In the latest
edition of For Whom The Book Tolls, Ken Ford Powell and I pitch a couple of
recent must-read books to each other.
Ken talks about The Spittle Of Zimolax, a between-the-wars mystery featuring
an intrepid female sleuth working for MI5 in pursuit of a tantalisngly well-imagined
McGuffin.
And I pitch to
Ken the great Polish sci-fi novel ‘Solaris’ by Stanislaus Lem (1921 – 2006). Much-filmed, Solaris is that rare thing – a
book that contains multitudes of other books, a sort of Borgesian multibrary. It’s not ‘just’ science fiction, it’s a ghost
story, a heartbreaking love story, a political satire, an enquiry into
knowledge and how we think about the world, an exploration of consciousness, a
warning on the dangers of AI – virtually everything that disturbs us about our
contemporary world is contained within it, and it was first published in 1961.
It also
provides the cultural missing link between George Clooney, a visionary Russian
film director, and the Sex Pistols . . .
How,
exactly? You’ll have to listen to the
podcast . . .
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