Darren Tofts

The blurb on the back of Lie of the Land informs us that the collection ‘reeks of Australia’. Apart from being an unfortunate phrase, the offer of a specifically Australian effluvium is too limiting a promise for this wonderful collection of stories. Clanchy’s world is more expansive, and the lie of the land is in no way circumscribed or even. Set in India and Ireland, as well as in differen ... (read more)

Many people regard cyberculture as the territory of boffins, sci-fi enthusiasts, and ‘itinerant wanderers’, and inescapably limited to computer technology. However, the term is also applied to a field of research, one that has always been interdisciplinary: traversing philosophy, mathematics, physiology, biology, linguistics, cognitive sciences, physics, and sociology. Prefiguring Cyberculture ... (read more)

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him. In his father’s footsteps, Roger Milliss takes up the challenge of communism not only as an alternative to capitalism, ‘a rival system of ideas, a st ... (read more)