Bill Nighy: ‘I procrastinate at an Olympic level’
“There is a way of looking at my life and my career as just one long exercise in displacement activity,” sighs Bill Nighy. Growing up, he didn’t…
Bill Nighy: ‘I procrastinate at an Olympic level’
“There is a way of looking at my life and my career as just one long exercise in displacement activity,” sighs Bill Nighy. Growing up, he didn’t…
Sea of Tranquility review: Emily St John Mandel’s time-travel mess is no Station Eleven
Three people, separated by centuries, experience the same, haunting phenomenon. They are each simultaneously in three places at once, hearing and seeing and feeling the same things….
Margaret Atwood: Why we need science fiction
They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are therefore not about Real Life, which ought to lack coincidences…
Cyrano de Bergerac: the original flat-earther
For Cyrano de Bergerac, the space race began in 1657. The 17th Century French novelist, playwright and duelist – and lovelorn inspiration for Edmond Rostand’s play of…
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan review: Handmaid’s Tale for the Squid Game generation
Last year, Rebecca Hogue, a mother whose boyfriend killed her two-year-old son when she was out at work, was found guilty of first-degree murder under Oklahoma’s controversial…
Why Brave New World is a terrifying guidebook to our future
The underlying assumption of the book is that humans are biochemical algorithms, that science can hack the human algorithm, and that technology can then be used to…
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara review: an awe-inspiring work of imagination
About a third of the way through Hanya Yanagihara’s awe-inspiring new novel, the narrator of the section in question – a Hawaiian boy directly descended from the…
Salvaging Starship Titanic, Douglas Adams’s mad interactive folly
It was supposed to be unsinkable: a humorous science fiction game by the most beloved name in humorous science fiction, with a starry voice-cast (including John Cleese…