Edmund Gordon

In M. John Harrison’s​ short story ‘The Crisis’, first published in 2017, the world has been invaded by aliens that look like ‘stalks of fleshy, weak rhubarb’. Except they might not be aliens; it might not be an invasion. Nobody’s quite sure what they are, or where they’ve come from, or whether they’re even ‘here’ in the...

In 1936​, two very different novels about plantation culture and the Southern experience of the Civil War received verdicts from the New York Times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – with its cast of gallant gentlemen and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!...

Iwas​ a competent name-caller and a precocious smoker, but my schoolboy talents stopped short of anything that involved a ball. Catering to my eight-year-old son’s tennis abilities has involved a serious learning curve. The atmosphere on the London and South-East nine and under circuit can be surprisingly intense. Pint-sized competitors gather outside the clubhouse, doing warm-up...

There are​ approximately twenty billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that...

Fiction​ about creative writing programmes is always vulnerable to accusations of navel-gazing. Camille Bordas has, however, provided her new novel with an alibi. The Material follows the staff and students on the ‘MFA in stand-up’ at an unnamed Chicago university over the last day of the autumn term. It’s a clever conceit, giving the eternal question about writing...