All six books on this year’s Clarke shortlist are about history, and are divisible into two approaches: the books of rupture and the books of continuities. They are also about complicity in history: about war criminals and the children of torturers, about monsters and the worlds they make.

Is Starlings a collection of short stories, a writer’s drawer of odds and ends, or something else entirely?

Expertly translated into English by Sheryl Curtis, Vestiges hasn't yet been picked up by an English-language publisher. This review is by way of voicing my own interest in this book, and the series in general, in the hope that, together, we might convince editors here in the US to bring it over from across the Atlantic.

The world is dark and difficult enough; these comics tell stories in which the monsters come out right and the truly monstrous, the evildoers who fear and oppress them, get what they deserve.

Lee relentlessly reminds us that war is a self-sustaining state, and that the suffering it produces is its intended product.

This gives the comic a loose, effortless tone but at the same time each page is meticulously laid out, perfectly balanced even when Taylor throws in charts, diagrams, or blocks of text.

I’d suggest in fact that Garland’s film is less an adaptation, but something more organic, echoing some of the novel’s central themes, complementing it, an extension of that continuous dream.

I really, really wanted to enjoy the second season of Jessica Jones.

In a world in which people are defined as tools and resources, people will come to understand themselves and others as tools and resources, too.

If Big Fish & Begonia begins as a tale of self-assertion against both the community and the environment, it ends as an allegory for self-sacrifice.