December 2011
20 posts
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Extracts from Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First...
The following was originally published in 1931. I found it remarkably prescient.In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time...
November 2011
18 posts
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“Meanwhile, Bramanti went on: “Sublime Hierogam of the Chemical Wedding,...”
– Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
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An Instance of the Fingerpost (Iain Pears, 1997)
The full-immersion historical novel isn’t an easy one to get right. It’s easy to get bogged down in irrelevant contemporary details, info-dumps in the form of history lessons, archaic speech. Or it can be a failure of overarching style, as novels written in the 18th and 19th centuries in particular (popular periods for period books) are for the most part extremely well-structured, a...
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“If anyone can achieve power, then all will try and government becomes a mere...”
– Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
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“When Sir Philip Sidney was making the grand tour, three centuries ago, he came...”
– Harper’s (1871)
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“O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river.
Our...”
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mirror cube "invisible" treehouse →
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“My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled...”
– Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
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kill switch →
PROTECT IP is a lunatic proposal, penned by a dinosauric industry concerned solely with the preservation of its own profits. It will do nothing to curb piracy while at the same time eroding fundamental freedoms of the internet.
The only people who can possibly be in favor of this bill are either ignorant of its implications or stand to gain by its passage. This desperate power grab by a...