During the Steam Next Fest, a week-long event featuring demos and previews for upcoming games, one game called out to me from the crowd: the cyberpunk role-playing game ANNO: Mutationem. The trailer alone felt specifically designed to lure me in, with …
Ecologies, empathy, parenting, robots, and unanticipated consequences
Two scifi stories about tech inventions that don’t work out as their designers planned. Ken Liu’s “Quality Time” (from last year) looks into “unsolved problems in home automation” and a friendship at a startup. “Nobel Prize Speech Draft of Paul Winterh…
Mary Beard: ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’
The classics professor and author on being inspired by Mary Douglas and terrified by Beatrix PotterMy earliest reading memoryWhen I was about four, my mother read me Beatrix Potter’s The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit. It was so scary (with the hunter’s …
Burntcoat by Sarah Hall review – love under lockdown
A sculptor considers the meaning of art, sex and disaster, in this masterfully achieved miniature epic set against a deadly virusWhat if the virus had been more deadly, more infectious? What if the deaths in the UK had been in the millions rather than …
‘I just wanted to write something funny for my friends’: Torrey Peters on Detransition, Baby
Her novel caused a storm when it was longlisted for the Women’s prize, and is one of the most talked-about of the year. She talks to a writer and trans dad about LGBTQ+ families and the ‘Sex and the City problem’Torrey Peters did not write Detransition…
‘Bad art friend’: should fiction writers ever lift stories from other people’s lives?
Great writers have always been inspired by friends and lovers, but a viral article has revived the moral arguments around muses. In the age of the internet, does using someone else’s story feel like a violation?Name: The muse.Age: Ancient. Continue rea…
“The Computronic Program-o-Mat was deeply unpopular”
“i am assuming for these purposes that wayne enterprises is a privately held conglomerate…” Kitty Unpretty (previously) lays out a plausible corporate structure for Wayne Enterprises (the fictional company owned by Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman). Highli…
Breakfast at Tiffany’s at 60: the sharp romcom that grows darker with age
Audrey Hepburn’s star-making turn as Holly Golightly remains as luminous as ever in Blake Edwards’ sweetened yet still bittersweet adaptation of Truman Capote’s novelBreakfast at Tiffany’s was a sacred film in my household growing up. My mother’s VHS t…
Bernardine Evaristo picks black authors for London ‘short story stations’
Author teams up with Canary Wharf to distribute short works by five writers during Black History MonthThe award-winning author Bernardine Evaristo has joined forces with the owners of Canary Wharf in London to publish a series of short stories by up-an…
Burntcoat by Sarah Hall review – sex on the eve of destruction
A sculptor recalls her fling with a restaurateur as the world succumbs to a deadly virus in Hall’s urgent lockdown taleThe pandemic novels are coming. While lockdown hovered just out of eyeline in Rachel Cusk’s Second Place and provided a coda to Sally…