Over the years, and very much by trial and error, my rather difficult relationship with science fiction has come to work essentially like this: I give a very, very wide berth to everything dystopian and pre/post/apocalyptic; I’ll let myself be tempted by some carefully chosen, strictly past-bound time travel* now and then – and that’s it.
Now, please, let’s not go into whether time travel is proper sci-fi or something else or its own genre, shall we? Let us just observe that my last foray, Murray Leinster’s Time Tunnel,** was published and marketed as such in 1964 – and leave it at that. Continue reading
I’m sure you know how it goes.
They come to you, and say that they have a story, a really good story that you should really write.
I am looking for a book.
And it is 
Well, not quite a full week, if you like, as today is just the sixth day… But I have to say: so far, so good. Last night, quite late (after the loveliest Alice rehearsal) I completed the draft of my fifth story, and took a few notes for things to come… 
I stumbled across Borges’s Shakespeare’s Memory a few years ago, while on a quest for memory-themed readings. And I have to say, it was a rather intricate kind of “stumbling”, because I became aware of the story only to find that, for some reason, it was the one piece missing from my mother’s supposedly Complete Works of Borges in Italian translation… 
For the first time in ages, I’ve listened to an audiobook. No, really – audiobooks and I… I absolutely love the idea in principle, only I find myself easily distracted by details. I begin to wonder about the exact lie of the land, the pigments that would have been used to dye a particular kind of silk, the sort of face this or that character would have… and by the time I come back from my wanderings, the narrator has gone ahead.
Scribblings 