- The Millions : A Year in Reading: 2014 –
- Best Books of 2014 : NPR –
- Emic, Etic, and the depiction of Otherness in SFF | Safe – SFF writers depict aliens and fairies in loving detail, giving them whole histories and complex societies and yet casually dismiss the Others in their midst with stereotypes, tired tropes that do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. This recursive, ouroboros-type, self-perpetuating mythology makes it obvious that the writer has been watching TV as research.
- Top Ten Tips for Being a Vigilante On a Budget – My friends and I got into a discussion on vigilantes this past weekend, or, more specifically, what it would be like to be Batman on a budget. It was fun throwing ridiculous ideas into the air but I started to really think about it.
- Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich: ‘an example of the almost-lost art of romantic townscape’ | Municipal Dreams – Kate Macintosh designed Dawson’s Heights back in the Sixties when she was just 26 years old. If she weren’t very much alive and kicking – and still fighting the cause of high quality social housing – I’d call it a worthy memorial. It remains much more than that in any case. Beloved by architectural groupies and a striking presence on the local skyline, most importantly it has provided a decent home to many.
- The Wire – Drexciya: Fear Of A Wet Planet –
Articles with the Tag London
London calling
Curt Purcell, of the excellent pulp/weird fiction/horror/sci-fi/etc blog Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror has been inspired to explore “the ultimate urban setting, the original Big Bad City, the real Metropolis: London”. The list of books he plans to read is interesting in its diversity:
Here’s a listing of what I’ve set aside in my to-read stacks. I don’t plan to read these in any particular order, and I may not get to all of them this time around. In any case:
- Soft City by Jonathan Raban
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- London: A Pilgrimage by Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold
- The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
- The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
- At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
- Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke
- London Under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman
- London Dossier by Len Deighton
- Burden of Proof (retitled Villain) by James Barlow
- The Long Firm by Jake Arnott (also with something about the BBC television adaptation)
- Tainted Love by Stewart Home
- The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman
- SAM 7 by Richard Cox
- The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
- Mother London by Michael Moorcock
- London Fields by Martin Amis
- Something from the Nightside by Simon R. Green
- London Revenant by Conrad Williams
- Caballistics, Inc. from 2000 AD
It’s a list that can be almost infinitely extended, because there are few cities that have had such a hold on the public imagination as London. Sure, every big city has literature associated with it –even Amsterdam has writers associated with it, like Simon Carmiggelt– but London is different in that its attraction is worldwide, perhaps matched only by New York. Even Rome is only a village compared to London, as Nancy Mitford teased. Unfortunately, that does result into a certain amount of arrogance and navelgazing on the part of the London based media and literati circles, the illusion that because London is so important, they and everything they do is important.