Current coolness around the literary net.
Updated on Project Gutenberg: The Door Through Space (1961) by Marion Zimmer Bradley.
… across half a Galaxy, the Terran Empire maintains its sovereignty with the consent of the governed. It is a peaceful reign, held by compact and not by conquest. Again and again, when rebellion threatens the Terran Peace, the natives of the rebellious world have turned against their own people and sided with the men of Terra; not from fear, but from a sense of dedication.
There has never been open war. The battle for these worlds is fought in the minds of a few men who stand between worlds; bound to one world by interest, loyalties and allegiance; bound to the other by love.
Such a world is Wolf. Such a man was Race Cargill of the Terran Secret Service.
“Some love of the new and marvellous.” at Mapping the Marvelous.
[Charles] Darwin - whose 200th birthday we are celebrating this year - was asked by his half-cousin Francis Galton to fill out a seven-page questionnaire in 1873. Galton carried out a survey of the mental attributes of scientific men, intending to identify the ‘genius’ or talent for science that, as he believed, characterised the British nation (published as English Men of Science, Their Nature and Nurture in 1874).
“The prose style that launched a revolution” at the Guardian Books Blog.
Re-reading The Origin of Species, it’s fascinating to see what a cautious kind of iconoclast Darwin was.
“What George Orwell would make of our financial ‘apocalypse’” at Telegraph.co.uk.
A flick through the great author’s work soon puts paid to self pity, argues Michael Deacon
“Raising a Glass to Mr Poe” by Neil Gaiman.
It’s Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th birthday today. And while I twittered a link to this, it occurs to me that I should have blogged it too. It’s an essay I wrote as an introduction for a collected volume of Poe stories (now on deep discount at Barnes and Noble):
I met Poe first in an anthology with a title like “Fifty Stories for Boys.” I was eleven, and the story was “Hop-Frog,” that remarkable tale of terrible revenge, which sat incongruously beside the tales of boys having adventures of desert islands or discovering secret plans hidden inside hollowed-out vegetables. As the king and his seven courtiers, tarred and chained, were hauled upwards, as the jester they had called Hop-Frog clambered up the chain, holding his burning torch, I found myself astonished and elated by the appropriateness of his monstrous revenge.[…]
“The Elephant” by Aravind Adiga, fiction in the New Yorker.
All the employees of the furniture shop had gathered in a semicircle around Mr. Ganesh Pai’s table. It was a special day: Mrs. Engineer had come to the shop in person.
She had seen her TV table, and now she was approaching Mr. Pai’s desk to finalize the deal.
His face was smeared with sandalwood, and he wore a loose-fitting silk shirt through which a dark triangle of chest hair stuck out. On the wall behind his chair he had hung gold foil images of Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, and the fat elephant god, Ganapati. An incense stick smoked below the images.
Mrs. Engineer sat down slowly at the desk. Mr. Pai reached into his drawer, then held out four red cards to her. Mrs. Engineer paused, bit her lip, and snatched at one of the cards.[…]
