Awen Publications

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...

In Rob Latham’s Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014) the field of ecocriticism was conspicuous by its absence. That gap could have...

The Telling is the last of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, set in a galaxy in which numerous planets, including Terra, have been...

Since its first publication in 2015, Arran Stibbe’s Ecolinguistics has been hugely influential in research in this field. The book’s...