2018 Frankfurt Book Fair Last week I was bedazzled by the masses of people and hundreds of thousands of books at the Frankfurt Book Fair, reputed as the biggest book fair in the world. Six huge buildings located at the Messe exhibition grounds were packed with booths of publishers from all over the [...]
An early draft (deleted later) of my novel, Jellyfish Have Eyes, started with the discovery of a letter in which Ricardo, a champion of basic science, bemoaned rotting in jail for the dubious felony of using government funds to perform basic research considered irrelevant. Ricardo blamed the “Relevancers” – a faceless, abstract group – for [...]
The other day, I read excerpts from an amazing novel called Erewhon by Samuel Butler, published first anonymously in 1872. I was intrigued by the title, which turns out to be the name of a fictional country meaning “nowhere” spelled backwards with the letters “h” and “w” transposed. The novel is a satire on Victorian [...]
