Mark Charan Newton

Just a few thoughts on symbolism. I’m currently re-reading Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series, and I’m really fascinated by the use of symbolism. I won’t go into detail here, but there are good essays here and here if you’re interested. Now, is it me, or are symbols totally out of vogue [...]

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According to this source, Nasa’s probe to Mars that was launched nine months ago was stocked with our literary visions of the red planet.
The compilation contains work by such giants of science fiction as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Paul Anderson and Arthur C Clarke. But it also includes early classics such as H G Wells’s [...]

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Some of you might know I’ve an active interest in Buddhism. I’m really not someone to get involved in political view on this blog, but it’s worth knowing a few things such as commented here. I’ll quote big chunks, because he’s more eloquent than me on this subject! I feel the need to put this [...]

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I don’t know about you, but I’m amazed and fractionally suspicious of anyone who manages to read several books in a week. I was happy to find this article about the joys of reading slowly, and I utterly agree.
If a book is worth reading, it must be absorbed, sentence by sentence, which often means re-reading [...]

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Continuing the path to publication discussion, here’s the follow up from having an idea of the types of books that sell.
Now you’ve written something. You’ve chucked out your TV, trimmed your social life so you can get things down on paper. It’s a full novel now, not a patchwork of ideas. It’s all the way through. [...]

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Darren, master of UKSF Book News, mentioned that I ought to blog about the process of my path to publication and what happens when the book is bought. To shed light on things in the industry. I’m all for this.
One of the things I’ve learned from writing, as well as being an editor at Solaris, and [...]

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An interesting piece, in which Zadie Smith says that entrants into a story competition aren’t good enough. So no one wins.
This is a difficult thing to write. Just like everybody, we at The Willesden Herald are concerned about the state of contemporary literature. We are depressed by the cookie-cutter process of contemporary publishing, the lack [...]

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Much to pick apart here. This point in particular stayed in the mind:
…prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in EO Wilson’s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d “L’Oreal” already exists well [...]

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I read this and felt it was a great shame indeed. M John Harrison has provided one of the best blogs on the Interwebs. It was like a writer’s notebook, and a great insight into the head of a very important man in the industry, although he’d maybe hate me for calling him ‘a man [...]

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This isn’t going to be a coherent review, because, for me, it wouldn’t suit the book. The Alexandria Quartet comprises of four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. The first two are the most tightly linked, for everything you know in Justine is looked at from another angle, although still from the same narrator. Mountolive [...]

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