Consequences...

Sally Rooney has said she is being forced to withdraw her books from sale in the UK because of her support for the banned organisation Palestine Action.

Her financial support, to be perfectly clear. 

After Palestine Action was banned last year, Rooney said she would use proceeds from her sales to support Palestine Action. Supporting organisations banned under the Terrorism Act is an offence and she subsequently cancelled a trip to the UK to pick up an award, for fear of arrest.

In a high court statement in support of the legal challenge to proscription, warning against its impact on freedom of expression, Rooney said her books could disappear from UK stores and the publication of new works in the UK could be prevented.

Oh, well, people will just have to download it on Kindle then, because the 'ban' is so easily thwarted it might as well not exist. But that won't stop the left screeching about it. 

Her books have been critically acclaimed – she has been described as the voice of a generation – and hugely commercially successful in the UK.

Who by? Her Mum? The books are perile rubbinsh, I know, I sampled a chaper on Kindle to see what all the fuss was about. 

Normal People has sold more than 1m copies, while Conversations With Friends and Beautiful World, Where Are You have each sold more than 500,000. Normal People and Conversations With Friends were adapted by the BBC, and the former racked up 62.7m views, becoming the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020.

In a world where rubbish like 'A Court Of Thorns And Roses' becomes a bestseller, that really doesn't say much. Still the royalties from tv adaptations will keep her from having to live on ramen for a while, eh? 

Rooney said last year that she had been advised by the independent producer of the TV dramatisations that any payment to her for those series, both broadcast before the ban, would be a breach of terrorism laws if it knew or suspected that she was using the royalties to fund Palestine Action.

Ha Ha Ha Ha!  

Her UK and Ireland publisher, Faber, said: “Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work. To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”

I woulsn't be too proud of it if I were you, it's beginning to look a lot like a publishing gimmick to shift mote copies every day. 

Sunday Funnies...

 William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' is missing from this list, and that's a crime!

What Did I Tell You?

 Mote details of Greta Gerwig's adaptation of the Narnia novels have been released over the weekend. And as predicted when I first heard about it, it's gone down like a sold cup of sick with fans of the beloved children's novels. 

Predictably, the luvvies are riding to Greta's rescue, scoffing at the idea that an artist has any responsibility to adapt a work of literature faithfully. But that’s not why she’s doing this, is it? This is why:

Will I watch it when it launches? Sure, because I always have the Disney versions to fall back on. They were perfect!

Just Make It Stop!

Ahh, we're back in the wacky world of science fiction and fantasy, as viewed through the warped lens of Reactormag's genital-obsessed columnists.

Growing up as a queer person in Indonesia meant continually starving for representation.

It’s a Muslim country, no one’s going to stick their heads over that parapet, not if they want to keep the on their shoulders! 

However, when I turn to Western media, more often than not I’m met with disappointment—I find that I cannot relate to the queer characters at all.

Really? It’s just a Western conceit that thinks the only important thing is the sexuality then? 

Recently, my friends shared a post about the Amsterdam Rainbow Dress. I get the intended sentiment. It’s a call for inclusivity and equal rights for everyone in every country in the world. Still, I can’t help but wonder, with a definite sense of bitterness: Is that all these countries are to the people behind this project? Why does it feel like the dress is saying “we are more civilized than you are”? The dress gestures at solidarity, but flattens out nuance and historical reality in a way that feels in keeping with a particularly Western, European brand of paternalism that conveniently turns very real people actively fighting for their own rights into caricatures and passive victims.

Welcome to enlightenment! That’s exactly how it works-you’re a tick in the box to the very people who commissioned this post. 

Why do I, a queer person of color, have my existence reduced to the narrative that “your country is homophobic” and yet in the media, white characters get to be queer and live rich lives without being trapped and confined within the limits of an outsider’s view of their existence?

 Because your country IS homophobic, of course. And that's hardly the worst thing about it, is it?

The graphic novel follows Indu, a trans boy from the moon who struggles with culture shock when he and his adoptive mother move to New Earth. The language barrier makes it difficult for him to connect with his stepfamily and make friends at school, but Indu discovers that New Earth’s queer community are happy to welcome him.

We aren’t just a “developing country.” We aren’t going to be reduced to the neo-colonized tourist traps that have taken over Bali. We are so much more; we are of a rich history and culture that’s under constant threat of being forgotten if we don’t preserve it through our own stories.

You haven’t been able to preserve anything else of your culture in the face of Muslim expansion and conquest, have you? 

Sunday Funnies...

 Of course, we haven't had the real ending to No 11, and I don't think we'll ever get it at this rate....

Hysterics And Technophobes!

There is now a growing realisation that Britain's second-hand bookshops are being pillaged - not by voracious collectors of prized first editions but by Silicon Valley tech firms for a far more insidious purpose.

What are they doing? Buying things. And treating those things as if they owned them, the bastards! 

Today, the Daily Mail explains how millions of second-hand books are being bought in bulk and sent to warehouses across America, where the pages are sliced from the spine before being fed into industrial scanners, harvested for their text, and later destroyed. This process, known as 'destructive scanning', is the latest method of gathering the vast reams of data being used by Big Tech to train its AI chatbots.

I wonder what Longrider's take on this is... 

'It's a moral dilemma,' says Lucy. 'They're my books, my babies. I feel like we've been eaten by the AI monster. It's difficult. 

Then why are you offering them for sale? 

'I want the sale, but not to somebody who will b****r up everybody's books.'

Well, you gave up the right to demand what should happen to them when you sold them! 

Aside from the obvious concerns over copyright - of which more later - there are fears tech firms could be destroying rare books - even the last remaining editions of some historical tomes. As Lucy herself admitted, some of the books purchased from her store are 'collectable and valuable'. 

It would be perfectly ok if a person bought them, read them once (or not at all) and then put them on a shelf never to be taken down again, I suppose? 

'Bulk-buying books just to rip them apart to scan is shocking, but it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the brazen theft of copyright materials by the tech giants,' says Dan Conway, CEO of the Publishers Association.

The books are paid for - thrice, once by the original purchaser, and a second time as second-hand books, so it’s hard to see how authors are being hard done by here. 

Most book-lovers would find the practice of destroying huge numbers of physical volumes stomach-churning. Scenes of grinning young Nazis burning towering pyres of 'un-German' books in university cities across the Third Reich in 1933 are seared in the public memory: a 'cultural genocide' that continues to horrify us.

The books aren’t being destroyed entirely, though! Their content still exists, just in digital format. 

Of course, the AI companies would argue they are doing something different: rather than destroying books to censor the material they contain, as the Nazis did, they are destroying them in order to disseminate their contents more widely.

They would be right to argue that, because they demonstrably are. 

A Difficult Choice For Bookstores....

 

Assuming it actually sees the light of day, where do you put it? On the 'fiction' shelves? Or with the other fantasy selection...

The Key Word Here Is 'Fiction'

Nine of the 10 bestselling fiction paperbacks in the UK this week have one thing in common: a woman is murdered.

So? The big seller is crime novels, someone has to be murdered. I don't want to read a novel about bank fraud, my maths isn't up to it!

While the titles range from historical fiction to domestic noir and police procedurals, each centres on the death of at least one female character.

The key word there being 'fiction', of course, and literature is hardly the main culprit here, movies, tv shoes and even computer games also feature murders of women. 

Only The Correspondent, a novel about the art of letter writing, breaks the pattern.

Wow, that must be a rivetting read! 

The trend was highlighted on Instagram by the author Wendy Jones, who wrote: “So 84% [sic] of the books people bought and read in the UK this week involved a woman being murdered for entertainment. What is going on here?”

But why does commercial fiction keep returning to the same story? Critics argue that repeatedly turning women into victims risks normalising violence against them. Yet the genre’s paradox is that women are also its biggest consumers, with some arguing its appeal may be a way of processing real-world fears.

Longrider weighs in on this 'paradox' too. 

The crime writer Mel McGrath wrote that the genre has, in some ways, moved on from the time of male authors such as Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane killing off women chiefly so the men investigating their deaths could be heroes. “Reading crime fiction written by women remains a powerfully feminist act,” she said. The crime writer and critic Laura Wilson explained that domestic noir is popular at the moment because it reflects “some very real fears”.

No, it's mostly that mystery is the hook here, not the act of murder. 

The novelist Denise Mina traced the appetite back to the broadsheet sellers of 18th-century London, who found that manufactured crimes sold copies so long as the victim fitted a particular profile.

A traditional crime novel, Rader-Day said, wraps up in under 400 pages with the mystery solved and order restored, “not at all like what actual death is like”, which is precisely why it’s so comforting. She said both craft and culture explained why the victim is so often a woman.“Most readers, most consumers, are women too, so if a writer wants to showcase anyone’s anxieties, a woman’s is a good choice – the anxiety that they themselves could become a victim,” she said.

That would imply that horror is popular because people can imagine themselves summoning demons, wouldn't it? And what about sci-fi? 

Niche Interests

“We left Warrington at 5.15am this morning to get here,” Emma tells me, standing in a queue that stretches down Walton Street. It is just after 9am on a Saturday in Oxford, the students are still in bed and the tourists have yet to descend on the city, but this corner of Jericho is already buzzing.

It’s a queue for a new bookshop. That’s a good thing right? 

Oxford is rarely short of literary pilgrims. Every year, visitors flock to the colleges and libraries that shaped writers including JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Iris Murdoch. But this crowd is here for something a little different. Instead of queueing for the Bodleian, they’re swapping recommendations for dragon riders and faerie kingdoms.  

Oh dear. 

The bright pink doors they’re waiting outside belong to Bad Girl Books, the UK’s first romantasy bookshop. The subgenre, blending fantasy and romance, has gone from niche online obsession to one of publishing’s biggest commercial success stories.

Yes my Kindle offers are usually stuffed with these, poorly written barely illiterate smut, but dragons are popular now so slapping a dragon on everything ensures it sells. 

Readers are immersing themselves in sprawling fantasy worlds of “enemies-to-lovers” storylines, where “fated mates” discover they were destined for each other all along, and brooding “shadow daddies” – dark, morally ambiguous male protagonists with supernatural powers – inspire devoted online fandoms.

Well, I have a taste for Laurel K Hamilton myself, but that tends to be rather better written than most of these. But at least it’s getting people reading.

“Last year I read about 100 romantasy books, and I’ve already read 60 this year,” says 22-year-old Izzy, who has been waiting in the queue with her friend since 7.30am. “I used to hate reading when I was in school, but then I discovered romantasy, and realised that there is a whole world of books out there that I really enjoy. It’s an escape from reality.”

And that's got to be a good thing, right? 

Inside, shelves are divided into categories including “Monster Smut”, “Unhinged” and “LGBTQ+”. T-shirts and caps proclaim “I Heart Fictional Men” and “Dibs on the Villain”; tote bags read: “I Like My Books Like I Like My Margaritas – Spicy”, and “My Favourite Colour Is Morally Grey.”

Oh, well, maybe not! 

That Tune's Familiar: Parody Songs

This is a really popular one to parody, and this one in particular is just sublime, as well as handy if you're struggling through the book!

It Shouldn't Be A Competitive Sport!

Every January, thousands of readers log on to Goodreads, Instagram or TikTok and make the same declaration: this is the year I read 50 books. Or 75. Or 100. Screenshots of spreadsheets circulate, templates for tracking pages and percentages are downloaded, friends publicly pledge to “do better” than they did last year.

Why? They aren't, can't be, reading for pleasure. Not if this is what's driving them.  

The appeal is obvious: in a distracted age, reading can easily become crowded out by work, screens and fatigue. Literacy rates in the UK are stagnating: in 2024, around 50% of UK adults read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

What they are describing doesn't seem too pleasurable to me. I love Goodreads for its options to recommend books, and see what others are reading, not for any competitive reducing of reading to a numbers game!

As the UK launches its National Year of Reading, a steady drumbeat of commentary has framed the decline of book culture as a civilisational crisis. Columnists have painted lurid pictures of a post-literate society, in which the shrinking cultural centrality of books represents a slow unravelling of the habits that once underpinned modern public life. In this context, reading targets promise discipline and a sense of progress.

The death of great authors like the sadly missed Dan Simmons at the weekend isn’t helping! 

But do yearly reading goals actually help us read better, or do they risk hollowing out the very activity they claim to protect?

The latter, I fear. What say you, Reader? 

How Is It A ‘Superpower’ If It needs This Level Of Encouragement?

Stormzy called reading a “superpower” as he backed an initiative aimed at encouraging people who don’t see themselves as readers to pick up a book.

What sort of people ‘don’t see themselves as readers?’ you might ask, Reader? Is it once again the demographic that dare not speak its name? 

“Reading helped me when I was young and it still does today,” said Stormzy. “Books have the power to carry you through life.” 

Not as much as being a DEI media darling who can do no wrong in the eyes of the MSM…

“I encourage anyone who doesn’t usually read to pick up a Quick Read – because reading really is a superpower,” he added. “Music and books are both about finding your voice. We are all made of stories – they define who we are.”

If it really was a ‘superpower’ would you have to plug it so hard, or water it down to suit the audience you are aiming at, though? 

“Having never read a book until the age of 24, I wish I had come across Quick Reads sooner,” said Owusu. “They’re accessible, affordable and gentle in their approach, allowing new or lapsed readers to find their way into the pleasure and fulfilment of reading fiction and nonfiction. “I’m excited to be part of their legacy and to add my voice to something that helps people feel confident enough to pick up a book and look forward to spending time with it,” he added.

So what sort of literary masterpieces are you creating? 

Owusu is also the author of That Reminds Me, Losing the Plot, Borderline Fiction and the editor of Safe: 20 Ways to be a Black Man in Britain Today.

 Gosh, I’ll leave you to it…

The Perfect 'Rebellion' For The Modern Generation...

Fan fiction is democracy in its purest, most chaotic form. It’s the people seizing the means of production. Every “what if?” is a tiny revolution.

Yes, some blue-haired nose-ringed creature leeching off a genuine creative to make up a wish-fulfillment screed is a sign of the times, of course. And it's only fitting the 'Guardian' should consider it worthy of a column. 

Because fan fiction isn’t just rewriting, it’s repairing. It’s giving yourself the closure you need when the author won’t.

How very DARE an author write the story they want to write!  

It’s deciding that pain can end differently, that love can be louder, that characters who were doomed in print get to live this time. It’s literature written by people who refused to move on and sometimes these people spell really badly (and that is completely OK). And yes, it’s rebellion.

No it's not. The people of Iran are showing you what rebellion is. It's risk and heartache and peril, not scribbling a different ending to a classic or popular story because it didn't end the way you wanted.  

Against gatekeeping, against prestige, against the assumption that stories only count when they make money. Fan fiction exists because readers loved something so much they refused to let it die.

Who IS this moron, anyway? 

Urooj Ashfaq is a Mumbai-based comedian, writer and actor.

Ah.  

And Yet, Aditya, It's Not The Muslims Afraid In Their Places Of Worship, Is It?

Aditya's been sampling literature for talking points, his usual ones no longer working as they used to...

An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he thinks, how festive. Soon he learns the truth. So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision.

Does it, Aditya? Does it really? Let’s read on, eh? 

Amid this yawning suburbia, Pearson starts to come awake. One evening, he sees an old Volvo up in flames, and an angry mob about to storm a “shabby house”. Inside, he supposes, must be “a released murderer or a paedophile exposed by the local vigilantes”. But no. Out come Muslim women, who have been praying in a makeshift mosque and who must rely on a police line against violence from their own neighbours.

And yet, you seem not to realise that, far from being some Nostradamus-like predictive text, it’s rather got things the wrong way round about exactly whose places of worship are under threat, and who is bearing the brunt of the terror. 

Whether We, The Readers, Would Buy Them Is The Real Issue Though

Waterstones would stock books created using artificial intelligence, the company's boss has said, as long as they were clearly labelled, and if customers wanted them.

And if customers won't buy them, there's no point in stocking them. 

However, James Daunt, a veteran of the bookselling industry, said he personally did not expect that to happen. "There's a huge proliferation of AI-generated content and most of it are not books that we should be selling," he said, but added it would be "up to the reader".

It's ALWAYS up to the reader, in the end. 

Daunt, who is heading into his 36th Christmas season in the book trade, said Waterstones' success had been built on handing more control to individual store managers to serve their own communities. "Head office is there to make life easier," he said. "Make sure the books that they order turn up on time, but do not tell [managers] where to put them."

And that can be a two-edged sword, with managers going rogue because they can, and damaging Waterstones' reputation.

A report published last month by the University of Cambridge , found that more than half of published authors feared being replaced by AI. Two-thirds also said their work had been used without permission or payment to train the large language models which lie behind generative AI tools. But some writers use AI themselves, especially for research, and AI tools are being used to edit novels, and even produce full-length works.

I look forward to one of my favourite author's takes on this... 

Ladies And Gentlemen, I Have Finally Found It!

 The most unbelievably and insufferably arrogant person in the UK! Beating off, I have to say, some pretty strict competition but he did it with ease:

Imagine the astonishing level of self-absorption you have to have to claim children are 'suffering' by not being able to read your works? 

It was against this backdrop (The Taliban's decicion to stop girls attending school, Reader)  that I read about the school in Weymouth, Dorset, that had removed American author Angie Thomas’s wildly popular young adult novel The Hate U Give from its Year 10 reading list, apparently in response to the objection of one parent, former Conservative councillor James Farquharson. While copies of the book would continue to be available in the school library, its removal from classrooms sent a worrying message: that one man’s comfort could be considered more important than the rights of an entire student cohort to access literature that might speak directly to them, never mind that it may contain dangerous or difficult ideas.

They can, of course, still access his scribblings freely, by walking into a bookshop or opening their Kindle and clicking the little shopping trolley icon, he's just lost his ability to have them given no choice but to read it by having schools ram it down their throats... 

The use of my novel, Pigeon English, is also under review at the school, thanks again to Farquharson’s intervention. His objections to my book – which he shared on Facebook having read the first 13 pages and Googled some reviews – centre on its use of profane language and depictions of violence and sexual behaviour.

Well, why on earth would we want children reading that, then? 

Pigeon English explores some of the same themes as The Hate U Give, social injustice chief among them. It draws on my experiences growing up on a diverse and deprived council estate in Luton in the 1980s and 90s, and on the killing of Damilola Taylor, the Nigerian schoolboy stabbed to death in Peckham, London, in 2000.

Sound like a feelgood read. 

The novel was very much directed at an adult readership, which I felt could parse some of its more troubling content and recognise the urgent social questions it posed. I did not predict that it would end up in the hands of schoolchildren or being dissected in classrooms; nor was I consulted when the decision was made in 2015 – rubber-stamped by a Conservative education secretary – to include it on the GCSE curriculum.

Should they have consulted you? This man's ego clearly knows no bounds. As if he'd have said anything but 'Yes please!' 

When Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto was unveiled in 1606 it scandalised Rome; not because it dared to put a face to the newborn Christ but because it showed the dirty feet of the peasants who knelt to venerate him. Centuries later, do those same prudish sensitivities still prevail?

Good god, he's comparing himself to bloody Caravaggio now!  

Does No-one Read For Pleasure Anymore...?

 Or do they just read to see their own desires and worldview reflected in the pages?

Yes, it's Reactormag again. 

For me, reading was always an escape from my world, and a chance to see another, either real or invented. How sad for today's generation, unable to appreciate anything that doesn't 'reflect their reality'.

Guilty Pleasures…

 One of mine is the ‘Gor’ novels of John Norman.. trashy sci-fi to trivial sword and sandal epics to some, deeply misogynistic tracts to others, I love them, even if they are the literature equivalent of Vesta meals - which I also have a fondness for! - I was delighted to find, just the other day, two new ‘Gor’ novels available on Kindle. So glad to have been proved wrong! So of course, I bought them. Though it has to be said, the cover art is sadly no longer as good as the older books. 

And in catching up with Tarl Cabot's quest to resue his kidnapped old flame, I was swiftly reminded that the author is a philosophy professor writing under a pseudonym and has something to observe about modern politics, even in the pages of trashy sci-fi:

Even at the verable age of 94, he's keenly aware of what is going on in the world today, and doesn't pass up the chance to comment on it on his magnum opus.

Yes, Because Nothing Urges Children To Read Better Than A ‘Worthy’ Book With A Mission

This year’s Carnegie medals for children’s writing, awarded on Thursday, brought to light an unexpected trend. At a time of widespread public anxiety about the decline in boys’ reading habits and the rise of the toxic influencers of the online “manosphere”, male friendship and masculinity were front and centre on the shortlist.

Well, if preachy literature can’t solve this, what can? We clearly can’t rely on proper parenting, can we? 

The winner, Margaret McDonald’s superb debut, Glasgow Boys, tells the story of the relationship between two looked-after children on the threshold of adulthood who process trauma in different ways. Banjo’s aggression and Finlay’s avoidance could be seen as two models of dysfunctional masculinity. Luke Palmer’s Play, also on the shortlist, tells a story of male friendship which touches on rape culture and county lines drug gangs, while teenage gang membership is the focus of Brian Conaghan’s Treacle Town.

Ah, remember when children’s literature was full of adventures in far-off lands or fantasy worlds, rather than avoiding getting stabbed by the local imported hoodlums? 

Nathanael Lessore won the Shadower’s Choice medal (voted for by young readers). King of Nothing tells the story of Anton, a pre-GCSE hardman for whom reputation is everything. Anton hangs out with a thuggish crowd whose worldview is shaped by gang culture and Tate-like influencers. The arc of the plot – boisterously comic at first, but increasingly moving – shows how Anton’s developing friendship with the uncoolest boy in the school changes his priorities.

Ugh!  

Though the books were judged for their individual qualities, the panel’s chair, Ros Harding, observes a pendulum-swing in publishing. “We’ve gone from children’s adventure books, where it was always the boy as the hero, then there was a backlash against that, making sure that girls could be the heroes as well, which then maybe led to some boys feeling that things weren’t being written for them.” Now, she says, “another wave of books” is addressing that.

The people they broke something being the best ones to fix it?  

The explosion in so-called toxic masculinity is taking place at the same time as statistics tell us that reading for pleasure, especially among boys, is on the decline.

I wonder why? 

Novels are empathy machines: they invite you to imagine what it might be like to be somebody else. So they are, at least potentially, an antidote to the misogynistic influence of the manosphere and gaming culture.

if they ever perform that function, it’s usually as a side effect, rather than a main plot objective. Children aren’t stupid, and are really good at sensing when they are being patronised and preached to. 

Infiltration Intensifies!

 Once more, I dive into ‘Reactor’ magazine to get an idea of what is coming up in the world of science fiction, and once more, find that fantasy worlds and imagined alien societies for daring heroes and heroines to negotiate takes a back seat to …. this:

Even in the earliest stages of editing the anthology Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I knew the book would open with an epigraph from the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia—where he argues that “the future is queerness’s domain.” Or, put another way: something about queerness is always “not yet here.”

Really? It seems to be omnipresent, these days! Gone are the days I’d make a trip up to ‘Forbidden Planet’ in London to peruse the latest imports, mostly selecting titles by the quality of the artwork on the front cover (a dragon or alien big cat on the cover being a sure clue I’d like it!), secure in the knowledge that they were mostly written to enthrall the reader and sell copies, rather than push some personal sexual agenda. 

Speculative fiction, too, is grounded in thinking about what has been, what is not, and what could be. In sf, we imagine our way into other worlds and other futures! Given that, I think there’s a natural connection between queer/trans life and culture and speculative fiction itself—it’s in those horizons of possibility.

Relentless propaganda is what it is - I'm old enough to remember when sci-fi was a beacon of hope, written by people whose desire was to entertain, not proselytise.