You sucked on those mineralized / meteorites, eyes shining silver, and they named you / Star Eater.

Some scholars of prosimetric charms point to the order of invocation in this haibun as similar to her subsequent summoning of Erishkigal, first lady of the Underworld.

Back in 2005, the journalist Thomas L. Friedman championed the wave of globalisation in the 21st century in his book The World Is Flat. Today, that title’s more notable for its shortcomings than its innate truths. As much as we’d like to believe it, our planet isn’t flat: it’s a treacherous terrain of unequal opportunities. Nevertheless, slowly if not surely, the axis of power is tilting. It’s shifting our lands closer, chipping away at our borders, making them porous enough that if we prick up our ears, we can hear each other speak our stories.  And it’s changing the light, so a few more of us may have our time in the sun.

In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, the critic and reviewer Paul Kincaid joins Aisha and Dan to discuss how and why critics persevere in their work, what changes about it as the platforms and delivery mechanisms that surround criticism shift, and the challenges that face those writers who seek to collect or look back on their previous work. He also discusses A Traveller In Time, the forthcoming volume of reviews and essays by the late Maureen Kincaid Speller, a founding critical friend—and Paul’s wife of more than thirty years. Alongside memories of Maureen and her