Fiction
A collection of 26 posts
The Case for Nabokov
An even moderately careful reading of Lolita should make it quite clear that it’s anything but a “celebration” of child rape.
Policing the Creative Imagination
If sensitivity readers become a publishing institution, they will only incentivize more cautious, conservative, and ideologically homogenous books.
Michel Houellebecq: Prophet or Troll?
Houellebecq depicts a Europe where French culture is a bad joke.
Young Adult Fiction's Online Commissars
Orwell warned that liberty of thought—and literature with it—is endangered when writers in free countries adopt a “totalitarian outlook.”
Headline Rhymes
The Forgotten Story of How "Punching Up" Harmed the Science-Fiction/Fantasy World
Drama in the sci-fi/fantasy fandom may not be of great consequence for larger society (though the politicization of culture is a real and spreading problem).
"Canada Has Gone Mad": Indigenous Representation and the Hounding of Angie Abdou
Abdou responded to the advice she got by writing a different kind of book altogether. “These were big edits,” she says. “I now had a ghost story without a ghost.”
What if the Industrial Revolution Happened to Rome?
What, I wondered, would have happened had Jesus emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution?
Read Houellebecq To Free Your Mind
Houellebecq has grave doubts about the net effect of the sexual revolution on human well-being.
Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle: Science, Commerce, Freedom, and the Origins of Modernity
They witnessed the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the siege of Vienna, ending a thousand years of implacable Islamic expansion.