It has just enough going on to enjoy as a space-faring adventure romp with no real surprises or mind-twisting concepts to contemplate, which it seems is what my stressed and sleep-deprived brain needed when I read it.
Pondering Utopia: A Fool’s Errand?
Utopias litter the mythological landscape. They crater the philosophical expanse, and they mar the psychological maps. Fiction’s forest is dotted with utopias like delicate, diseased orchids that never quite work.
War: How Conflict Shaped Us Review
I was interested to see what insights I might glean from MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us, but the answer, sadly, was ‘not many.’
A story of Conflict
When I try to write stories and they don’t work, I’m increasingly seeing that the common thread is that they lack a sufficient, permeating conflict.
Stories Come From Somewhere
No, it's not a magical fairyland. No pixie whispers into my brain what I should write next, what stories I ought to tell. Actually, I don't think that very many stories could come from a magical fairyland, if such a place existed. It would be too nice in such a magical place, and stories, at their heart, require a digression from the pleasant or the normal. Otherwise, there would be nothing worth reading, much less writing. Which is not to say that there couldn't be a magical fairyland in which things don't go beautifully, but let's leave that possibility be for the purposes of this discussion.
IGC Publishing 