The Albigensian Crusade, Jonathan Sumption (Faber & Faber, 1978).| www.thepsmiths.com
Our universe is fractally strange, and so are our societies. This is a post dedicated to works of non-fiction which, if you close your eyes or change the names, give the same imaginative thrill as the most daring speculative fiction.| www.thepsmiths.com
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
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard (Viking, 2011). We once lived for a few years in another part of the country. It was nice in a lot of ways — I have fond memories of that time, and not just because two of my babies were born there — but it was also| 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