Your regular reviewers are busily tending to the newest Psmithling and will return anon. In the interim, we present a guest review by Thomas Casey. The Wake: A Novel, Paul Kingsnorth (Graywolf Press, 2015). What if the apocalypse had already happened? Your friends and family dead, your home and city reduced to ash, your language erased, your gods forgotten, and your temples reduced to a few blocks of bleached stone scattered across a grassy field. Your world has ended. That is the case for co...| www.thepsmiths.com
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The Children of Men, P.D.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Cross and the Machine| pk
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (New York Review of Books, 2021). Have you ever sat and stared at the sea? If you’ve been near it, then I’m sure you have. As soon as it hoves into view, our eyes are drawn ineluctably up to that far horizon, that endless undulating plain. Coast-dwelling cultures around the earth have stories and legends about the ocean’s strange magnetism, like some eldritch vista that once beheld deepens and ages the soul, but stare too long and...| www.thepsmiths.com
As I’ve written before, I am an absolute sucker for alternate history. Most of it, unfortunately, is not very good, even by the standards of genre fiction’s transparent prose: the attraction here is really the idea, with all its surprising facets, so the best examples are typically the ones where the idea is so good, the unexpected ramifications so startling at the moment (but so obvious in retrospect), that you can forgive the cardboard characters and lackluster prose.| www.thepsmiths.com
In 2009, two English writers published a manifesto. Out of that manifesto grew a cultural...| Dark Mountain