declining readership. Then I went silent for ages. I’m aware probably looks like I was off on a massive sulk. Far from it!

First, everyone was LOVELY. The number of kind emails I received were really touching. I really wasn’t feeling sorry for myself - honest! I’m aware that newsletters, like podcasts, are notoriously non-transparent. Given the state of the internet (RIP), I think owned channels are all the more important, especially those (like newsletters) that don’t rely on an algorithmic intermediary for discovery.

The problem is, it is very, very hard to measure what ‘good’ means in this space. As with all other ‘businesses’ (especially content and double-especially online content), the only stories you can find are stories of unabashed success: ‘I started a newsletter and now I have 80,000 subscribers and live in Hampstead’. There isn’t a lot of ‘I’ve been flailing for two years and mostly it is my family and a dozen strangers still confused about the lack of to dinosaurs’. ‘I’ve plateaued at relative mediocrity - AMA!’

Anyway, as someone firmly occupying the most mid of middle ground, I thought it’d be interesting to share what middling looks like. It mids! That’s ok!

First-and-two, I’m actually not sure how (if?) to escape said middling. I’m not going to lie: having 80,000 subscribers would be lovely. Mostly for my ego, but also because it’d make a sexxxy-ass platform for pitching and selling other projects. But I have very few other channels with which to fuel this one: my social media is pared back to nothing, and my work doesn’t really condone rampant self-promotion. Starting another channel solely to fuel newsletter growth sounds like turtles all the way down.

First-and-three, Beehiiv, at the free level (hi!), is pretty bare bones. It absolutely does what it should do, which I appreciate. And it isn’t trying to canoodle itself into being a social media platform, which was part of my issue with Substack (the other part being Nazis, but, to be fair, they seem to have gotten past that awkward adolescence). But a lot of the nice to haves - custom domains, website design - are at the paid level, which is, I think $49/month. That’s a pretty hefty commitment. Once you hit 2,500 subscribers, you have to upgrade. In my head, I was waiting for that point, because I think that volume does justify the investment. But I can’t see that happening. Maybe with access to their advertising features, but those are only available at the paid level, so… (Were I beehiiv, I’d probably cut that particular Gordian knot by allowing partial access to advertising features. If they’re confident that the features work, it’d be in everyone’s best interest! But presumably they don’t want their in-line ad inventory flooded with crap, which, again, fair enough.)

First-and-four, this is not my only newsletter! Shelfies is, of course, going well. What Shelfies has going for it (see 1.2, above) is an Instagram account. (To be clear: Meta’s a noxious, toxic presence and it pains me to use any of their products. I’ve somewhat rationalised it because I think Shelfies is a tiny force for good, but, let’s be clear: I hate myself.) @shelfies.please didn’t send any subscribers to the newsletter at first, but there seems to have been be a tipping point, and it now sends a few new subscribers each week. That’s pretty small, but I’m interested to see if that continues and/or scales.

First-and-five, speaking of Meta being a noxious, toxic presence, has anyone else clocked the title of Nick Clegg’s new book? Clegg’s spent the last seven years as Meta’s Global VP of Whitewashing and Distraction. In case you were hiding under the floorboards, his period of service includes such highlights as denying Russian electoral interference, burying Facebook’s role in the Rohignya genocide, lying about pernicious misinformation and polarisation, maligning whistleblowers, overseeing and ending fact checking ahead of the 2024 election, and - as a swan song - defending the rollback of hate speech protections in January 2025.

Clegg’s doing a reputational recovery tour now that he’s departing Meta, and his messianic book is clearly part of that. But let’s be clear: he’s already made 19 million pounds from Meta, and has at least that much still tied up in shares. When he makes grand pronouncements about weakening AI protections for the creative sector - six months after Meta got caught scraping its own users, the broader internet, and 7.5 million pirated books - he’s still serving the same same master: his dividentds.

Nick Clegg is an expert on ‘how to save the internet’, in the same way that a fox knows exactly how to save chickens. But at the tick-carpeted vermin that scrounge Morley’s bags from my bin at least have the common decency not boast about it.

That comparison was really cruel to foxes. This is our local fox, Scrap,and I adore him.
There were other analogies I could’ve used, but this one seemed the least likely to get me sued.

ANYWAY, the second reason this newsletter is so behind: I’ve been busy - see below. And given that the newsletter was in a, um, liminal state, I took the opportunity to park it for a bit so I could deliver a few other bits and pieces. One of the reasons I prefer not to (and recommend not to) professionalise (all) my hobbies is that it is like juggling. And sometimes you need to let one of those balls hit the ground. Best when your balls only belong to you and other people aren’t waiting on them and oh god my analogy game is really troubling today.

some BBQ hijinks

Obviously the update you were all waiting for!

Perdido Street Bacon had their first outing as a competitive BBQ team at The Whole Hog Competition (part of the Malton Food and Drink Festival). We did surprisingly well in some categories (sausage! pulled pork! mystery box!) and embarrassingly poorly in others (my ribs went wrong). The overall result was the most mid-table of finishes, and we’re really proud. Paul and I spent months prepping and practicing. Months! There’s a spreadsheet!!!

We had so much fun that, when the opportunity arose, we did it again two weeks later, at the UK BBQ Championships at Hayle’s Fruit Farm. Despite the prestigious title, this was a smaller competition… but also a much more ruthless one: we were the only BBQ rookies, and up against an amazing mix of international teams and British legends. And we middled it AGAIN, with great results in the burger and ‘non-meat’ rounds. (We also had a chance to judge, as there was a separate, KCBS competition happening the following day. That was some good eatin’.)

There’s a longer write-up lurking about, but - in short - this was an absolutely brilliant time. The BBQ community were immensely welcoming, we made a lot of new friends and picked up some new skills. PSB will ride again.

some non-BBQ hijinks

I was given the challenge of choosing the ‘five best Cyberpunk novels’ by Five Books. I fell back on the timeless strategy of pummeling a straw man, in this case, the (fairly well-debunked) notion that ‘cyberpunk is dead’. The five works were all published between Neuromancer (inclusive) and now, demonstrating how the genre has been doing nicely thank-you-very-much.

I also, I now realise, included one novella and one collection amongst the ‘novels’. All things considered, I was terrible at following the brief. It was a lot of fun: being interviewed will never get old, and being interviewed really, really well is a joy.

For true cyberpunk enthusiasts, last year’s panel at Bradford Literature Festival - featuring Lauren Beukes, EJ Swift and myself - is now available as a podcast. My memory being what it is, I don’t remember too much of what we said. Lauren and Emma were clever, Lauren hated my t-shirt, and I think the audience asked better questions than I did. Typical panel, really. (More on Bradford below.)

Not sure the last time I shared one of these, but Anne and I continue our ‘In The Weeds’ column for ParSec, tilting at all our favourite publishing windmills. Issue #12 saw us saying goodbye to The Kitschies and talking about when and why institutions should call it day. Issue #13’s contribution is about the power of ‘tropes’ and, more broadly, the rise of romantasy.

Outside of the publishing world - a couple of interesting presentations as well: a Pitch Perfect-themed presentation about, er, pitching for Bethnal Green Ventures (dad-joke gone awry, I’m afraid) and a couple of talks about misinformation (fewer Anne Kendrick references).

Finally, I’ve joined the Commission for the Future of Inclusion and Belonging in Multi-ethnic Newham as one of the expert commissioners (bonus: also a Newham resident). This is an independent body, that will be conducting research and providing recommendations to the Mayor of Newham. We’re not a shy group, and I look forward to exploring the findings with the other experts and residents.

what’s coming up

Bradford Literature Festival (This is going to be a heavy suitcase.)

I’ll be at the Bradford Literature Festival this weekend! I am, as always, immensely excited by my annual pilgrimage to great food. I mean culture. (But also food.)

The programme is out now, and I’ll be chairing four different literary events:

• Witchy Reads with Kirsty Logan, Dr Michael Stewart and Molly Aitken

• Writing Castlevania Nocture with Testament and Clive Bradley

• Haunted Histories with Shubnum Khan and Genevieve Cogman

• Surveillance States with Professor Hassan Ugail and Jake Hurfurt

I’ll also be chairing a session on creative technology at the Creative Economic Conference - and wandering about as many of the other panels as I can! If you see me, please say hi. I’ll undoubtedly be stuffing my face, but am always happy to chat!

Looking much further ahead, I’ll be in LA and San Francisco in late July: if you need a specialist hand-waver to hand-wave about cyberpunk (or BBQ) (or misinformation), please get in touch!

Cast your mind back to January, my decision to enact Project V and trial the ‘dot-dot-dash’ format: weekly rambles and a monthly deep dive. Ten weeks later, the results are in, and they aren’t great.

Let’s EVALUATE!

summons back all the planners who had been totally excluded from the process since writing the creative brief

Let’s start with the data, and, oh.

The Boob of Doom

Well, that’s probably not good.

I don’t conduct exit interviews. However, I think it is safe to guess that:

• Some readers that didn’t want to read this newsletter every week

• Some readers that joined for a key moment (probably cyberpunk) and the increased frequency acted as reminders to finally unsubscribe

Well, that’s still ok, right?

I don’t want to fall into a type of reverse survivorship bias. The people that left are gone! I should be worried more about the people that stayed, right? As long as they’re satisfied, I can find more people like them.

How can I tell if they’re happy? If I’m simply shedding ‘casual’ or ‘accidental’ readers, those were the low-engagement folks. As they depart, my engagement metrics should actually rise and…

[No image here, but imagine something along these lines.]

Oh.

If I was only losing unengaged readers, the % of people opening and/or clicking should be on the rise. But those numbers - although not breasting boobily into the abyss - aren’t much better. I’m not just shedding the chaff, I’m boring the wheat as well.

Now I have to account for the strong possibilities that:

• Some readers didn’t want to read this format

• Some active readers didn’t want to read this content

And you know what? That’s fair enough. Let’s park the misery for a moment and talk about two positive outcomes.

First, I have heard directly from more people over the past two months. Which is amazing! I love getting emails back. Yes, I’m terrible at replying (promptly/at all), but I love it!

Second, I’ve hit ten straight weeks of delivering weekly! One goal was to build better writing habits, and it happened! Not counting Paul’s excellent guest post, I managed to get 25k of ‘incremental and incidental’ newsletter writing done: that’s writing just for the heck of it. That’s a long way from Adam Roberts (seriously, what is UP with that guy?), but I’m pleased.

Basically, all the metrics might be shite, but the process evaluation is glowing! Look at all the exclamation marks! We can work with this!

Let’s go back to objectives. What do I need from this newsletter?

• Writing practice. For personal satisfaction and betterment, but this isn’t a diary. I need to work on writing for an audience.

• A platform. I’m starting to loathe that word. I’m genuinely blessed with a lot of platforms - editorial matter in anthologies, columns in magazines, articles in books, talks to willing (and occasionally unwilling) audiences. But they’re scatty and fragmented and slow. At the end of the day, I need a (flails) thing-place that can collect (if not cohere) the stuff I do, and allow me to talk about and around that stuff. And, let’s be honest, I want a thing-place that helps me get more things.

The dot-dot-dash format was one tidy way of achieving both objectives. Weekly emails gave me regular writing practice. And each indidivual email that covered the scatty, fragmented things I like to write about (strategy, books, bbq,…) in a light-touch way.

But it ain’t working. FINE. BE THAT WAY.

The new plan!

Here’s what I propose:

• Drop back to fortnightly (data says so) - so two monthly emails

• Longer reads (‘cause I still have opinions. So many opinions.)

• One email will focus on strategy, and also include the ‘interesting links’ round-up

• One email will focus on books and book reviews, and also include the BBQ updates

This is slightly bipolar, but feels like a manageable split. Those feel like the obvious groupings, and both seem ‘useful’ - both to me and to you.

Your thoughts, please.

Would this approach work for you?

And, yes, I’m overthinking it, but (whispers) that’s part of the fun.

I’m going to keep the ‘What Genre Am I?’ survey open for a little while longer. 

I will say that (by design) we’ve got some contentious ones in here. Is Red Rising fantasy or science fiction? What about Frankenstein? Or the Civilisation game series? Some very interesting answers. (Also a shout out to the person that commented ‘why’.) (I DON’T KNOW.)

what I’m cooking

• Two more pork tenderloins. Or ‘fillets’ as some would have it. These are at the sweet spot of a) good BBQ practice, b) quick to cook (evenings, not weekend), c) really healthy (zero Weight Watchers points!), d) cheap ( <£4 at Lidl!). Are they great? …no. They’re fine. In the culinary ecosystem of our home, they’re filler: basically interchangeable with chicken breast, but for half the price. If Big Tenderloin are looking for a spokesperson that can stand up on camera and be like ‘this right here could be your generic weekday protein!’, they’re welcome to call my agent.

• All the thighs. ALL OF THEM. Why are chicken thighs so good? Wait, I know. Everything I said about pork tenderloin applies to chicken thighs except the healthy part, and, yeah, that’s where the action is. They’re quick and yummy to smoke. As my BBQ Better Half Paul points out, they’re great at holding flavour. Basically they’re a canvas for whatever spicy mad science you’re keen to try.

• Mutton. There’s a community farm nearby and every week I diligently buy one stupidly oversized gourd from them. Two weeks ago, it was an actual big ass pumpkin. I laboriously chopped it up and then used that as a massive gourdy bed for a mutton leg. Turns out that pumpkin, slowly boiled in fatty sheep goo, is pretty exceptional.

• Brisket. My local Lidl does £10 briskets. I was dubious, but you know what? They’re not huge, by any means, and they’re slightly overly trimmed, so you have to be careful, but… they feed 3-4 and they’re pretty great value for money. Anyway, absolutely killed it with this one. Intolerably smug, etc. Actually, screw Big Tenderloin, maybe Lidl should sponsor me?

And finally… a newsletter that’s doing really well!

Shelfies is six months old and is ticking along very nicely.

We’re on Instagram now (I KNOW I HATE MYSELF FOR IT), where these candid shots of well-loved books are a very, very, very interesting counterbalance to the perfectly composed shelves of #bookstagram. Authenticity vs aspiration! CHOOSE YOUR SIDE. Or don’t! But please do follow and share; we’re proud of this little go-er.

Shelfies

The stories about your books. Collected by Lavie and Jared.

shelfies.beehiiv.com

This year, I’m supplementing weekly newsletters with a monthly ‘long read’. This month’s comes courtesy of Dr Paul Graham Raven, who is oft-quoted in this newsletter. I was very pleased when he offered his thoughts on ‘fandom intensity’. Comments and questions? Let me know, and I’ll include them next week. Now, over to Paul…

I have a hypothesis which explains the difference in intensity that Jared recently noted between fandoms attached to science fiction and/or fantasy franchises and fandoms attached to, for instance, crime fiction. My hypothesis starts from a definition of the distinction that separates those categories: crime fiction is generally primary world fiction, which is to say it’s set in the world that the reader broadly assumes to be their own, while sf/f is generally secondary world fiction, which is to say that it’s set in a world (or even universe) other than the one in which the reader actually lives.

(For the sake of simplicity, I’m leaving aside hybrid genres, such as romantasy or sf crime, which borrow generic forms traditionally attached to primary world settings, and redeploy them in secondary worlds. That said, the theory holds if you assume that hybrid genres are always secondary world fictions; for the purposes of this particular argument, the setting matters more than the plot tropes.)

The simplest statement of the hypothesis might go something like this: a secondary world fandom is more intense because it has a unique thing to bond over (i.e. that imagined secondary world) which is all but impossible to understand, or even to access, as an outsider to the fandom. This barrier to entry becomes more intense the larger the franchise becomes, for much the same reason that the volume of a sphere expands at a faster rate than its surface area.

Let us imagine a n00b (who has read one Discworld book, perhaps) listening in on a table full of Pratchett fans. Our n00b will know few of the characters or events under discussion, but such new-to-them characters and events can be described fairly easily in response to an enquiry, in pretty much the same way as character or event from the Sherlock Holmes franchise might be easily described.

Now, a n00b to either of those fandoms will ask lots of further questions, which will shift their focus from characters and events (or ‘plot’) to a more contextual enquiry, as they try to make sense (and/or a system) of said characters and events. They're trying to piece together and extrapolate the implied world of the stories, based on the parts they've seen so far.

In a primary world franchise like Sherlock Holmes, the canonical works are set in a historical version of the world in which the text—the book, the TV show, or whatever—itself exists. So, while there might be questions (whether asked aloud or kept to oneself) about why these characters talk like this, or why law enforcement or international travel works in this particular way, most of them can be answered with “because Victorian-era London”. 

To be clear, Victorian London is an increasingly distant and inexplicable world for most people alive today, and I'm sure historians would justifiably be keen to point out just how much we misconstrue it—with media properties such as the Holmes franchise, now out of copyright and thus out of control, very much implicated in such misconstruals, if only in part.

Nonetheless, for all but the most ignorant or stubborn of novitiate fans, there is an ontological finality to “because Victorian-era London”. It is an established fact that the original works were set (and, in some cases, written) in that particular timespace, by an author well-acquainted with it; questions about the context in which the stories play out are therefore ably answered this way, which opens the door for our hypothetical n00b to investigate further into said historical timespace (if they are so inclined) via the means of historical documentation and discussions which may not have anything to do with the Holmes franchise.

(Of course, there's a whole genre of history texts written to target exactly this sort of enquirer, which will use the fictional franchise as a key to their contextual interest... but let's not make this more complicated than it needs to be.)

Other primary-world fandoms have similar ontological boundaries—boundaries which abut the world the reader knows, albeit at what may be considerable distance in terms of time and/or space and/or socioeconomic circumstance. For Jane Austen fans, for instance, the equivalent answer might be “because the Napoleonic war”, but all such answers are subsets of a meta-answer which (so I'm given to understand) will be very familiar to anyone who has been the parent of small children: “because that's just how it is/was”. This is an appeal to concrete reality—or at least to a shared socially-constructed reality.

The point being, you could ask a historian of Victorian London—or, in earlier years, someone who experienced it first-hand—those same contextual questions about language or law enforcement as observed in the canonical Holmes texts, and likely get answers which matched fairly well with the implied world of the fictions. To put it another way, those books depict events and characters whose contextual logics would make sense even to those who have not read them; the texts partake of a world which does not depend upon said texts for its existence.

In narratological terms, then, these texts (i.e. Holmes books or movies or whatever) contain stories and narratives (e.g. accounts of investigations that hinge upon dogs not barking when one might expect them to) which in turn imply a world (or, more strictly, a fabula). That implied world is—modulo certain acts of creative license, plus the scientific and social misprisions of its era of production—a known quantity, a documented and real timespace accessible through multiple channels of enquiry. In other words, you can learn about the London of Sherlock Holmes without reading more Sherlock Holmes.

Returning to our table of Pratchett fans, things play out slightly differently. Rather than reaching moments of epistemological closure and comfort via the touchstone of history, the questions of the n00b will instead encounter moments of WTF and sensawunda. Rather than “because Victorian-era London”, for instance, they'll reach “because Death is a person”, or “because the Discworld is not only flat, but supported by four cardinal elephants stood on the back of a giant turtle”. Further questions (which will likely be of the general form “wait, what, why?!”) will only result in further revelations which demand further explanations. There is no point at which “that's just how it is/was” can work quite as it does for the Holmes novitiate, namely as an appeal to a reality which is shared beyond the borders of the franchise and its fandom. 

To the contrary: with Pratchett’s world (or Tolkien’s, or the world of Sailor Moon, or whatever world it might be) ontological questions can only be answered by reference to sources within the franchise and/or fandom. More simply, you can’t learn more about Discworld without reading more Discworld, or engaging with secondary literatures or fandom discourses which are, in essence, an extension of it.

I hypothesise, then, that it is exactly this sense of being party to an arcane (and, if not exactly secret, then certainly obscure) imaginary ontology—of being party to a secondary world, if only at the distance necessarily sustained by its representation in various media—that pushes such fandoms to a greater intensity of collective activity, engagement and obsession than those of primary-world franchises. If you want to know more, there is nowhere to go but further in.

(The reader of reasonable intuition, and perhaps of experience with the social dynamics of knowledge and status, will likely also see that this may well also be why secondary-world fandoms tend to be far more savage and fractious, particularly but not exclusively with regard to questions regarding canonicity. Comparisons to religious sectarianism could stand accused of being both lazy and invidious, but presumably not by any honest person with any experience of fandom. Don’t @ me.)

Another way to come at this question is through the idea of curation. Fictional worlds, primary and secondary, are built—but they are also maintained. This could be said to be true of the primary worlds of pop stars and soap operas just as much as of fictional detectives. The work of Taylor Swift implies a world, for example, of which Swift herself is the central organisational (and narratological) axis; that world is ‘our’ world, in a sense, but it is Swift’s world in another. But it is not exclusively hers; it belongs to, and is built and maintained (and sometimes fought over) by her fandom.

This is why my good friend and fellow theorist Jay Springett argues that we should consider worlds to be the definitive medium of the C21st, and that the job of managing and curating them—a role to which he assigns the wonderfully science-fiction-fantasy label of “worldrunner”—is a new form of artistic practice, to which the original worldbuilder may not be suited by either skill or temperament.

Returning to my own domain of interest, it also tells us something about the competing visions of futurity that proliferate in popular culture. Human futures are primary worlds, in that they abut temporally with the ‘real’ world, but they are also secondary worlds in that, because they do not (yet) exist, they can only be accessed through the works of their creators, curators, and fans.

What happens when the vision of the person (or organisation) that created a future no longer aligns with the vision of some or all of its ‘fans’? Well, you might end up with what fandoms sometimes call a canon war—but which the rest of us might recognise under the broader but just as accurate label of politics.

Dr. Paul Graham Raven is a writer, researcher and critical futures consultant, whose work is concerned with how the stories we tell about times to come can shape the lives we end up living. Paul is also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, a collaborator with designers and artists, and an artist in his own right. He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and too many books. 

Professional stuff can be found at paulgrahamraven.com. You can follow his futures work at his online research journal, Worldbuilding Agency; or you can wade into the turbid ramblings of his two-decades-vintage personal blog at Velcro City Tourist Board.

What’s the most controversial TV episode ever, and why? 

Genuinely fascinating, and, at 1,500+ responses, I’m not the only one that thinks so. (As an aside, this is the sort of open-ended question that used to do really well on Twitter back when Twitter was Twitter. That platform’s UI changes have now made it useless: broken threading, no searchability, no ‘save-ability’. Also, y’know, Nazis.)

The two things that struck me are:

a) wow, there’s a lot of ‘classic’ television that I’ve not seen

b) almost all of these answers are old. All in the Family, I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver (the first toilet on television!)… A nice shout out to Degrassi Junior High as well.

The most ‘contemporary’ scripted television episode that is nominated repeatedly is ‘Home’ from The X Files. And by contemporary, I mean 1996. After that, you’re into unscripted television - and, boy, reality shows are weird. (Bizarrely, no one mentions S3 E7 of Netflix’s Barbeque Showdown, which, iykyk.)

What’s happened over the past few decades? Why don’t we have controversial television any more? Are audiences more jaded? Or is the output more banal?

I’m not a TV historian - although, as I like to remind people all the time, I was once paid actual real money to write about Gossip Girl - but I’ve got a GUESS. Let’s start with a less controversial topic than controversy: what makes a cultural product ‘influential? My long-running theory is that an ‘influential’ work is one shifts the norms of a cultural space. Following that logic, influence is an equation of ‘distinctive’ plus ‘ubiquity’.

Distinctive is a metric based on did this do something visibly different. If something is simply echoing the status quo, there’s no delta. Unless it is trying to make a difference, it isn’t influencing. There is, I suppose, meta-interpretation that reinforcing a norm is a type of influence, but we still need measurability, and that means ‘context’ → cultural product → change in context. We have to be able to point to our product as ‘the thing that made this thing possible’.

But how do we know it was our product? Ubiquity is key because you can’t be an influence if no one sees you. There are lots of people that do lots of new and innovative things! The avant garde exists! Amazing thoughts and ideas abound! But unless the visibility of that idea reaches critical mass, we can’t plausibly cite it as influential. Ubiquity is a deliberately chosen word: it isn’t about popularity, per se, it is about unavoidability. An ubiquitous property is one that is simply everywhere; whether or not it is actively consumed, it still permeates the space.

This is particularly important because an influential property may never be directly experienced. Most creative influences are unconscious or subconscious. If you ask me my influences, I’ll ramble about Dorothy Parker, but is it? Or is it really late night teenage viewing of Joe-Bob Briggs? I nicked the idea of the ‘vibrating aboutness cluster’ from a talk from China Miéville: we tend to overemphasise the influences that we want to be associated with, but really, we’re wandering through life picking up cultural flotsam , Katamari-style (a game I have never played).

Whether or not you read Twilight, you know about Twilight. See also: Fourth Wing, Game of Thrones… Tolkien, Conan, Rowling, Lovecraft… Smash burgers, kale, Cats… It is a reasonable assumption to make that the core aboutness of The Hunger Games has been absorbed by cultural consumers (of that time and place) - even if they’ve never seen or read it themselves.

In chart form:

I went with ‘content’ over ‘churn’ or ‘chaff’ or even ‘chum’. (Two years on from agency life and I’m still high on alliteration.) I don’t want it to sound prejudicial. The majority of cultural stuff is probably going to fall in this area. And there is a nice double meaning of ‘content’: stuff that simply abides. Stuff that satisfies.

Back to Leave it to Beaver, or, more importantly: controversy. I posit that ‘controversy’ follows the same formula. It obviously needs to be seen (ubiquity). Plenty of challenging, provocative or just plain offensive things are said and done behind closed doors. It isn’t controversial until people become aware of it.

For something to be controversial, it also needs to do something that is unexpected (have an element of distinctiveness). This is, without being unduly tautological, a matter of expections. Controversy arises out of the gap between what the audience is prepared to see and what they are presented with. It is striking when you see a toilet on Leave it to Beaver or a pregnancy on I Love Lucy because those have never happened before: no one expects the sudden toilet! It is surprising when someone dies on a sitcom, because the entire sitcom format is based on a pleasant eternity, where nothing ever changes. It is less striking when someone dies in an HBO series, because, well, everyone dies in an HBO series.

In the era of Beaver and Lucy - and even The X-Files - we still had broadcast television with broad audiences. You saw what everyone was seeing, because there simply weren’t that many options. That’s simply not the case any more. With streaming services and on-demand viewing, you can curate your own television consumption to your own taste. You can see exactly what you want, and exactly what you expect. If you’re only watching HBO shows, you’ll never be shocked by a character death. This is, arguably, why reality TV shows will never be as controversial as scripted programming: if you’re watching reality TV, you’re expecting something melodramatic to happen - that’s the selling point.

Where we do have controversial television programmes, it is because they challenge the expectations of a specific audience. The surprise is more ‘niche’; fan-centered. It is about subversion of tropes rather than subversion of norms. The fragmentation of viewing platforms means we have fragmented audiences, who are selecting the shows they want to watch, rather than having shows foisted upon them. A show may be watched by millions of people, but it won’t be the broad, bored demographic cross-section like we had back in the days of terrestial. The few remaining moments of mass television viewing remaining are live sport; which - however angry we are at officiating decisions - is very rarely ‘controversial’.

The last truly controversial moment on television: the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show

This is all pretty spurious (I promise ‘cold takes’, not ‘cold, robust takes’), but there are parallels to every other form of cultural or media consumption. We see it on social media, of course. The death of the ‘town square’ and the fragmentation of channels means we now have niche dramas rather than main characters. Controversy, like fame, is increasingly niche and fleeting.

The Trump/Musk administration has fully adopted the Steve Bannon tactic of flooding the media with one controversy after another, not just shifting the Overton Window, but desensitising the audience. It is impossible to maintain, much less focus, outrage when there’s so much to be outraged by. I’m still het up about illegal deportation, I can’t pivot to President-as-used-car-dealer yet! It also fragments the opposition - forcing people to choose which offends them most; which controversy will get their attention.

After a Serious Internet Discussion about genre definitions, I put together this exciting survey. Is it fantasy or is it science fiction?

what I’m reading (offline)

Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is one of those big books. A #1 NYT bestseller, a GoodReads Choice winner, 350k+ reviews and counting… this is a big book. I can see why, but I can also… not.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

Phoebe’s husband has left her, her job sucks, and her cat died. She’s decided there’s nothing left for her. The location she chooses is a luxurious seaside hotel that’s always appealed to her, and Phoebe plans for one final night of luxury. It turns out that Phoebe is the only person there that’s not a guest at a ludicrously fancy wedding. The bride, Lila, gets word of Phoebe’s plans and puts her foot down. Lila is not paying a million dollars for a wedding to have it ruined by a suicidal stranger. Much to her own surprise, Phoebe acquises and becomes - because plot - a member of the wedding party.

The theme, such as it is, is learning to live. But like, like, really live, you know? Lila, her family, and her friends are all hot messes largely because, it is implied, they aren’t living their real lives. Fortunately, Phoebe, who is fully in ‘give no fucks’ mode, is there to float about dropping truth grenades.

The book is oddly constructed: Phoebe wanders around and people monologue at her. Everyone is keen to open up to a total stranger, which is both entirely pitiable while also being a literary conceit with no basis in reality. There’s a romance, but it isn’t romantic. There are lots of monologues and Virginia Woolf references, but it is not actually literally. And it is undeniably funny, but not satire. I’d even go so far as to say it is feminist, but… kind of not?

The appeal of The Wedding People is that it is - somewhat ironically - a bit of all of the above, without ever having a big truth of its own. It provokes discussion, but never provides any answers beyond the superficial. It is agreeably radical. Yoga might not be the answer to all life’s problems! Weddings aren’t fun! Affairs are bad for marriages, but sometimes marriages were already bad! Sometimes women like skeezy men! People are complicated! Money is nice to have! But it can’t buy happiness! Except where it can!

These are not shocking things! None of this is controversial! But... This is the sort of book that I want to give to someone else so we can both then have a chat about how overrated it is. It is funny and I want to talk about it. So that’s that.

[I do have a serious bugbear about books that treat mental health like it is something that can be ‘solved’ by a week of hijinks. I think The Wedding People kind of avoids that trap? But also it does not? Mental health is, like every other aspect of the book, something that is batted about gently and inconclusively. That could be worse, I suppose, but also a lot better.]

what I’m cooking

Went off-piste a bit.

• Cod! I have a fishmonger (I love saying that. I have a fishmonger.) which is a whole story in and of itself. It was … ok. I think there’s a pretty low ceiling for cod. Sorry, cod.

• Chicken kebabs. Beef kebabs. And, for the sake of science, chicken heart kebabs. I’m not averse to offal, and I think hearts are particularly tasty. There is, however, something about lining up a dozen tiny hearts on a sharp stick that makes you feel like a serial killer.

• I’m now the proud holder of a Level 1 Food Hygiene Awareness certificate from the Royal Society of Public Health. It isn’t mandatory for competitive BBQ, but it seemed like a good thing to have in the bag (the bag itself is clearly labelled and kept under 5 degrees).

what I’m scheming

A quick schemes update:

• Two (2) pieces sent in last week: an essay on an old fantasy favourite (🐉); the quarterly column that Anne and I write for ParSec (🚀) — plus one proposal rejected (😔 -you can’t win them all) and one essay yet to write (😟)

• Three (3) anthologies in various stages: one contracted-but-not-announced (🍾), two out on sub (🤞🤞)

• Four (4) recent or upcoming talks: a lecture on behaviour change comms (👨‍🏫); a workshop on misinformation (🐦); another workshop on pitches for socially-conscious start-ups (🌞); a podcast on cyberpunk (🦾) — plus one proposal still waiting to hear (🤞)

None of that is particularly useful for you to know, but lists are fun.

In The Matrix, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) explains to Neo that the world is crappy because humans wanted it that way. The AI overlords initially created a different, kinder version of the Matrix. (The all-subsuming virtual reality that keeps humans engaged while they serve as batteries for their AI overlords.) (Uh, spoilers?)

That first edition, according to Smith, was a perfect world:

But humans didn’t believe it.

We couldn’t live in peace and harmony because, Smith posits, we’re inherently destructive. We desire conflict and mess and anger. Humanity couldn’t be kept docile with utopia; we needed conflict to stay engaged.

This monologue is a great jumping-off point for a newsletter about negative emotional engagement. Possibly even how anger fuels misinformation! Maybe a rant about the ragebait attention economy!

THIS IS NOT THAT NEWSLETTER.

Instead, I’d like to point you to this:

Elrond (Hugo Weaving) is sharing, succinctly, a familiar thought: “Men are weak.”

Elrond goes on to say he’s been around for thousands and thousands of years, and has seen the decline of ‘the race of man’. He’s witnessed them make poor choices. He’s watched them succumb to greed and temptation, rather than exterminate evil once and for all.

Let’s connect the obvious dots: Middle-earth is clearly that first, failed iteration of the Matrix. It is a beautiful, eternal land, filled with goodness and light. Humans have the opportunity to be, and remain, glorious; capable of art and culture and magic. Yet after thousands and thousands of years (or processing cycles), the rot creeps in. The new generations are no longer complacent.

Humanity’s ‘viral’ instincts kick in: we swarm and degenerate from ancient Numenor to the Scouring of the Shire. (For less nerdy folks: we start with a bucolic forested paradise… and then proceed to invent the nastiest sort of industrialisation.) Middle-earth is meant to be eternal and picturesque, but humans really screwed it up.

Elrond is Agent Smith. He is present in Middle-earth, in his capacity as project manager. He’s there to ensure humanity stays docile, and delivers minor course corrections where and how he can. There are limits on his ability to get direct involved (e.g. he can’t hide the One Ring or carry it to Mordor himself), but he can make his little nudges in favour of Good (that is, ‘continuing the status quo’).

The Lord of the Rings is Elrond/Smith’s last-ditch attempt to patch the program and keep humans docile in a utopian environment. However, humanity has gone too far down the rabbit hole. Gondor has crumbled, half of mankind is fighting for Sauron, and incredibly potent viral agents (Worm-tongue, etc) are wreaking havoc by causing dissent.

[Saruman is, in essence, a type of proto-Neo, able to warp the code ‘with magic’ and upset the system. Gandalf, meanwhile, is unintentionally working as an agent of the status quo, trying to keep the system secure. Perhaps he knows what exists outside of the Middle-earth Matrix, and is deliberately trying to keep humanity in the utopian program because he knows the alternative is worse?]

Even after the Ring goes into the mountain, it becomes clear that Middle-earth, Matrix 1.0, is beyond repair. The events of Scouring show that, after Sauron’s defeat, even relatively remote and ‘secure’ networks like the Shire are still being corrupted by human vice. Despite Agent Smith/Elrond’s best efforts, this project is a failure.

The few remaining humans that prefer utopia are shoved into a backup server (the ‘Gray Havens’) - perhaps as a reward for their attempt to salvage the status quo. The rest of humanity is moved to an entirely new Matrix 2.0: the contemporary, messy, dirty Matrix of The Matrix series.

Anyway, there you go. Middle-earth is the Matrix.

what I’m reading (online)

While I’m at it, I’m a Paul WS Anderson and Milla Jovovich truther. I adore them both. I really like this article because it explains why I like them so much: they’re very, very good at what they do, and what they do is an unheralded, underappreciated form of pulp entertainment. Is Death Race GREAT ART? God, no. But have you see the pile of steaming poo that is Death Race 2? There is a major difference between making good pulp action and bad pulp action.

Nice New Yorker piece on the changing local media scene in London (paywall, sorry). It highlights a few of the new (digital) outlets that are filling the ‘void’ left by the closure of the Evening Standard. I’m genuinely excited about what’s going on. London is, ironically, underserved for local news, and I’m keen to see how things will shake out going forwards.

“It had thousands of likes. It had to be true.“ A teenager writes about teenagers and why they trust influencers more than experts. Unsurprising, but harrowing nonetheless.

I quote Paul Graham Raven a lot (also, admire his shelves!). This long-read on the role of storytelling in ‘serious, long-term planning’ is fantastic, and something I’ll be tapping into going forwards:

For my sins, this arrived just as I completed a short course on Programme Management, and I can see how storytelling can fit as a vital tool at both programme and portfolio level; not just for uncovering risks, but also thinking about benefits and ‘dis-benefits’ (I may hate that word, but it is apparently a thing, so sure).

Anyway, not to spoil anything, but you’re getting another long read from Paul as this month’s upcoming ‘dash’ newsletter.

what I’m reading (offline)

This got long, so some rapid-fire recommendations:

Grace D. Li’s Portrait of a Thief. If you liked Ocean’s Eleven. I really liked this. It ticked all my ‘hot people doing cool things’ boxes. The heists are great. The pacing is fast (and furious). It is extremely, shamelessly cinematic. I often wonder if this sort of book could even exist in a pre-cinema world, in the way that it is paced and structured. There’s some light-touch geopolitical philosophising, which gives it a bit of heft.

Olivie Blake’s Masters of Death. If you liked Good Omens. I liked this much more than Atlas Six. It is a bit rougher and, honestly, quite fan-fictiony. But it is a tome-length volume of good banter and nice vibes.

Elise Bryant’s It’s Elementary. If you like, um, … Parks & Rec? I don’t actually have a good reference here. It is a rubbish mystery, but a funny / sweet / touching look at parenting and community.

what I’m cooking

Two wins this week. Some brilliant ribs (including a rib/sauce combo). I was genuinely intolerable after making these. It was the smuggest I’ve ever been, and that’s saying a lot. My presentation was appalling, however. I need to brush up on some of the more aesthetic elements (including ‘how to cut ribs without doing a Jack the Ripper impersonation’). They are pretty spicy. I will start work on a less feisty rib mix next.

I think I’ve nailed a good burger formula. It is replicable and tasty. This is first in a multi-step process which will now involve CHEESE TRIALS. I’m so excited. I love cheese.

Given we had our first ‘dash’ last week, I’m making this a shorter one.

From Chelsea:

Via Matt:

(Matt and I exchange emails routinely, and this might be the only printable one.)

Elsewhere, another tick on the old bucket list. Video Games Industry Memo did a dive into ‘why politics is obsessed with Civilization’ and as someone on the outskirts of the former and deep into the latter, I got to give a quote or six.

Also obligated to point out that my editorial partner-in-crime, Mahvesh Murad, does a very good Shelfie.

The economics of self-publishing. They actually do quite well! But it goes to show the very thin margins of publishing, and the unexpected costs. Also, why you don’t see many self-published books in bookshops.

“The question isn’t whether teens are rebellious; it’s whether rebellion itself has been neutered by the system.” Fashion as rebellion - and the current (perceived) lack thereof. I love the list of hypotheses, and will be nicking it for further use.

what I’m reading (online)

Setting aside the ideological agenda, and concentrating on the behaviour, this is a look at how the new ‘powers that be’ behave:

Is this the amateurisation of politics? There’s something depressing about the way that the entire governance process has turned into an extended reddit comments slapfight. Politics for the lols (lolitics?) and the simple refusal to take responsibility. But, yes, it is hard not to raise an eyebrow at the irony of the Musk-right embracing this particular tactic.

Although it feels particularly hypocritical when billionaires whine about how powerless they are, I’m also thoroughly over weaponised incompetence as a political narrative. Like many others, I sat for four years listening to why Stuff Isn’t Happening. I am, I’m sure, more politically clued in than the average voter: I’m aware of the roadblocks and checks and balances and sluggish pace of government. (I had a great Government teacher in high school.) I’m also aware of what did happen. However, even equipped with that knowledge, I’m still frustrated.

I’ve worked (and am working) with young people and the ‘democratic decline’ (the erosion in their belief in democracy). Every four years, young people are asked to Save Democracy, and then seemingly ignored. They’re told that voting is the most Important Thing ever; then followed by years of the party in power snivelling excuses why they can’t actually achieve any of the things they promised.

Again, part of this is a lack of transparency, part of this is the overclocked pace of ad-funded media, part of this is how the system is meant to work, but… all of it is exasperating. And that angry exhaustion is compounded, particularly for the young audience, when someone believes their vote has been wasted. They’ve given their support to people who can’t - or seemingly won’t - make a tangible difference for them.

You can see why young people are dangerously close to noping out of ‘democracy’ as a whole. Is this all ‘just’ a comms problem in communicating how, when and why government works? Or is a more systemic change required? Your notions, please.

what I’m reading (offline)

I’ve been slowly re-integrating comics back into my reading diet lately. I even splurged on a Marvel Unlimited subscription and then realised that, despite being an ABSOLUTE TURBOGEEK, returning to superhero comics after a decade out is really, really hard. I’ve missed like eighteen crossover events! Everything is rebooted! Twice! All the good guys are bad guys and all the bad guys are good guys and everyone is Spider-man and also Spider-man is dead! It was, to say the least, intimidating.

I’ve ranted about it before, but the fact that comics readership somehow declined at the same time that comics owned the box office might be the biggest pop cultural buttfumble of all time. But ‘entering’ comics is, and always has been, nearly impossible. The learning curve is steep and the industry is unhelpful, and whenever there is an attempt to build an on-ramp for new readers (reboot, spin-off, etc), it quickly collapses under the weight of its own morbidly obese canon. As a lapsed reader / TURBOGEEK, I’m the softest possible audience, but, well, here we are…

Anyway, I did the mature thing which was to shut the app, and reread an older, self-contained series that I really enjoyed instead.

Gail Simone and Walter Geovani did an 18-issue run of Red Sonja - three different story arcs, all featuring (or centered around) Robert E. Howard’s second-most-famous creation. Sonja, she of the chainmail bikini, has been something of a fantasy meme character. She’s the “strong female character”, except said with an eye-roll: the woman that’s got so much agency that she’s chosen to only wear the most chafing and ill-protective of outfits. She’s as strong as a man, but she’s still a woman! (Camera pans slowly up and down her body to confirm.) Look how powerful she is! (Camera lingers on her impressive set of powers.)

Dynamite, bless them, have never been the most progressive of publishers either. If you’ve ever walked into your Local Comic Store and been skeeved out by the giant posters of Booby Vampire Chicks, well, that’s probably a Dynamite title. But, somehow, … here we are, with Gail Simone reclaiming and redefining a meme character in one of the best 21st century fantasy works.

My favourite part is the middle arc - The Art of Blood and Fire. The set-up is pretty simple: a mean ol’ king wants to have a really big party before he dies, and demands the six best entertainers in the land to make it a super-awesome shindig. If Sonja gathers all six in time, he promises that he won’t take a lot of slaves with him into the afterlife. A ticking clock; a scavenger hunt; a big bad. Simple.

Sonja, both competent and confident, snaffles up one after the other: the courtesan, the beast tamer, the astronomer, the chef, etc. Each is an entertaining character in their own right, but they also prompt a Sonja into some unwilling reflection and rattling her sense of self. The chef instigates a discussion of ‘living to live’ versus ‘living to survive’. The courtesan instigates something of a sliding doors moment: she was born in a village near Sonja’s, but their lives diverged. Could Sonja have lived a life of luxury? At what cost? When Sonja has to recruit the world’s greatest swordsman it prompts musing on what violence is. It is a means or an end; as something you are or simply a tool that you use. And what does that mean to someone who is surrounded by, created by, violence? How does an icon like Sonja become a Sonja?

All throughout, it is action-packed, fast-paced and very, very funny. There’s a recurring joke about Sonja being extremely smelly due to her outdoor pursuits, and her desperation to take a bath […and find a partner for it]. It is shockingly silly, but also a really clever use of the medium. Simone and Geovani write and draw Sonja as hella sexy, because, Sonja, but smell is a sense we can’t pick up from the page. Stinkiness aside, this is somewhat the crux of why this interpretation of Sonja is so resonant: she’s wearing a chainmail bikini! She’s a sexual being!… but never a sexual object, and very much an actual human.

The long-delayed Red Sonja movie is in train again, and I’m cautiously optimistic - albeit with very, very managed expectations.

what I’m cooking

• A rum and Coke BBQ sauce that I’m very happy with. Going to tinker with this one a bit more.

• Pork tenderloins again! Daisho Umami Salt and Pepper is magical. Tried a few different rubs and binders, and the best combination so far is Daisho and miso paste.

• A rack of ribs - Split it, to try some of the rum sauce (above) and cherry chipotle sauce (last week). Both were tasty, but a little too sweet. More work to be done!

• Pork shoulder - I’m fairly confident in my ability to do pulled pork, but I’m trying to find ways to up the speed. This one … wasn’t a success. It made for a very healthy (and tasty) batch cook for the week, but wasn’t really competition-quality pulled pork.

• Pork burgers - Ending on a high note. These were fabulous.

Crystal Palace dinosaurs!

This year, I’m supplementing weekly newsletters with a monthly ‘long read’. This is the first of the latter. Enjoy.

2024 was, amongst other things, the final year of The Kitschies.

Back when we were bloggers (back when there were blogs), Anne and I really threw ourselves into the ‘talking about awards’ conversation. It is a niche conversation, but a conversation nonetheless. I swear I did like eight panels in two years, yammering on about ‘recommendation engines’ and how ‘“best” is a meaningless word’. It was inevitable that people would grumpily-but-not-unfairly challenge us to stop kvetching about other awards and ‘go make our own’. I think they meant that in a ‘shut up, n00b’ sense, but they really underestimated how tetchy we could be.

So we made an award.

I doubt any of those people are reading this, but, just in case - that’s right, we made an award to spite you, and it was awesome. Ha ha ha.

I like awards. They can contribute massively to the publishing ecosystem by celebrating and/or discovering books. Many readers - and all media outlets - are more trusting of a Branded Institution™ than the word of an internet rando, so awards can help push or platform books that otherwise don’t get noticed. To be fair, some readers prefer internet randos to Branded Institutions™, which is why it is important to pay attention to both.

And awards are recommendation engines! But like any other source of recommendation, from your dentist to your TikTok feed, it is important to understand how it works. Awards have processes and they have biases, and often the two are intertwined. People should understand why a thing is recommending the thing it is recommending, in order to help assess the value and relevance of said recommendation. Awards should be transparent and held accountable.

That ‘celebrate’ and ‘discovery’ dichtomy is key as well. Awards can do either. When it comes to celebration, an award can be a way to showcase achievement. This book is the most popular! This book has sold the most copies! This book has the most engaged readers! This author is the most liked by the people that attend this convention! These awards are about icing an already-successful cake: possibly in the hope of flogging that cake further, but mostly about - rightfully - basking in that success. This isn’t meant to belittle these awards: they’re great! We should take time to feel good. Authors and publishers and creators work hard and deserve recognition. Bring it on. If I ever win a celebrate award I’m grabbing that popularity trophy with both hands. Who doesn’t want to go platinum? As a recommendation engine, a celebrate award is saying ‘this is the book that everyone else is reading’. And that is, in fact, one hell of a recommendation. Social proof is persuasive.

A discovery award shines a light on books that everyone else might not be reading. In fact, no one else might be reading it at all. A discovery award starts with a premise - that certain readers might be interested in a certain type of book - and then seeks to find the book or books that fit that criteria. It could a book that explores gender really well; a book that’s in the spirit (‘vibe’) of a particular movement or author; a book that demonstrates a particular ideology; or any other niche or specific point of focus. Awards that involve voting - whether that’s public or membership-based - are celebrating. They don’t need other criteria, as the award is showcasing is ‘what that body of people likes’. Discovery awards generally have juries or judges; people that can discuss and agree a shared interpretation of a particular set of criteria. When I talk about celebrate/discover, I’m talking about two different objectives for an award. They’re both, as noted above, important.

Awards - like any other type of institution - they can often forget their purpose. They can become more about themselves than the books that they ostensibly seek to celebrate/discover. Scandal-plagued awards are failing as awards, not because they recommend ‘bad’ books, but because the the scandals are a distraction from the recommendations. (And also because, sometimes, they recommend ‘bad’ books.) A boring award is a good award, because it is about the books, and not about itself. An award should not be famous, it should be recognisable. The first is self-aggrandising, the second is about building trust. I wrote a post for Pornokitsch back in the day comparing the search volumes of a famous award and the books it was supposedly celebrating - and found that the award was very good at generating conversation about itself (not always for great reasons) but had seemingly marginal benefits for its winners.

In the spirit of being helpful, and because, again, I think process transparency is critical in the awards space, I’ve collected the things I think we did well. This is undeniably self-aggrandising, so please take it with a massive grain of salt. We had the advantage of building an award from scratch, and doing so the way we wanted to do it. More honestly, you’ll also see that we didn’t actually achieve all of the things we wanted to do: either sustainably or at all. But there’s as much - if not more - to learn from failure. More importantly, I stand by these principles and think they’re not only an aspiration for best practice, but theoretically replicable for future awards.

Make the award’s criteria meaningful and specific.

The criteria for The Kitschies (and I’ll remember this until the day I die): ‘the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining work containing an element of the speculative or fantastic published in the UK in the calendar year’.

The two obvious words that are missing are ‘science fiction’ and ‘fantasy’. Our argument here was two-fold. First, people bring their own assumptions to commonly-held genre labels. Folks find genres to be self-evident. They believe they know what a science fiction book ‘is’ or, worse yet, ‘should be’. The SF/F community has been endlessly parsing the difference between those two genres since their inception/s - which, ironically, arguably happened with the same book in 1818. The definitions may feel obvious, but, in reality, that’s far from the case.

The other argument is that those definitions, within the publishing industry, are a set of known, limiting marketing labels. If you approach a publisher saying that you’re an SF/F award, they’ll send you to their designated SF/F imprint. But many of the great science fiction and fantasy books aren’t published by those imprints: they’re published by other imprints, and shelved as literature, book club, women’s fiction, mystery, young adult, romance, etc. Lots of these books have fantastic or speculative elements, but they’re not all shelved in Science Fiction or published by Science Fiction imprints.

By being specific - and not relying on genre terms - we forced everyone - judges, readers, media, authors, publishers - to step back from their habits and think about the books themselves. They’d often ask ‘is such and such eligible?’, which is great, as it showed they were actually thinking about the entries as much than a tick-box exercise. (And, almost always, the answer was ‘yes’.)

You know what else isn’t in there?

The word ‘best’. I harp on about this over and over again, but ‘best’ is absolutely meaningless. It is relative, subjective, contextual and so ill-defined as to be counter-productive. It tells us nothing about the quality of the work and everything about the bias of the judges. This is the ‘best science fiction’? Is that the best science? Or the best fiction? Or the most inclusive future? Or the most imaginative one? Or the most plausible one? Or the book that you liked the most ‘cause it had a dog in it that reminded you of your own? The only way to make ‘best’ even remotely possible as a descriptor is to have an award with a single judge… with whom, we can all then disagree. (This is not a good idea.) As an important subclause of ‘meaningful and specific’: don’t use the word ‘best’.

Finally, our criteria reflected our vision. We didn’t say ‘best’ and leave that for others to decide ‘why’. We had a clear vision of what books could be: progressive, intelligent and entertaining. We wanted The Kitschies to spur a broad-reaching and inclusive conversation about, and inspired by, fiction. That meant discovering smart books, future-facing books, and books that people enjoyed.

Fifteen years of judges have shared how they’ve approached those criteria, and we’re really pleased by the discussion they’ve caused. For us, it was always about a balance of those factors. We wanted a recommendation engine that churned out books that moved the space forwards (even a little bit), challenged the reader (for the better), and were fun to read. But it isn’t about our criteria, it is about the specificity of the criteria. Over the years, despite the yearly change in judges, there was a steadily-built understanding of what a ‘Kitschies’ book was. That came from those three words.

Remove the barriers to entry.

As any of the very best brand strategists will tell you, a brand isn’t only what you say, it is also what you do. An award is no exception. How an award behaves should be a reflection of its vision. In our case, you can’t be an award that seeks ‘progressive’ books if the award itself is exclusionary.

What that meant in practice:

• No cost to submit. Fun fact: if you charge someone to submit a book, they’re less likely to submit a book. Moreover, the people with less money are disproportionately less likely to submit. An entry fee limits an award to bigger books; the ones that already have the marketing and publicity budget behind it. Studies have shown that the published books that get the most support are predominantly those written by white men. You can see where this is going, right? This was always the red line / no go / you shall not pass Law of The Kitschies: no fees, ever.

• No cost for being on the shortlist. See above. The Booker is weird, y’all.

• No hidden costs. This seems pretty silly now, but fifteen years ago, telling authors that we accepted - and, in fact, preferred - digital copies was pretty radical. Requiring publishers to post multiple copies of physical books is one example of a hidden cost, and it massively discourages small and independent publishers. There are other forms of hidden cost: requiring a publisher to give away a lot of books; insisting that publishers reprint covers with the award on it; mandating marketing support; etc. These might not be feel like huge demands for big publishers or big authors, but these can be absolute deal-breakers for small presses and new voices.

• Conducting outreach. A lot of awards take the lighthouse model: WE ARE HERE! SAIL TO ME, YON SHIPS OF DIVERSITY! Then they’re shocked when a dazzling variety of books don’t come fluttering in like moths. For The Kitschies, we wanted that massive diversity of publishers, authors and books. You can’t plonk yourself down and declare yourself ‘progressive’, you have to get out there and get moving. We showed up at a lot of events. We hassled authors and publishers and (possibly most successfully) agents. We posted on forums. We even made phone calls. Horrible, I know.

• Giving ourselves permission to play. We tinkered a lot with the categories. ‘Novel’ and ‘Debut’ were obvious. ‘Cover Art’, our other long-running category, was less obvious, but felt really important given the way the market (and its retail platforms) were changing. The Kitschies trialled an ‘Interactive Fiction’ category for two years as well, which was way ahead of its time. Then we untrialled it. Basically, don’t feel like you are bound by your own traditions. Institutions have to change and adapt.

I’ve linked all of these to The Kitschies’ desire to be progressive, but they’re just as much about intelligence and entertainment. Awards shouldn’t squat there and demand from others; they need to play an active part in the space.

The challenge here, of course, is money. Without charging for entries, awards lose their most obvious source of funding. But that’s by no means the only source of funding, and thinking beyond the obvious is no bad thing. (I’m going to leave out the ‘how to approach a sponsor’ spiel, but tldr; make it a business case, not a moral one.)

Be present.

An award’s PR cycle is ‘submissions’, ‘shortlists’, ‘winner’. Those are the three moments when they’re relevant and folks pay attention.

The Kitschies were a discovery award, but even with that focus, building a recommendation engine that spat out a single book still felt antithetical to our overall purpose. We wanted people to talk about more books, more often.

What this meant in practice:

• More activities. We held workshops and panels; parties and talks. During our busiest years, we hosted events every few months on top of the basic cycle.

• More partners. We fished where the fish were to increase our reach and find a wider array of readers. We partnered with bookshops, book clubs and conventions. Places that had the infrastructure (even if that was just floor space and/or some chairs).

• Weird partners. We held events at - and with - gardening festivals (thanks, Chelsea Fringe), cinemas, and art shows. We wanted to show how great books were relevant to everyone, and could spark conversations (enjoyable ones) outside of traditional ‘book’ spaces.

• Talking a lot about books. We tried a few things in this space. We had themed events on trends we spotted - the Gothic, steampunk, post-apocalyptic literature. For a few years, judges reviewed the shortlisted books (both on The Kitschies site and beyond). I think this added a lot of transparency as well. One glorious year, Adam Roberts reviewed every single book he read, which was absolutely bonkers, but truly amazing (and since published as a book of its own). Imagine the furore if every juror of every award was that transparent.

• Sharing the love. We supported other prizes and programmes. We helped bring agents to conventions for pitch sessions and lent our name (and time) to writing workshops and competitions for new authors.

These all took a lot of time and energy. We couldn’t maintain it for every year, but the quick wins we found when we did try showed how receptive everyone was. I think another award could do it better, but the resource needs to be planned for it up front.

We also didn’t really invest in social media, which is - obviously - a way to promote continuous engagement with more books, more of the time. The social landscape being what it is right now, I’m not sure what channels I would recommend (if any), but that was certainly a huge gap in The Kitschies effort. I don’t regret our award’s focus on offline engagement. But once there is an audience, having something to connect and remind people would’ve been useful.

Again, it depends on your vision. If the point of your award is to platform a few books and shout about those books as much as possible: great. Hit the submission / shortlist / winner buttons. Focus on the ceremony and make it the biggest moment you can. Most awards are, very much, about that, and it is a very valid strategy.

If the purpose of your award is to be more than that - to encourage discovery or discussion or engagement with books more broadly - then there’s much more you can do beyond the basic cycle.

Know what you are, but be prepared to be much more.

The recurring theme here is the importance of having a very clear objective. We had an advantage with The Kitschies in that we were starting from a blank slate, and could do whatever we wanted to do. We were unburdened by history, tradition or expectations. (Or, for that matter, experience.) We had the freedom to set up an award that was going to be a) a discovery prize, b) about discussing books (broadly) and c) predicated on the values (progressive, intelligent, entertaining) that we decided. The plan - such as it was - came from there.

That said, all creative initiatives, are actually only about 10% creative. 90% is admin and paperwork and Google Sheets. Slog. It was immensely fun to dress up and talk about books, or pour rum and talk about books, or craft woolly sandworms and talk about books. And that makes the slog worthwhile. But the vast majority of running an award is the slog, and that can’t be avoided or ignored. It is all about the hard work that keeps the lights on, wheels turning and tentacles wriggling.

Even if you turn that very basic awards cycle - submissions / shortlists / winner - into a project plan, there are a lot of underlying activities. Just as a short list:

Submissions: deciding and writing criteria, finding contact details for publishers, emailing publishers, writing a press release, finding contact details for relevant media, sending the press release, chasing publishers, set up and update the website, collecting (physically or digitally) all the books, checking all the books, double-checking publication dates and eligibility, chasing media, storing all the books, compressing files, reformatting files, putting reminders into the void of social media, purchasing your own books when you get frustrated by the publishers’ inability to send you functional copies, getting the books to the judges, tracking entries, update the website again, chasing publishers again, cold-emailing new imprints, cold-calling new imprints, answering enquiries about eligibility,…

Shortlists: finding judges, finding contact details for judges, emailing judges, begging judges, getting books to judges, helping judges with IT support, chasing judges, organising judging meetings, chairing judging meetings, creating a judging spreadsheet, tracking entries, talking judges down from their inevitable panic, chasing judges again, writing a press release, updating the website and social media, faciliating the final shortlist with the judges, contacting relevant publishers, contacting relevant authors, double-checking publication dates and eligibility, answer correspondence, explain why books are ineligible, explain why books just didn’t make the list, contacting relevant media, updating social media,…

Winner: organising judging meetings, chairing judging meetings, chasing judges, facilitating final decision, contacting relevant publishers, contacting relevant media, updating social media, getting prize money from the sponsor, transferring prize money to winner/s, briefing speeches, getting speeches from winners, getting speeches from alternates, getting speeches from people who aren’t the winner but prepared to speak on their behalf but in a way that doesn’t give away that they’re the winner, inviting winners, inviting shortlistees, inviting relevant stakeholders, inviting irrelevant stakeholders, save the dates, getting email addresses for all of the above, trying one last time with media, getting quotes for the media from winners and judges, updating social media, making trophies, making posters, printing posters, finding a venue (preferably in Central London, free and fits 70+ people - good luck with that), booking the venue, booking and checking tech, finding someone with a camera and begging them to take pictures, reminder emails, prepping plan B when tech isn’t working, so much correspondence, all the RSVP management, remembering you have your own speech to give, getting the trophies to the event, getting the trophies from the event, getting the trophies to an author who lives in Canada…

That’s the bare minimum. All of this has to be done; none of these tasks are optional. It also kindly assumes the admin isn’t a judge, and isn’t doing a close read of 100+ books at the same time. (This is both a blessing and a curse. If you’re not judging, you’ve got more time and less anxiety. But if you’re not judging, you’re even less engaged with the creative part of the process.) Everything you want to do on top of the minimum - events, reviews, social media, outreach, even updating the Wikipedia page (f-ing tables) - is extra. Running an award is project management and event planning; being a press office, distributor, publicist and agony aunt. If you don’t like spreadsheets or strangers, it is hardly the gig for you.

However, the reverse is also true. If you’re willing to learn about any or all of the above, there’s no better way than getting stuck in. The Kitschies taught us all of the above, and more; skills we’ve taken with us into our professional lives and beyond. We also made a ton of friends. It turns out that, if you can make a space where people feel welcome, that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and where fun is baked in as a core value… you meet some pretty great people.

These are, of course, entirely my own opinions and not those of The Kitschies’ other directors, board members, sponsors, judges or winners - some of whom have also written about their experience with the prize. The principles set out above are the work of Leila, Glen and Anne, and I’ve tried to capture their incredible vision and dedicated work. I am, and always will be, immensely grateful to everyone who supported and inspired The Kitschies on our journey.

The article living rent-free in my brain this week is by Ian Leslie (h/t Matt Muir), about the death of the ‘scenius’:

Brian Eno is pretty cool, but that’s a weirdly unpleasant word to say. Scenius. Seee-nee-us. Like Latin for a horrific digestive ailment. The Senate rejoices as Cato is overcome with scenius and cannot speak today. Anyway. Leslie explains cogently that these socio-temporal-collective-moments (ok, ‘scenius’ is a useful word) exist, and have throughout history, and they are birthed by a combination of infrastructural, cultural, and social forces. They also work. Something about lumping all of these creative minds in one place makes for an added level of brilliance. Cafe culture as intellectual cheerleader effect.

But no longer! Those same macro-forces have now pushed the opposite way: space has become expensive, culture has become individualistic, and society has become hostile to the dithering of the creative process. We still have artists, but they are representatives of monocultures or monomovements; transcendent interdisciplinary brilliance is no longer. You can no longer go to Shoreditch simply to sit around and think, y’know?

I’m genuinely torn. There’s a part of Leslie’s take that is indisputably a classic ‘there’s no great ART anymore’ rant. I have to question my own sympathies for the argument: is this really something we’re seeing or nostalgia for the greener fields of my own coffeeshop-lurking days of yore? (Or possibly both?)

Without delving too deeply into my own nostalgia, the early days of Twitter felt pretty sceniusic (scenile?!). It was a cafe where it was easy to flit through a virtual crowd of artists, creators, collectors, entomologists, etc. The call out to #hivemind when you needed, say, to find a cover artist or answer a specific question about ants. Speaking from experience, that level of creative buzziness in my immediate (virtual) surrounding was inspiring and drove me to (relative) creative excesses. It didn’t need a coffee shop or a basement rave or table at the Algonquin. (The online scenius is also more affordable, accessible and teetotal than the offline, which is no bad thing.)

But… That too is in the past. The Twitter scenius has been useless for years. The basement rave is now a Nazi bar. The online world is becoming fragmented and the random contact permitted by these ‘town hall’ sites is no longer pleasurable, or even encouraged. As people retreat to their virtual man-caves and build pillow forts out of their niche interests, the odds of serendipitous collaboration with an adjacent-but-dissimilar creative mind have plummeted.

But… but… Our reality is now augmented. Yes, we’re used to jiving in physical spaces and have the novel experience of jiving in virtual ones, but the future won’t be either - it’ll be both. Our experiences and workflows and conversations shift between worlds; they bob and weave and layer. The future of sceniuses (scenii? scenoda?!) won’t look like either Shoreditch or Twitter, but something very new. But hopefully without steep rent and Nazis.

what I’m reading (online)

Blurbs suck! 99% of them don’t even sell books, making them a rite of pointless self-flagellation. Simon & Schuster have boldly said they won’t be asking their authors to get them any more, which is very nice, and probably sensible. I would, however, like to ask Misters Simon and Schuster the follow-up question which is why were the authors responsible in the first place? Many, if not most, authors do not have access to other authors. All publishers do. Maybe it is different in America’s BOOTSTRAPS marketing scene, but it seems weird that ‘publishers allow authors to stop doing one aspect of their own marketing’ has gone unchallenged. Personally, I’ve been on both ends of this: I’ve had publishers ask me if I could get blurbs for my books; I’ve asked publishers go out and get blurbs for my books. Often the same book! Because - gasp - what works is a) someone has an existing relationship with b) someone else who is c) relevant to the book. What my publishers never did was demand that I spam the universe with requests because that is humiliating and awful. (In full disclosure, I tried to get my publisher to send copies of The Big Book of Cyberpunk to folks like Sir Ridley Scott and AJ Jenkel and I’m fairly sure they were like ‘oh yes, definitely’ and filed that into the overflowing ‘Jared Ideaz’ box.)

Shannon Sharpe welcomes his big brother to the Hall of Fame. Look I don’t even like the Sharpes. Shannon tormented the Chiefs while on (wards off evil eye) Elway’s Broncos. And I have Feelings about the Hall of Fame (in general and also this year’s selections or lack thereof), HOWEVER, this made me get all sorts of misty-eyed and urgh.

I am an East Bank truther (seriously, my passion for the East Bank is … actually rather terrifying, and a running joke at work). I think the joint presence of UAL’s Fashion and UCL’s Mad Science programmes is genuinely glorious (SCENIUS ALERT!). Although I know nothing about dance, Sadler’s Wells East is the first of the public creative institutions to open, and it is awesome. I love that the community connection is woven into every part of it - from cheap tickets to free performance spaces to the actual curated musical selection. It is a famous institution being ‘plonked’ into an East London space, but there’s a real you are what you do ethos to placemaking involved. (And a cafe. I don’t know much about dance, but I do know cafes.)

what I’m reading (offline)

Yonks ago, I was heading to the launch for Irregularity at the National Maritime Museum. This was taking place at one of their ‘Lates’, and one of the other activities there involved the poet Simon Barraclough. We wound up on the DLR together, and were chatting away happily. In my perpetual need to fill conversational silences/eat my own foot, I blurted out ‘I just don’t get poetry’.

Simon, bless him, immediately fired back, “You don’t ever hear people say “they just don’t get prose”.’ And bless him, rather than chucking me into the Thames, he proceeded to encourage me to read more poetry because it is, after all, an entire mode of expression, and not, y’know, one single work.

Which brings me to The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. Josh “Filthy” Bell is a 12-year-old basketball player and vocabulary-lover. He and his twin brother are the stars of their team, with a bright future ahead of them. Everything is great until, of course, it isn’t. It is a tough age and a tough time as Josh ‘crosses over’ (theme alert!) to adulthood. He and his brother are no longer in perfect harmony; his parents have flaws; his life is perhaps not on a perfect arc of progress.

The Crossover goes from moment to moment, in Josh's life. Some of these moments are far apart; some come in rapid-fire batches. And each is told as a single poem. It is incredibly readable, and incredibly powerful. Structurally, it is a perfectly composed coming-of-age narrative, moving from beat to beat with each turn of the page. But by capturing each of those beats as a singular poem, each in its own style, Alexander tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar and deeply powerful way.

Whether or not you ‘get’ poetry, this is a book worth getting.

(Simon Barraclough’s poems are also rather wonderful, btw. Bonjour Tetris is a genuinely beautiful book, and Sunspots is also a personal favourite. Thanks, Simon. You were right.)

what I’m cooking

Ribs. Had to make them for the Superbowl. This time I tested quantities of brown sugar in the rub. Flavour great, but overcooked, and it is easy for an overly-sugar-rubbed rib to burn crispy. My goal is to nail a consistent tasty base and then move on to sauce/rib combos. SCIENCE! Mental note: get new thermometer.

Pork tenderloin. I don’t know why I thought a pork tenderloin would be the same size as beef tenderloin. Mental note: cows are bigger than pigs. Expected lunch for the week, wound up with a tasty snack. These are really lean and easy to overcook. I didn’t, but only through pure luck. See thermometer.

Burgers. Pork mince is lean, so requires a bit of finessing - and also a binder (breadcrumbs, egg, whatever - something to keep it from crumbling). I was out of breadcrumbs so smashed up some stale Polish-origin fake-Ritz crackers that I found in our cabinet. It was ok! But there’s a huge difference between an ‘ok’ burger and a ‘great’ one. Paul has been doing MAD SCIENCE and tested over a dozen different flavours, which is really going the extra mile.

Sauces. Two bangers this week. Went spicy, and tried using nanami togarashi and honey. Anne’s favourite so far. Also went sweet with a sour cherry and chipotle sauce that should be fantastic with ribs.

Academics agree:

Huge thank you to Clare for titling both this newsletter and my midlife crisis.

I’ve been slowly leaning, Pisa-like, back into my BBQ roots. BBQ has always been a part of my identity. A grill or smoker has always been our first household purchase, sauces and rubs are smuggled across the Atlantic with every trip; I’ve always spent too long planning the menu of every summer party we’ve ever held.

Covid definitely dialled my BBQing up. We’re fortunate enough to have our own garden and slow-and-low is a great way of filling the empty hours. Having a child also made a difference. It is important to us that our second-generation-immigrant child has a connection to their home culture. It sounds frivolous, but BBQ is my home culture, and it is important to me that it is important to them. BBQ in my life is not a ‘new’ thing.

Last year was something of a tipping point: re-licensing as a KCBS judge, visiting my first BBQ competition in decades, spending an increasing amount of time destroying lumps of meat and boiling up new sauces, even writing (and somehow publishing) a couple of pieces on the topic.

This year, I’ve fallen in entirely.

My friend Paul and I have signed up for our first competition. It is, I hasten to add, a ‘backyard’ competition - a non-KCBS format that’s designed to be friendly for newcomers. We’re starting slow… if cooking six types of meat in two days for blind-tasting by expert strangers can count as ‘slow’.

Also on the calendar: a BBQ class, a few competitions to judge (with more to come), and at least two ancillary food festivals. In broader notes, I want to work on the food writing, so there’s some of that in the ‘schemes tracker’.*

This may derail at any moment. Covid again, work needs, sudden life events, whatever. We may also be really bad at BBQ, like, unbearably so. (If so, I’ll probably never speak of this again, and I’ll thank you to never remind me.) But the past few years have seen me take the steps from ‘I think I’m pretty good’ to ‘I think I’m pretty good, in an awkwardly-unBritish-way-of-self-praise’ to ‘Let’s see if some strangers think I’m good as well.’

There’s a lot to be done. Being a truly good BBQ cook means being good consistently, and being a great one means developing a distinctive taste and style. Basically, this is going to require a lot of practice.** Paul’s a hell of a cook and we’ve already been driving one another to new levels of meaty achievement. I think, together, we’ll be able to whip up something interesting.

Yes, but I know you’re asking yourselves ‘what does this mean to my weekly newsletter content?!?!!!?’ Absolutely nothing, although please do be gentle when it all goes wrong. But as well as keeping a secret BBQ tracker***, I’ll be sharing occasional updates into this email. All tips and tricks are welcome. But being publicly accountable will help keep me on track.

If this works out, maybe we’ll have a BBQ shindig someday: you all deserve a good meal for putting up with me.

^{*Yes, I have a schemes tracker. Doesn’t everyone?}

^{**I am also trying to shed twenty pounds. This is going to be a weird year.}

^{***Yes, I now have a BBQ tracker too. Honestly, Google Sheets should sponsor me.}

what I’m reading (online)

• A rather charming journey through reading ‘too many’ debut novels. Because of The Kitschies there were a few years where I also read vast swathes of debuts in a go, and I agree with some of this author’s conclusions - namely, it is really fun to go into a book with no knowledge or expectations. (Reduced expectations in some cases, as we ‘assume’ that debuts will lack the polish of writing experience.)

• My sister and nephew went to one of these giant virtual stadium/bar things, and they loved it. I also want to give it a shot - why don’t people try bringing that to London instead of the giant space nad?

• Via Web Curios. Totally into this site that sells reprints of old propaganda posters. 

what I’m reading (offline)

A few recommendations:

Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I’m coming to this late, of course, but, hey - this book is good. Reid does an amazing job of a) giving all the characters different voices and b) making them flawed but not unlikable. I wrote last week about sports and, uh, narrative perspective. And, in Daisy Jones, there’s something wonderful about a lot of un-self-aware characters all fulfilling their own Destiny, often at cross purposes. I had two small issues. First, I didn’t love the ending/denouement, but I will admit it was thematically appropriate. And second, I haven’t liked any of the covers. Daisy Jones, as described, is breath-takingly beautiful and charismatic and iconic. She exists on a level that mere mortals cannot. Which is a tough brief for any ol’ model or stockshot: no one will never match our imagination of this transcendent figure. I think, rather than try to find a ‘Daisy’, they should’ve gone with a different approach. That said, it has sold six bajillion copies, so what do I know? (Could’ve been seven bajillion, yo!)

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I’m really coming to this late. But, yes, Whitehead is very good, and this novel is very good. I’ve been reading a lot of Dark Academia recently, and one of the challenges in that particular genre is demonstrating how smart the characters are. Writing intelligent, clever characters is tough, and it is easy to see how authors can slip into ‘tell, not show’, with protagonists that quote Sophocles at one another or give lectures. Elwood, the protagonist of The Nickel Boys, is unbelievably smart, but his intelligence is never pretentious or forced. He acts ‘smartly’ and Whitehead’s use of allusion is always natural. It is one of the many, many (not-)small things that makes this book impressive.

The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood. I’m very exacting in my Dark Academia (I HAVE HIGH STANDARDS), so here’s one that made the cut. It is fast, intriguing, and properly sinister. Like many other DA books, it is about an outsider character who joins a secretive group of ‘elites’, but, in this case, I think the protagonist is secure enough that you get the slightly ‘objective’ perspective needed. The elites are… weird. They’re charming, but not overpowering, and the seductive appeal of being a member is balanced out with an awareness of the actual, real world outside of that circle. It is tidily done.

what I’m cooking

• Baby back ribs. Two racks, for SCIENCE. One had a mustard binder [when you slather the meat with mustard first, so the rub sticks better] and the other was rubbed right into the meat. Honestly, there was no difference. The slab with the binder had a slightly different colour, and, if anything, had less of a bark [the crunchy external bit].

• Two sauce experiments. One was inedible. I like a vinegary sauce, but this one was toxic. If you fell into a vat of it, you’d come out ready to terrorise Gotham. The other was inspired by my discovery of sour apple juice in the local corner store. Solid, but very shallow.

• ‘Heart of rump’. Batch-cook for the weekly lunches. Basically a lean brisket, which is self-contradictory? But somehow works! Braised it and seared it. Yum.

The third book in Stark Holborn’s mathematical gunslinger series - Triggernometry Finals - is out now. This is an excellent series of novellas that’s fun as anything, delightfully weird, and well worth picking up.

I’m writing this on the Sunday afternoon before the AFC Championship Game. The Kansas City Chiefs play the Buffalo Bills in about 9 hours; the winner of that match-up will go on to the Superbowl. This is very exciting, especially for fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills.

Sports are fascinating because they are an exercise in competing narratives. Ultimately, this is down to talent and luck and bodies crashing into one another on a field somewhere in the Midwest. But around this singular event is a maelstrom of narratives. We want this event to signify something; to be part of a larger story. The media and the fans create narratives of how this should go - what this particular game means in the bigger picture. The thing itself is a part of a vast, swirling narrative-historical context that is, quite often, completely disassociated from people slamming against one another on a muddy field.

The narratives are amazing. If you’re a Bills fan, there are a thousand reasons the Bills should win. There are arcs of the season, of careers, of players, of a team; of a geography or culture or region - all that add up to a narrative of why the Bills should (or will) win. Josh Allen deserves it. Damar Hamlin deserves it. The rivalry deserves it. The Bills deserve it.

If you’re a Chiefs fan, there are a thousand reasons the Chiefs should win. There are arcs of the season, of careers, of players, of a team; of a geography or culture or region - all that add up to a narrative of why the Chiefs should (or will) win. Patrick Mahomes deserves it. DeAndre Hopkins deserves it. The rivalry deserves it. The Chiefs deserve it.

There’s a human need to make connections between unrelated events; to turn singularities into sequences into stories. The media plays into this: stories are more interesting than facts and figures. We don’t want to. random people, we want protagonists.

And, of course, there’s the personal narrative. I deserve this because… I lost my job. I wore my lucky jersey. My wife left me. I just got married. My uncle has been a fan for 75 years and has never seen them win. My aunt has just now become a fan, and has never seen them lose. Over 50 million people will watch this game, and every one of them has a narrative excuse why one team or the other should win. A superstition, a jinx, a streak, a hope. We make the connections between ourselves and these distant random events, involving total strangers in far-away places. Not just because there’s a human need to create stories from scratch, but to put ourselves into them. We can’t stand to sit on the sidelines, even if the actual sidelines are 4,341 miles away.

And here’s the flip side: half of these narratives are wrong. One team will lose, despite the vast stack of (utterly fabricated) reasons that they shouldn’t. I wish and hope and pray and need my team to win, and have every narrative reason that they should. But somewhere out there, other folks have every reason as well. Every story is a matter of perspective. Sports aren’t just a lesson in narrative, they’re a lesson in perspective as well. If only we learned it.

what I’m reading (online)

I’m not much of a gig-goer (or even a music-listener! I know! I’m a psychopath!) but I am a nerd for creative industry reports, especially in the post-Covid-and-Gen-Z-we-are-all-figuring-out-what-fun-is-anymore sense. The annual report of the Music Venues Trust looks into some of these trends. There are 810 music venues in Britain (a slight decline, but a slighter decline than previous year, which is a sign of hope?), a third of which are not-for-profit. Virtually all these venues also play other roles in the community - food and beverage providers, but also as galleries, theatres, or other social spaces. In fact, the number of non-music events (comedy, theatre, etc) grew, perhaps to cover the steep decline in big ticket musicians doing national tours. Draw your own conclusions, I suppose - but something in there about both the fragmentation of taste and of use-spaces.

I am, however, a big baseball cap guy. They’re an expressive accessory, an affordable collectible, and, they make a nice quest as you try to get every. single. Kansas City. sports. team. Like every other niche cultural anything in 2025, the terminology has become baffling, so I’ll confess I found this piece useful.

Andrew Griffin lands, I think, the best (although undoubtedly not last) word on the tech/politics mash-up hellscape in the US right now. It is - as always - frustratingly unlinkable (subscribe to Indy/Tech here), but well worth reading. Forgive the longer extract, but you don’t want to miss it:

A weirdly nice segue to cyberpunk. The Shelf Talkers interview I did last year on everyone’s favourite genre-for-contemplating-the-hellscape has now resurfaced on YouTube, in case you missed it. This was a really enjoyable (and, as always, wide-ranging…) session about cyberpunk, as hosted by Los Angeles’ lovely Village Well bookshop.

One more - and also with an LA connection: I contributed a ‘2024 top ten’ list to the Sci-fi Short Story Club’s round-up. They’re a great reading group hosted by the LA Public Library. Not all my personal picks were SF/F, or even books (Rivals FTW!), but the whole document is full of fun, eclectic suggestions. 

To round that up: the Binc Foundation are currently matching donations to help bookshops recover from the (ongoing) wildfire disaster.

what I’m reading (offline)

Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword (2024) is so good. So, so good.

Callum is a gifted young knight from a remote part of the British Isles. After a childhood of neglect and abuse, he finds himself to be a natural warrior. In search of meaning and purpose, he heads to the shining heart of civilisation, to study from - and join with - his greatest heroes: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Except, by the time Callum arrives at Camelot: Arthur is dead. Camelot is empty and the Knights have all fallen or scattered to the winds. Merlin has been betrayed and buried. There is no longer a King, and possibly not even a country.

Callum unites with the - pardon the pun - table scraps. The knights that, for some reason or another, weren’t there for the climactic battle. Left to their own devices, they try to devise some sort of plan to maintain the (now crumbling) peace that Arthur had built.

The story takes place in the shadow of legend, as our heroes (and they are truly heroes) work in full awareness of their own inferiority. What Arthur did was impossible and incredible, and now, they need to recreate it. Callum et al’s quest is punctuated by flashbacks, as we learn the origins of the remaining Knights. They each - despite being the ‘dregs’ of the table - are absolutely incredible: triumphs of spirit and will against incredible adversity.

I’m being deliberately light-touch with the detail here, but, again, this is an incredible book. It has big cosmic fights, a nasty battle, some duels that made me want to cheer out loud. It has a heart-warming romance and a few tragic ones. There’s banter and a sprinkling of snark. History happens. The villains (the real villains) are as horrifying as the heroes are inspiring. The ending is deeply satisfying and thematically perfect. It is, without even getting into everything else, a genuinely great epic fantasy standalone - already that rarest of beasts.

And then there is the everything else. I am a sucker for an Arthurian retelling: I think it is a platform for great stories about tragedy, romance, virtue, questing, brotherhood, chivalry, etc. They’re even fun for ‘monster of the week’ episodes. It is great stuff. I’ve written about this before, but ‘Arthur’ has become more and more of a delocalised myth as time has gone by. In my review of the recent anthology Sword Stone Table, it struck me, for example, that none of the authors were British. And although all the stories were about Arthurian characters, none of them were about Britain. There’s something powerfully attractive about Arthurian myth, permitting it to be universalised.

What Grossman (also not British!) does is ground Arthur back in Britain. He is reconnected with the land, its culture, its history and its people. I love this. I think Arthur is the closest thing we have to a ‘national myth’ (despite, yes, being baked from French sources), and Grossman follows in the tradition of Mary Stewart by showing how critically important these legends are to the British. Grossman also proves how Arthur is more than just an ‘origin story’: he’s an aspiration and an ideal. And what The Bright Sword does is update that to add new dimensions of inclusivity, to make the quest for righteousness more flexible. Something that’s no longer rigid and inflexible, but a belief that - whatever the odds - good is possible, and we can all help achieve it.

Highly recommended. In case you missed the subtext: I liked this book.

There’s a lot in the latest newsletter from artist/provocateur Ganzeer, as he strings together economic and geopolitical trends in a convincing (if terrifying) way. This is cherry-picking one of the smallest links in the chain, but... I think a lot about how products - including creative products - diverge between the commoditised and the craft. 

Fashion is probably the obvious example, but, of course, I’m a books-minded person. You’ve got ebooks (rapidly created, easily churned, non-collectible) vs hardcovers (lengthy, crafted, collectible). You’re either looking for cheap and functional or expensive and, um, ‘aesthetic’ and luxury. AI accelerates the divergence: the mass-produced becomes infinitely produced, while ‘craft’ products include what is - essentially - a human premium.

Is an ebook a speculative thing? Is fast fashion? In a sense, yes: they’re both (to some degree) and ephemeral good. For ebooks - and streamed music and TV and movies, etc - they’re not even owned. They’re borrowed or leased. Creative collective Metalabel also pick up on this point, in their pitch to ‘stop posting and start releasing’. (Metalabel is, on top of other things, a platform for the sale and distribution of limited-release items - but I daresay that the philosophical chicken came before the commercial egg in this case.)

I thought this table was particularly cogent:

The division between lost/home feels particularly relevant. There’s a security and an emotional comfort that comes from physicality. As Ganzeer points out, non-speculative assets - land, infrastructure, even gold - does well during times of uncertainty. What does this mean for the little luxuries as well? Will non-Buffet individuals look for the tiny tangibles to keep on the shelf, or under the bed, or will we pour more of our limited spending money into the cheaper distractions?

what I’m reading (online)

• Fun thread on reddit - what’s the most f***ed up RPG scenario/module that you’ve ever read? This is (mostly) about ostensibly published works, and not just DM horror stories. There are some shockers in here. (The one where you fight the ghosts of Auschwitz really stood out.)

• I’ve not seen Arcane (or, for the matter, played League of Legends), but Riot pulling the plug on their very expensive, extremely popular show is fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on this in the gaming and media and fandom communities, with responses ranging from lauding Riot’s single-minded focus on their core purpose to decrying their short-sightedness by truncating a potential transmedia empire.

• John Grayshaw boldly went through the table of contents for infamous book vapourware, Last Dangerous Visions, and has pulled together a well-researched ‘where are they now?’ on the stories. Some, I’m sorry to say, sound like they’ve been completely lost. A fascinating read. (Yes, I know there’s now a “Last Dangerous Visions” as produced by the Ellison Estate and discussed in the article, …we can talk about that some other time. But this is a lovely piece of publishing forensics and a clear-eyed/depressing look at what happens when projects die.)

• The report of the New Frontiers in Digital P/CVE is out, and it is a whopper. There’s an interview with me (starting on page 75) about developing storytelling campaigns for PVE purposes that, like most of the report, is also more broadly applicable across social and behaviour change communications.

what I’m reading (offline)

I’ve had a really good run of reading lately. You know that thing when you’re trapped in a rut of just reading mediocre stuff? It feels like I’m in the reverse trap, everything lately has been way too interesting.

One recent read is the anthology Two Views of Wonder (1973), edited by Thomas N. Scortia and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. The idea was to explore the notion of the author’s gender, and how that may (or may not) impact the stories they tell. How to approach this? Well, in the case of this anthology, pseudo-scientifically! The editors wrote (very) detailed prompts and gave each one to a pair of authors, one man, one woman.

The results are mixed to poor, honestly. Yarbro’s own “Un Bel Di” about an alien visitor abusing his power and privilege on a colonised world is the strongest in the collection; the sort of piece will that will perpetually be (sadly) relevant. (I read it right before the latest round of Neil Gaiman stories unfolded, and, yup. Relevant.) The bulk are doing classic science fiction ‘this is a problem that must be scienced!’ stories, but with a edgy New Wave writing approach. Only one was downright, but mostly, these were all pretty fine.

In an interesting editorial decision, the editors tell the reader the author of each story up front. This somewhat ruins the science experiment, as we know, in advance, the gender of each story-teller. Oddly, the themes are then hidden in the back of the book - but I’m not sure those were ever the key part of the mystery. I suspect there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes debate to these decisions, and I’m very curious.

To me, at least, there was no ‘gendered’ difference across the stories. I think there were a few authors - Joe Gores, Harlan Ellison - that I probably would’ve guessed correctly in a blind test, but that’s also because I’m fairly familiar with both their work already. The primary symptom, I suppose, is that all the men wrote stories with male protagonists, while the women had a greater variety.

With Last Dangerous Visions (qv) in mind, I think there’s an argument that Two Views - released the year after Again Dangerous Visions - is actually a pretty solid heir to the DV ethos. The stories aren’t great (and at least one is wretched), but it is aggressive, unapologetic and provocative, and I completely admire it.

This was a really fun book to think about, and I’m delighted that this experiment existed. Smash cut to 2025: could you make a new version of Two Views of Wonder? I suspect not. First, a lot of the ‘binaries’ taken for granted in 1973 are now known to be spectrums, and our understanding of the many dimensions of identity is more nuanced. There are still some binary divisions, but I think they’d be, probably, unpublishable. Imagine a Two Views of Wonder with, say, Republicans and Democrats. I also think, were I given Absolute Editorial Power (or co-power with my appropriately polar opposite), I’d make the themes a lot less perscriptive. The authors did manage to explore the themes in their own unique ways, but I don’t think the themes themselves did anything to help us explore that possible binary. A more conceptual brief like, ‘building a better world’ or ‘a modern family’ would be more open to showing us the (potential) intrinsic or values-based differences between the authors’ worldviews.

If you can find a copy, well worth it - perhaps less for the text itself than for what the book stands for, and its role as a prompt for broader conversations and speculations.

Speaking of Ganzeer, here are his shelves.

I’ve been going through all my newsletters for my annual unsubscribathon and inbox cleansing, and that, of course, has me thinking about this little outlet. Raptor Velocity has been a little bit of a letdown for the last year.

There are reasons excuses. My work is sensitive enough that I’m not wildly comfortable talking about communications strategy, even in the abstract. And, post-Cyberpunk, I’ve not had a cohesive bookish topic to focus on. The inconsistency bugs me too: I published 26 newsletters in 2024, which averages well as a fortnightly, but the ‘content schedule’ was less ‘drumbeat’ and more ‘manic fits’. Particularly frustrating as that’s exactly what I don’t like in other newsletters, and this was never meant to be a ‘publicity’ tool.

I perused the publications that I enjoy, and I think I much prefer the pattern of short, regular posts and the occasional ‘long read’. Particularly when the latter isn’t time-limited, but something I can peruse or refer back to at a later time. Now, I suspect this is a classic causation/correlation issue - I like this format because I like the writers that use it, rather than the format itself having any intrinsic appeal.

But…

What I’m calling the ‘dot-dot-dot-dash’ format (e.g. ‘V’ in Morse Code) feels like a good goal for me. Short, weekly posts will force me to write to a deadline. Plus a longer, monthly slot will encourage me to dive deeply into something or another. Basically, Project V is about using this newsletter for it’s god-given purpose: something that benefits me. In this case, by actually improves my writin’, in terms of both output and discipline.

Or, at least, that’s the goal. I’ve going to try this as a ‘dot’ email - e.g. up-front musing, interesting links, book chat, and - where I’ve got ‘em - project updates. Let’s see how it goes.

what I’m reading (online)

• Who is affected by violence? Focusing on young people in the UK. Lots of detail in here, but the number that stuck with me: 20% of teens have been the victim of some form of violence (physical assault, robbery, sexual assault, and threat being the most common forms). But there’s also the halo effect (what’s the negative version of a ‘halo effect’? the ‘brimstone effect’?). 67% of teens are worried about becoming victims, which is ‘reshaping how they live their lives’. According to the report, ‘over half (52%) reported changing their behaviours, with a third (33%) avoiding certain places or social events. For over a fifth (22%), the anxiety has taken a toll on their mental health, disrupting sleep, suppressing appetite and making it harder to focus in school.’ As with all topics in this area, perceptions and concerns around safety carry with them second-order effects.

• The Bookseller, the UK’s publishing trade press, has busted out their first league table for editors. The publication uses a combination of sales and ‘award points’ to create a total editorial score. The sales are sourced via Nielsen Bookscan TCM, which doesn’t include ebook or audio sales. And ‘awards’ doesn’t include genre prizes. Even taken at face value, the focus on sales (except not ebooks) and awards (except not genre ones) makes this yet another accolade for ‘the most commercially-successfully mainstream book’. One could (and does) argue that if we really wanted to celebrate editors for their commercial, not artistic, acumen, that should be done on an ROI basis - rather than simply reinforcing the truism that big books sell bigly. Underpinning the whole exercise is a frustratingly narrow interpretation of what an editor does and what ‘good’ looks like in the publishing world. That said, if The Bookseller’s real KPI were clicks heading into the holiday season, I suspect they smashed it. In the words of one commenter: ‘Thanks, I hate it’.

• Paul Graham Raven interviews Bruce Sterling. Fantastic conversation about futurism and world-building, and the limits of both (as practices and definitions). And luxury multi-tools. And even a reference to ‘pink flamingos’, one of my favourite esoteric social science terms.

what I’m reading (offline)

I really like Beth O’Leary’s books. The Flatshare is an amazing (and annoyingly rare) example of a romance where the FMC (female main character, for those not down with the romance lingo) and MMC (guess) have charmingly distinct voices. The Switch is ADORBS. The No-Show is surprisingly throughtful. And the upcoming Swept Away is absolutely lovely (yes, I’ve read it. ha ha.)

That said… in the spirit of completion, I went back and found one of her ‘earlier’ (well, 2021) works, The Road Trip, and I’m sadly meting out a ‘meh’ rating. Love the concept, of course: Addie and Dylan broke up two years ago. Now they’re heading to the same wedding and ruh-roh, an auto accident means they are sharing a car.

Literally none of the context will make sense to Americans, where long road trips actually cover vast swathes of geography, because the driving infrastructure, y’know, works. In Britain you need to set aside three days to cover a hundred miles, because all the roads were planned around (and possibly by) Roman chariots. On the flip side, we have trains. On the flip side of that, they don’t run on weekends or holidays. Anyway, for American readers, pretend they’re going, say, New York to Boise, and the underpinning dramatic set-up will make more sense.

ANYWAY, the book flips between THEN - when Addie and Dylan first met, dated, dumped, and NOW - when Addie and Dylan and their ludicrous friends are car-trekking dozens of miles at a glacial pace. O’Leary is a genuinely funny writer, and the NOW is filled with amusing moments. The THEN is where all the drama happens. All leading to, of course, a will-they, won’t-they, etc.

Spoilers follow, I suppose… Sadly, this is one of those cases where I was desperately clinging to the hope of ‘won’t’. The foundation of their relationship seems to be a week of steamy sex in France, followed by a lot of ‘tell don’t show’ about how lurved up they are, despite Dylan essentially abandoning Addie, Dylan being utterly useless, Addie (rightfully) considering a life without him, and also they fight all the time. Also also their friends hate them together, for reasons that are simultaneously deeply troubling and entirely justified. The actual break-up impetus is a truly harrowing moment that, to be honest, I don’t see how Dylan can - or should - come back from.

Cut to NOW, apparently Dylan being broke and useless (vs rich and useless) is enough of a demonstration of change to prompt Addie to rethink things. Reader, she should not. He’s still a hot mess and she’s still got a lot to work through (alone). They both have a lot of growing up to do, and no matter how good the sex was in France, they should not be doing girl-boy things together for at least another decade.

Anne and I have often discussed the ‘disaster girl’ trope in British contemporary fiction, both in the ‘book club’ and romance genres. The ‘posh disaster boy’ is an equally prevalent trope, and, honestly, one that deserves a fair amount of unpicking. Just because Dylan can quote poetry, it is apparently ok that he doesn’t have his life together, he’s entirely useless at [everything], and he’s spineless against bad influences. The ultimate resolution in the book involves Dylan not standing up to his hideous father and continuing to let his friends carry him. Contrast Dylan with, say, Kevin - a lorry [truck] driver who appears frequently in the story to bail the crew out from various predicaments. Kevin is comic relief. Dylan is a romantic hero.

Britain has some shit to deal with, you guys.

One of the newsletters I admire is the London Minute. I like the local snippets. And the daily highlights and travel info have earned it the coveted ‘first email I open in the morning’ position in my inbox.

I’m a little behind on sharing some of the interesting (and not so interesting) things I’ve been reading. Let’s get caught up.

what I’m reading

Suburban Warlock by Noah Layton. Just in case you thought I was a classy reader. This is a harem cozy progression fantasy.

Translations:

• ‘harem’ - one dude with a lot of special lady-friends

• ‘cozy’ - low-stakes conflict

• ‘progression fantasy’ - in a context where the characters are self-aware of their own skills and powers, often with textual references to statistics and abilities

Translation of translation:

• This was never going to be a great book.

That’s a little harsh, and the many, many readers of the above would undoubtedly disagree with me. Furthermore, if you boil Suburban Warlock down to the elevator pitch, it is right up my alley. A badass warlock wants to retire to the suburbs, but keeps getting dragged into his neighbours’ hijinks. That there’s a fun concept.

Unsurprisingly, the best moments for me where those when where Trent, a badass dungeon-clearing warlock, solves small town problems in explosive and direct ways. It is the stuff of daydreams, and I’m always a sucker for Scouring of the Shire-type ‘adventurers come home’ narratives. Trent also spends a lot of time describing his wagyu steak, overtipping with gold bars, driving around on his motorcycle, and showing off his cool scars. Trent can also do basic DIY. Trent is a MAN, y’all. Plumbing is less my particular daydream, but I get the appeal.

That’s all harmless - and, honestly, pretty fun. But one of the great failings of the progression fantasy subgenre is the persistent trope of treat women like achievements. They’re something you collect, or - at ‘best’ - earn. They’re not, y’know, people. In this case, the lootboxes are, well… particularly ridiculous. See the covers. This book uses the word ‘busty’ fifteen times. Including one truly impressive reference to ‘her round, busty breasts’. It is, very much, what it is. I don’t judge the (waves hands) escapism of it all: as noted, we all deserve our daydreams. But the very specific daydream of Suburban Warlock is not really one for me.

A Man for All Women by Chandler Brossard. I haven’t read one of my beloved Gold Medals for some time - basically because I haven’t found any for ages. But this lovely book, complete with Robert McGinnis cover, fell into my lap from eBay.

Guy is a member of the ‘nouveau jet set’. Handsome and ruthless, he makes a life for himself in Paris as a kept man and petty criminal. He has a string of wealthy lovers, trading his company for expensive gifts. He also mingles with the underworld, dabbling in smuggling and fraud to stay afloat.

Guy dresses well, eats well, and lives a life of (largely) carefree ease. He’s so handsome his tailor gives him a discount. He’s such an excellent lover that beautiful prostitutes refuse to take his money. There are no stat blocks, a la Suburban Warlock, but there are some similarities in terms of the shameless escapism.

That said - and where they differ - Guy is subconsciously, if not self-knowingly, self-loathing. He pays a local journalist to include stories of Guy as a ‘successful businessman’ in the Parisian papers, so he can send clippings back home. He has self-destructive gambling urges, which prevents him from ever building enough seed money to break free of his life. And, perhaps most tellingly, he has horrific nightmares of being ordinary: when his looks have faded and his charm is worn, and he is no longer able to slide by on magnetism. The book opens with one of these nightmares, creating an unsettling tone for the story to follow - the reader knows that Guy’s life is time-limited, and that there is an inevitability looming sometime in the future. Perhaps during the course of the book, perhaps just beyond it.

A Man for All Women needs, and I can’t believe I’m writing this, a bit more Suburban Warlock to it. Guy detests himself - and the environment he swims in - so much, that it is hard to find any fun in this as well. We can see, objectively, how Guy has been ‘trapped’. Conceptually, his life as an International Dodgy Sex Dude is probably appealing to the bored and miserable reader… but the actual joy - the enticement - is few and far between. Guy is so jaded that the debauchery he needs to feel is beyond escapism and straight into misery. If Warlock lacks depth, A Man for All Women badly needs more light to it.

Some quick reviews:

The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer. Two boys disappear into the woods, return years later. Spoilers: they were in a magical kingdom! Now they’re adults, and circumstances mean they have to return. There are a few revisionist portal fantasies out there, exploring ‘what next?’ after the wardrobe closes. The Lost Story stands out to me as being a ‘realistic’ take on the question without slipping into the nihilistic (e.g. The Magicians, which did it well, but is undeniably grim). There are real human issues here, and the advent of MAGIC! is incorporated as a way of working through and beyond them. But no touch of the grimdark. Also, great banter. Recommended.

The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl. I really, really have issues with Dahl - as a person, and also a writer. But his (adult) short stories are undeniably great, if relentlessly, grindingly bleak. He’s not someone that celebrates the best - or even the ok-est - of human nature. Recommended, I suppose, but I wouldn’t canter through all of them like I just did.

The Accidental Detective by Laura Lippman. Great collection of short stories. Snarky, funny, clever. You needn’t be a fan of the Tess Monaghan series to appreciate them, although my edition was padded out by some unnecessary Tess ‘content’. Recommended.

IOU by Kirsty Marie. A college-based romance that feels like an attempt at writing a Mafia romance with students. Not much else to add. Not really recommended though.

The One Month Boyfriend by Roxie Noir. I love Romance author names. ‘Roxie Noir’ has penned a small town fake dating book that is largely by the numbers. This is very much About Mental Health as well - he has PTSD and she struggles with anxiety. Like many other romances that use mental health to add Depth and Conflict, this left me a bit squeamish. They don’t cure one another with their magical gonads, which is a good thing. But I’m also left thinking that they both needed a lot more help than was provided over the course of these pages. Not really recommended.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez. I read Our Share of Night for The Kitschies two years ago and it stuck with me as one of the best horror novels I’ve read, well, ever. I’m not sure this collection is necessarily ‘horror’, in that there aren’t nine foot bugs or monsters, but it is certainly horrific. Enriquez applies an unflinching scrutiny of the darkest parts of human nature. The stories with a light touch of the supernatural are actually easier to read as you can wave them off as ‘not real’. Honestly, these are great. Highly recommended.

Merry After Ever by Tessa Bailey. I don’t know why I keep trying with Bailey. Maybe this was the Christmas spirit. That well has run dry. Instalove between a GIANT FARMER and a quirky single mom. It doesn’t matter that they’ve never spoken, because she made him jeans that fit and he has an enormous [tract of land]. No, not recommended.

The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu. I really like Liu. I think The Tangleroot Palace is a better showcase of her range than her depth, if that makes any sense. The stories are all very different, ranging from historical fantasy to secondary worlds to fairytale retellings. And they’re all bit dark and weird. “Sympathy for the Bones”, I thought, was quite solid. Liu at her most ok is still pretty good, so if you like decadently gothy vibes, this might be one for you. Recommendedish.

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake. TIKTOK MADE ME BUY IT. (Or, it would’ve, were I on TikTok.) Pros: a rock-hard magic system that gives Brandon Sanderson a run for his money. Plus, hot, disturbed protagonists that bang a lot (not like Sanderson). Cons: A shocking failure to stick the landing. Genuinely one of the worst cop-outs I’ve read in some time. In a few hand-wavey pages, it renders hundreds of pages of tension and character-building to absolute naught, and undermines the central conflict of the book. Deeply frustrating. Interesting world-building, but not sure I’d recommend this one either.

The communities and institutions of science fiction and fantasy have many, many deeply embedded issues, but one thing they do well is archive. SF/F geeks, of which I am proudly one, are remarkably good at making sure that stuff is catalogued.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is not 100% accurate or 100% complete, but it is still an overwhelmingly comprehensive resource, and, for researchers, an absolute god-send. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia is also a remarkable tool. Romance has some pretty impressive resources (search by trope is such a Romance-y thing, I love it) of its own.

Crime? Mystery? No such luck. Crime is, by far, the most popular genre of fiction (in terms of self-identified readers). But it isn’t as associated with ‘fandom’ in the same way as those other genres. One may be a Sayers fan or a Christie fan or a Cozies fan or whatnot - and all of those have their own catalogues - but there isn’t a cross-author ‘crime reader’ communal identity in the same way. Maybe it is also that Crime isn’t as much a ‘digital’ fandom as the other two? There’s also (Holmes aside) less of a fan fiction heritage. And fewer, smaller conventions. Maybe Crime is simply ‘mainstream’ enough that Crime readers have never needed to herd for protection?

Anyway, to land that particular helicopter: the lack of a crime ‘catalog’ is a pain in the butt for anthologists. I’m working on a Secret Project now. I’m surrounded by a toppling pile of mystery anthologies, all of which have been found, more or less, at random. Relying on gossip and serendipity is fun, but wasteful.

what I’m reading (online)

First, Andrew Griffin for Indy/Tech, as always talking about social media trends (in this case, Twitter) far better than I ever could:

I figured I wasn’t the first person with the notion of - or even the phrasing of - the ‘quiet internet’. And I wasn’t! Continuing the theme - this long discusson with Kristopher Tjalve about ‘the poetic web’ puts my musings to shame, as he considers the mythology of the early internet:

Tis the season for ‘end of year’ lists and all that. The two that demonstrably have the most impact on me: GoodReads Choice and Gosh! Comics’ Best of Year. Of all the awards and critical round-ups and whatnot, these are the two that actually get me to buy lots and lots of books. For GoodReads, it is a fun opportunity to surf the ‘mass market zeitgeist’ in a lot of categories I don’t regularly read. Especially when publishers are smart enough to discount their finalists. For Gosh!’s year’s best list, it is the reverse. Awards as are simply recommendation engines, the trick is to find a recommender with good taste. Gosh! nail it, and I always wind up shopping the hell out of both their adults and kids’ lists.

Chicken Betty’s recipe, c1980

I was discussing favourite fried chicken restaurants with my parents (Top four Shurin family conversations: food we have eaten, food we are currently eating, places we will travel, things we will eat at those places). My mom dropped the bombshell, ‘well, of course we like all those chicken restaurants, because they’re all Chicken Betty’. Which is one of those sentences that makes perfect sense if you’re from Kansas City and is totally befuddling if you aren’t.

The best fried chicken in Kansas City was the singular work of one ‘Chicken Betty’ Lucas. She, herself, was a commodity - poached by a succession of restaurants over time. Chicken Betty would appear, the restaurant would have a chickeny boom time, and then she’d move on to a regional rival. Not unlike the plot of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. If you had a Venn diagram of niche fandoms, local drama, and quality food, this would be at the center. That may also be the Venn diagram of my brain.

…and, in fact, straight into that space - this essay on Vittles about the decline and fall of ‘pie and mash’:

It is a great essay that touches, excellently, on the changes of London’s ‘indigenous’ culture and the power of nostalgia. In full disclosure, Anne and I sought out, and enjoyed, one of London’s traditional East End pie and mash shops. The service was great, the decor was spectacular, the proprietor was super-cute with our small, stinky child, and we really enjoyed it. I’d go so far as to say that we liked absolutely everything about it except for the actual food. It was a brief glimpse into the experience that people miss, but the true, de jure reason for said experience was undoubtedly the worst part. In conclusion, and echoing Jonathan Nunn’s sentiments in the Vittle piece: add some butter.

…and also on ‘awkward Venn diagrams’, I’m doing some research into the cheery intersection of extremism and fantasy, and stumbled on this (JOKE) article: ‘Lovecraftian Campaign has no Cosmic Horror, just Racism’:

Also this (NOT JOKE) article by Adam Roberts on orphans and robots, and why the ‘orphan story structure’ recurs in science fiction and fantasy:

Katee Hui writes about founding the Laces, women’s football, and how a sport can make a family. Katee is amazing, and I’m delighted she has her story out here in the world. Also, books make the best stocking stuffers.