I’m re-reading the critic James Wood’s excellent, readable little book of this title. Every writer should have a copy. There’s a superb...

Not just one  – but I’m happy to put in a plug for David Almond. Read beautiful Skellig. (Amazing, how he does so much with so little!)...

I’ve read pretty much every word George Orwell ever put in print, much of it over and over, and there is no writer I would rather have...

In the course of explaining why Angels in America is seven hours long, Tony Kushner offers a good insight into the myth of the nice...

Catching up with my favorite podcast, Philosophy Bites, I was fascinated to learn that the eerie connections between one of my favorite...

Quite a bit of The Babel Trilogy is about consciousness: what is it, and where does it come from, and how is it possible­—that’s what...

On the contrary – when I was 17, I discovered the philosopher Wittgenstein … He tends to say things like “In propositions thoughts can be...

In my first philosophy class, the professor began by saying something I've been repeating ever since: “Philosophy asks just two...

One minor character in my Ghosts n the Machine is the Slipher Space Telescope. This is me giving a big fat fictional hint to NASA, in...

The short explanation: I’m lazy. I can predict with great confidence that I will not die wishing I had spent more time at my computer....

The Bretz Erratic, a giant rock, plays a minor role in the plot of Ghosts in the Machine, but it doesn’t exist, no—it just seemed like a...

The Babel Trilogy is about consciousness: what is it, and where does it come from, and how is it possible? But that problem is bound up...

No. I was brought up in the Church of England, and I loved (and still love) the language and the music. But when I was 14 I realized...

In The Fire Seekers, Bill Calder is struck by the way similar myths emerge in cultures that have had no contact with one another, and in...

A lot of Americans hate JD Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye because it was forced down their throats as a ‘classic’ at school. I missed...

As detailed in The Fire Seekers, many linguists have thought the Phaistos Disk will never be translated, because it’s a unique artifact –...

Alert Fire Seekers reader (and diver) David Jeffrey just pointed out to me that my description of divers using GPS to map an underwater...

It’s fascinating. Some reviewers have said “The Fire Seekers” is great YA sci-fi. Others (including some who obviously enjoyed the book)...

First, you do the writing. Then, the rewriting and throwing away and rewriting and rewriting. Then, editing, and more rewriting....

On Tuesday, “The Fire Seekers” was ranked around #1,300,000 on Kindle – about typical, for a book that had not yet even been...