Awen Publications

It follows the true story of Facebook employee Frances Haugen’s leaking of inside information – the ‘Facebook Files’ – to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz.

David Lodge is my favourite comic novelist. Being a comic novelist is evidently a good qualification for writing enjoyable literary criticism.

I’ve had an active interest in the Pacific islands and their peoples since I travelled in that region in 2007 with plans for a new novel in mind. I had wanted to island-hop by air between several archipelagos, but the airline routes didn’t really allow this; in the end I visited just two archipelagos, both French-speaking: the Society Islands and New Caledonia. The main island of the former is Tahiti, which enjoys a fame in world history out of all proportion to its size: it’

One of the more immediately obvious impacts of human action on the natural world is roadkill. It always upsets me to see the flattened and mutilated badgers, muntjacs, rabbits, pheasants. Three weeks ago the impact struck closer to home: our beloved cat, Gwen, just four years old, in perfect health, and with a tremendous zest for life. We don’t know exactly where Gwen died; she was left on a vet’s doorstep a mile away. But her death on the road put me in mind of a story by

Among my very favourite science fiction novels are those by David Zindell, beginning with Neverness, centred on the eponymous ice-planet city that’s home to an order of starship pilots skilled in the high mathematics of navigating hyperspace. After Neverness came a trilogy with the same setting: The Broken God, The Wild, and War in Heaven. Twenty-five years after War in Heaven, Zindell published a fifth novel in this sequence, The Remembrancer’s Tale. There was an amazing a

Naomi Klein’s superb book Doppelganger (2023) sheds light on complex issues of communication and leadership in today's circumstances of the mass production of false information. The book was born of Klein’s distress at being repeatedly confused with Noami Wolf. Both women had started out as right-on liberal journalists, but in the covid pandemic Wolf became a celebrated proponent of conspiracy theories, beginning with antivax covid scepticism, and a frequent guest on Steve Ba

The title of this year’s gathering of the Centre for Narrative Leadership, convened by Geoff Mead, was ‘Dancing with Dragons’. Some of the ‘dragons’ in question are aspects of our own psyche, to be engaged with through inner work. But there are also some fearsome dragons out there in the world. The gathering's first session was a seminar about cybercrime, and how to protect yourself against it, by cybersecurity expert Ed Hare. Another session looked at AI. For me, the problem

The recent heatwave – more intense in North India, with temperatures in the mid-forties in Delhi – has put me in mind of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, which begins with an extreme heatwave in North India. When I reviewed Sixty Days and Counting, the final volume of Robinson’s trilogy about climate change, in Vector in 2008, I expressed disappointment that he’d shown us only the beginning of both the effects of climate change and humankind’s grappli

This volume in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series gathers stories mainly about extreme weather, but includes also some other ecological subjects: a tidal whirlpool (Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström); swarming locusts (Doris Lessing’s ‘A Mild Attack of Locusts’); earthquakes (Margaret St Clair’s ‘The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes); aggressive birds (Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’). In all the selected stories the phenomena in question are in some sense ‘weird’

In Rob Latham’s Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014) the field of ecocriticism was conspicuous by its absence. That gap could have been nicely filled by Gerry Canavan’s Introduction to Green Planets, or indeed Latham’s own contribution to this book. Ecocriticism and SF may have been reluctant bedmates, but in this book we see an explicit insemination of SF criticism with ecocritical thinking. Not only that, Canavan argues that science fiction itself is an ideal means of