Happy Lord of the Rings Day
I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost…
fantasy fiction
15 posts
Happy Lord of the Rings Day
War is on all our minds these days. There is a war happening in Ukraine and something barely resembling a war (because it’s a genocide) in Gaza. Governments have been fond of casting our collective re…
Lord of the Rings Day
Here's wishing you a Happy Lord of the Rings Day! (Previous editions: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014.) On this day in the book, Frodo, Sam and Smeagol (with help from Gandalf, Aragon, Gimli, L…
Some good books I read recently
Since January 2020 Read 1. Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin's Sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko 2. Every Creature Has a Story, Janaki Lenin 3. The Writing Life, Annie Dillard 4. Half-Life:…
Lord of the Rings Day
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! (Previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014) Every year I pen a commemorative piece about Lord of the Rings, and share something about the books and films t…
The calculus of creative discipline
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building. World-building is dull. World-building literalises the urge to invent. World-building gives an unnece…
Hard sci-fi
Come November, I will be at the Bangalore Literary Festival in conversation with Sri Lankan sci-fi author Navin Weeraratne. I am told Navin – "like you," according to one of the organisers –…
Happy Lord of the Rings Day!
The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series exhibited a rabid yet desirable iconoclasm, through which its author Steven Erikson elucidated every trope of epic fantasy and then shit on it. I came out…
'Mantra sciences' is just poor fantasy
I don't know how the author of a piece in the Times of India managed to keep a straight face when introducing a school based on Vedic rituals that would "show the way" to curing diseases…
Some notes and updates
Four years of the Higgs boson, live-tweeting and timezones, new music, and quickly reviewing an Erikson book.…
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you
The LotR trilogy made for the first modern great epic fantasy, its guiding light so very bright that even those who came after struggled to match its success.…
The neuroscience of how you enter your fantasy-realms
If you grew up reading Harry Potter (or Lord of the Rings, as the case may be), chances are you'd have liked to move to the world of Hogwarts (or Middle Earth), and spent time play-acting scenes i…