“... perpetual burrowing reminded me of the fractal architecture of the Elizabethan palace contrived by Michael Moorcock for his Spenserian 1978 novel, Gloriana, or The Unfulfill’d Queen. Moorcock, in his turn, was paying his respects to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Being outside the literary mainstream, and seeing the ...”

“... which many, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Lem’s most crucial English translator, Michael Kandel, claim as their favourite, and the paranoid-picaresque novels Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress, which as a teenage reader I made my talismans.The preoccupations of Lem Two resemble those of Lem One. The ...”

“... Ford and Lewis, to the drowned worlds of J.G. Ballard and Will Self, the dystopian multiverses of Michael Moorcock and China Miéville. Fredric Jameson, considering postmodernism, talks about the ‘hysterical sublime’: a sort of Gothic rapture in contemplation of lastness, the voluntary abdication of power to superior aliens. This was heady stuff for ...”