Tags: author

Authors Apart

Another handy list of where you can get works published by A Book Apart authors.

Authors Together

In 2024, A Book Apart closed its doors after publishing a much-loved collection of more than 50 brief books for people who make websites. The rights to each book have reverted to the authors — hi, that’s us — and we’ve put together this semi-official directory to help you find our books in their new homes.

…now including Going Offline.

I read Madeline Miller’s Circe last year. I loved it. It was my favourite fiction book I read that year.

Reading Circe kicked off a bit of a reading spree for me. I sought out other retellings of Greek myths. There’s no shortage of good books out there from Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Jennifer Saint, Claire Heywood, Claire North, and more.

The obvious difference between these retellings and the older accounts by Homer, Ovid and the lads is to re-centre the women in these stories. There’s a rich seam of narratives to be mined between the lines of the Greek myths.

But what’s fascinating to me is to see how these modern interpretations differ from one another. Sometimes I’ll finish one book, then pick up another that tells the same story from a very different angle.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic.

Take Perseus. Please.

The excellent Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes tells the story of Medusa. There’s magic a-plenty. In fact, Perseus himself is little more than a clueless bumbler who wouldn’t last a minute without divine interventation.

The Shadow Of Perseus by Claire Heywood also tells Medusa’s story. But this time there’s no magic whatsoever. The narrative is driven not by gods and goddesses, but by the force of toxic masculinity.

Pat Barker tells the story of the Trojan war in her Women Of Troy series. She keeps it grounded and gritty. When Natalie Haynes tells the same story in A Thousand Ships, the people in it are little more than playthings of the gods.

Then there are the books with just a light touch of the supernatural. While Madeline Miller’s Circe was necessarily imbued with magic, her first novel The Song Of Achilles keeps it mostly under wraps. The supernatural is there, but it doesn’t propel the narrative.

Claire North has a trilogy of books called the Songs of Penelope, retelling the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective (like Margaret Atwood did in The Penelopiad). On the face of it, these seem to fall on the supernatural side; each book is narrated by a different deity. But the gods are strangely powerless. Everyone believes in them, but they themselves behave in a non-interventionist way. As though they didn’t exist at all.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to have other shared myths retold with or without magic.

How would the Marvel universe look if it were grounded in reality? Can you retell Harry Potter as the goings-on at a cult school for the delusional? What would Star Wars be like without the Force? (although I guess Andor already answers that one)

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading some modern takes on Greek myths, here’s a list of books for you:

• Madeline Miller
  1. The Song Of Achilles
  2. Circe
• Natalie Haynes
  1. A Thousand Ships
  2. Stone Blind
• Pat Barker
  1. The Silence Of The Girls
  2. The Women Of Troy
  3. The Voyage Home
• Claire North
  1. Ithica
  2. House Of Odysseus
  3. The Last Song Of Penelope
• Jennifer Saint
  1. Ariadne
  2. Elektra
  3. Atalanta
• Claire Heywood
  1. The Shadow Of Perseus
  2. Daughters Of Sparta
• Costanza Casati
  1. Clytemnestra
• Margaret Atwood
  1. The Penelopiad

What’s the fun in writing on the internet anymore?

The dark forest expands:

To put any thoughtful labour into crafting words online today is to watch them get sucked up, repurposed, and often monetized by someone else. It feels a bit like a digital wasteland; overrun with pirates, replete with armies of robots regurgitating everything into a gooey cocktail of digital sludge.

Premonition of a Dragon Moon

I like the sound of Robin’s next book, and I like this little website about it that he’s updating over time.

Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? – Terence Eden’s Blog

I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.

Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte

The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.

ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine

But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.

ignore the code: Bookfeed.io

Such an elegant idea!

Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.

Small pieces, loosely joined.

An Ocean of Books

What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.

This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.

Quarantine Book Club

Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!

A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.

Why Are Accessible Websites so Hard to Build? | CSS-Tricks

I reckon a lot of websites have bad accessibility not because folks don’t care, but because they don’t know there’s an issue in the first place.

The headline is begging the question (I don’t think accessible websites are so hard to build), but I agree with Robin’s idea:

What if our text editors caught accessibility issues and showed them to us during development?

This is something that Hidde has been talking about recently too, looking at content management systems.

The Philip K Dick book I love most… | Books | The Guardian

Three authors pick their favourite book by Philip K Dick:

• Nicola Barker: Puttering About in a Small Land
• Michael Moorcock: Time Out of Joint
• Adam Roberts: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

After the eclipse I climbed down from the hilltop and reconnected with the world. That’s when I heard the news. Brian Aldiss had passed away.

He had a good innings. A very good innings. He lived to 92 and was writing right up to the end.

I’m trying to remember the first thing I read by Brian Aldiss. I think it might have been The Billion Year Spree, his encyclopaedia of science fiction. The library in my hometown had a copy when I was growing up, and I was devouring everything SF-related.

Decades later I had the great pleasure of meeting the man. It was 2012 and I was in charge of putting together the line-up for that year’s dConstruct. I had the brilliant Lauren Beukes on the line-up all the way from South Africa and I thought it would be fun to organise some kind of sci-fi author event the evening before. Well, one thing led to another: Rifa introduced me to Tim Aldiss, who passed along a request to his father, who kindly agreed to come to Brighton for the event. Then Brighton-based Jeff Noon came on board. The end result was an hour and a half in the company of three fantastic—and fantastically different—authors.

I had the huge honour of moderating the event. Here’s the transcript of that evening and here’s the audio.

That evening and the subsequent dConstruct talks—including the mighty James Burke—combined to create one of the greatest weekends of my life. Seriously. I thought it was just me, but Chris has also written about how special that author event was.

Brian Aldiss was simply wonderful that evening. He regaled us with the most marvellous stories, at times hilarious, at other times incredibly touching. He was a true gentleman.

I’m so grateful that I’ll always have the memory of that evening. I’m also very grateful that I have so many Brian Aldiss books still to read.

I’ve barely made a dent into the ludicrously prolific output of the man. I’ve read just some of his books:

• Non-stop—I’m a sucker for generation starship stories,
• Hothouse—ludicrously lush and trippy,
• Greybeard—a grim vision of a childless world before Children Of Men,
• The Hand-reared Boy—filthy, honest and beautifully written,
• Heliconia Spring—a deep-time epic …and I haven’t even read the next two books in the series!

Then there are the short stories. Hundreds of ‘em! Most famously Super-Toys Last All Summer Long—inspiration for the Kubrick/Spielberg A.I. film. It’s one of the most incredibly sad stories I’ve ever read. I find it hard to read it without weeping.

Whenever a great artist dies, it has become a cliché to say that they will live on through their work. In the case of Brian Aldiss and his astounding output, it’s quite literally true. I’m looking forward to many, many years of reading his words.

My sincerest condolences to his son Tim, his partner Alison, and everyone who knew and loved Brian Aldiss.

Future Simple Steps - where to find your favourite ex-Five Simple Steps authors and their books

Now that Five Simple Steps has closed down, the individual authors are in charge of distributing their own books. This site links to all of those books.

The Anti-Tolkien - The New Yorker

A short profile of Michael Moorcock’s Elric series (though, for me, Jerry Cornelius is the champion that remains eternal in my memory).

Brian Aldiss: ‘These days I don’t read any science fiction. I only read Tolstoy’ | Books | The Guardian

A profile of Brian Aldiss in The Guardian.

I still can’t quite believe I managed to get him for last year’s Brighton SF.

Designing the Wider Web

The dominance of the desktop browser is over – the web has become wider. After so long painting in a tiny corner of the canvas, it’s time to broaden our approach.

It’s understandable that the community is somewhat nervous about the changes ahead. So far, we’ve mostly responded by scratching around for device-specific tips, but this isn’t sustainable or scalable. We should transcend “platformism” and instead learn to design for diverse contexts, displays, connectivity, and inputs by breaking devices down into first principles. Instead of the defective dichotomy of the “desktop” and “mobile” web, designers should aim to create great user experiences using the truly fluid nature of the web.

NYRblog - Atwood in the Twittersphere - The New York Review of Books

Margaret Atwood is all kinds of wonderful.

Techno-utopian fail - The National Newspaper

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you have created.