War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective responses – such as they are – to climate change, antimicrobial resistance, and water crises as wars. In every nationalist …
Tag archives: fantasy fiction
Lord of the Rings Day
Here’s wishing you a Happy Lord of the Rings Day! (Previous editions: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.) On this day in the book, Frodo, Sam and Smeagol (with help from Gandalf, Aragon, Gimli, Legolas, Faramir, Eowyn, Theoden, Eomer, Treebeard and the Ents, Meriadoc, Peregrin, Galadriel, Arwen and many, many others) destroyed the One Ring in …
Some good books I read recently
Since January 2020 Read Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper, Lyudmila PavlichenkoEvery Creature Has a Story, Janaki LeninThe Writing Life, Annie DillardHalf-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist, Frank CloseShoes of the Dead, Kota NeelimaThe Overstory, Richard PowersWild and Wilful, Neha SinhaDifficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, Helen LewisHer Body …
Lord of the Rings Day
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! (Previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014) Every year I pen a commemorative piece about Lord of the Rings, and share something about the books and films that I think about nearly every day week. This year, I don’t have the strength, thanks to the workload …
The calculus of creative discipline
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnecessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World-building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it …
Hard sci-fi
Come November, I will be at the Bangalore Literary Festival in conversation with Sri Lankan sci-fi author Navin Weeraratne. I am told Navin – “like you,” according to one of the organisers – is a proponent of hard sci-fi, the science fiction subgenre that draws upon legitimate scientific ideas and principles. A less obsessive reader …
Happy Lord of the Rings Day!
The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out of reading the series feeling like nothing could surprise me anymore except some other Erikson fare. The man himself might not …
‘Mantra sciences’ is just poor fantasy
I don’t know how the author of a piece in the Times of India managed to keep a straight face when introducing a school based on Vedic rituals that would “show the way” to curing diseases like cancer. Even the more honest scientific studies that are regularly accompanied by press releases proclaiming “the paper is …
Some notes and updates
Four years of the Higgs boson, live-tweeting and timezones, new music, and quickly reviewing an Erikson book.
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you
The LotR trilogy made for the first modern great epic fantasy, its guiding light so very bright that even those who came after struggled to match its success.