Authors Electric

I may as well say it straight out: I hate cities. I hate the press of people, the lack of greenery, the rubbish, the exhaust fumes, the blank faces. But you can’t travel these days (or is it those days?) without encountering our huge conurbations. It’s reckoned that for millennia the average size of human communities was one hundred and fifty people. You knew everyone, and they knew you. Outsiders stood out immediately. But now? Cities can be absolutely enormous. Granted, there is some beautiful architecture, which wouldn’t be feasible for only a few hundred people, but there’s a lot of really awful stuff too. Shanghai China was a shock. We travelled by bullet train from Xi’an (population over 8 million) to Chengdu (population over 16 million), past various other enormous cities, their modern skyscrapers clustered together like children’s building bricks. All the new cities are built to the same plan, although they all look very different as the designs are imaginative and many-colou...

There are a handful of books that made a big impression on me as a teenager. The King Must Die , by Mary Renault, and  The Lost World , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, are the two that had the biggest impact. Both of these are now available as e-books, and I’ve re-read both recently on my Kindle. In the last few years I’ve visited the settings for both these books; one was a bit of a disappointment, and the other was far more impressive than I’d ever expected. and             The King Must Die is a brilliant book, narrated by Theseus and covering his time in Crete as a bull-dancer. Theseus is very much of his time and place; supernatural explanations for geological phenomena seem obvious to him, and his belief that he is the son of Poseidon perfectly plausible. Nevertheless, everything that occurs in the book happens for scientific reasons, and there is no supernatural element at all. I don’t think I’ve ever read somethin...