For much of his career H.G. Wells was a founding proponent of what Patrick Parrinder termed “the scientific world-view” — a sense that the nineteenth century liberal order (a balance of power among nation-states preserving the peace, a capitalist world economy) was dead, and that the way forward for the…

It is unsurprising that the early science fiction of H.G. Wells continues to be celebrated much more than any of his later work. The image of a working class degraded to Morlocks, massacring beautiful, hapless Elois in The Time Machine (1894); the note of despair at humanity’s animality in The…

Recently I had occasion to remark how authors’ biographical blurbs tend to cut out the less glamorous details of authors’ pasts — while the very people who do the cutting whine endlessly that the public has an overglamorized image of authorship, as if they were not personally, directly part of…

H.G. Wells, affecting the position of a historian of the twenty-second century casting an eye back at the twentieth, wrote in The Shape of Things to Come that the ordinary newspaper of that time was not so much a news sheet as a poison rag. Every morning the common man…

It is an oft-heard refrain these days that the results yielded by search engines are ever more worthless — that regardless of whether it is Garbage going In, it is pretty much always Garbage that is going Out — and that this is not least because the search engines, because…

I think I will shock no one when I say that, judged as a scene of discourse most of the Internet is a sewer. …

I recall stumbling upon Jamie Kennedy’s documentary Hecklers way back when it first hit cable. To put it mildly it was an imperfect work that did not put Kennedy himself in a particularly good light. The title of the film also gave the impression that he did not know how…

I have long disliked the saying “Expect the unexpected.” It seems I am not completely alone in this dislike. But I am, for the moment, concerned with my particular dislike of the saying. One might as well start with the saying’s origins — in a line from a play by…

When one reads about publishing one every so often runs into some statistic claiming that there are x number of writers — as in “writers of books for the general market” — in the country. “How do they decide that?” one may wonder. As a glance at web sites like…