playpen posts

• at 13:09 on 03-06-2010

  All this seems based on the assumption that The Anubis Gates is steampunk. Given the lack of divergent steam-powered technology with a Victorian aesthetic involved in the book I'm ...

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• at 16:29 on 02-06-2010

  There's just as much scope for saying "it's just more and more layers all the way down forever" as there is for saying "what's under the layer is in fact the real truth".</blockquo...

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• at 15:59 on 02-06-2010

  I've read Illuminatus and Lot 49, but long enough ago (ie more than a decade) that I evidently don't remember them that clearly. Not read Drood. The examples in my mind, because I have read th...

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• at 14:57 on 02-06-2010

  I think there's a difference between individual characters (or indeed the reader) not being able to discern the truth because of insane complexity, and there literally not being any truth to d...

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• at 14:03 on 02-06-2010

  Well, perhaps I should just say "the world can be made sense of" versus "the world ultimately cannot be made sense of". I've not read The Anubis Gates, but I would put almost all secret...

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• at 13:25 on 02-06-2010

  Hmm, I think I'd say that technofantasy, retrofuturism and neo-victorianism as aesthetic principles, if deployed even half self-consciously, imply a set of underlying ideas and philosophies. (...

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