I have, in my time, asked SF writers to write non-fiction. The results have been, without exception, both brilliant and entertaining. It's almost as if excellent SF writers are excellent writers full stop. Aliya Whiteley @adamroberts.bsky.social @comrademorden.bsky.social

Oct 6 "The grandfather clock, which refused to work for weeks, now ticks though day and night but has invented its own numerology - it strikes thirteen quite regularly and then it's anyone's guess, five, eight, ten and thirteen again. ...sometimes a smiling sun or moon circled."

Slug died for their art.

The media's biggest secret is that both The Archers and Eastenders are offshoots of the Alien franchise; it's just that the eggs haven't been found yet (they're in the cellars of the Grey Gables and the Queen Vic).

Great book,great thread.

Portal number 339.

I have not seen The Sopranos.

It's nice that the cat wants to spend some time with us.

YIPE!!

Finding out two decades later, that the beach I always used to go to and the pub I did all my underage drinking in were the beach and the hotel that M.R. James used as the setting for "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," was quite the retrospective chill.

Reasons to follow Sardonicus (and his immaculately curated feed of weirdness, history and wonder), number 845.

...I have mainly been listening to Jessye Norman and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss. (As with so many things @levparikian.bsky.social is to blame.)

"Dying was a new experience. It was part of it that he should be sorting feathers, feathers from long-dead birds, and heavy because of that. A wind along the floor blew him away from the feathers. It was part of dying that a dragon came in and curled up by his feet. It seemed kindly intentioned..."

Notebook changeover day. Number 61 to number 62. (The Range own brand to The Range own brand.)

"But, as well, they were like an old written tragedy. For if human, or superhuman, experience, and the tragic clash of personality can be expressed by plastic shapes, then one might believe that these tortured trees had been bent by the wind into the spiritual shape of some old drama."

A jay picking through the leaf litter, between swirling, low, white-rumped flights in Ravelston woods.

Assuming that for dogs a windy day is like someone running a buffet trolley past you.

Watching the pigeons sail steep, crooked-winged, up the wind.

"Because he saw on the throne the Tooth Fairy, a sooty shadow lolling on the vacated gilded chair. She had resumed her female form again, but her face was a hideous mask, and she wore a crown of ivy leaves and a sash of a thousand beaded teeth."

Exactly this.

Portal number 72.

LOVE this.

"Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur." Ursula K. Le Guin

"Once they were visited by the Grendel family, curious-shaped and rather watery folk who looked askance at Halla because she reminded them of the awful fate that had befallen their grandmother and their elder uncle, at the hands of the man Beowulf."

"Also you were not so great, Not so very great nor small When as oozy muck you lay Or you stood as still, clear water On the highest ridge of swamp land, On the crown of barren fell Where you turned to soggy soil, Then to rusty soil transmuted."

Reason number 5,217 why you'll have fun following M John Harrison and reading his books.

Two dozen jackdaws industrious on the Police Scotland Headquarters playing fields.

"A truly good fantastic story will echo that which escapes explanation in life; it will *prove*, in fact, that life is fantastic. It will point to that which lies beyond our dreams and fears and delights; it will deal with the invisible, with the unspoken...the uncanny...the absurd." Alberto Manguel

Portalage is rarely black and white..

It was three years ago today that I met a real life troll in the woods near a village in Fife. I had a dental appointment in Kelty but I’d made a mistake and was two hours early so went for a walk. I shouldn’t have walked over the motorway bridge. Never walk over the motorway bridge.

"The child shook his head free of the goddess's hand, and fixed her with his savage eyes. 'The fearful tale. Give me another nightmare to ride.'"

7.05 this morning.

Great book.

"LATIN" not in word list?; Get To, and I cannot stress this hard enough, Fuck.

His genius was fully formed from the very get-go.

"And there was another good story about the sunken forest of Losthope, and the awful forest Things that came slithering out, sometimes, in winter gales, when the waves are so huge, up and down, that stumps of the rotted, fossilised trees can still be seen. Or so it's said."

As a rule I keep politics off here but sometimes an incident needs highlighting, an experience needs to be seen, a person needs their voice shared. I'm sixty years old and this country is in a worse place than I've ever seen.

"Once again I was reminded of Africa, where you sometimes see the big steam-trains standing all alone, inexplicably waiting, in the immense and empty veldt. I looked behind me then, back over the peninsula: and like grey imperfections on the southern horizon, I saw the warships coming." 1/2

An extraordinary individual. Jane Goodall, world-renowned primatologist, dies aged 91 www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Algernon Blackwood's The Wind in the Willows would be pretty amazing.

Now listening to: Out of Season, Beth Gibbons & Rustin' Man. The most extremely autumnal album I own.

Looking back five years. Ollie, when he first came home, sat in a hole. Ollie, five months old, sat in the same hole.

Mashed up tinned-sardines in tomato sauce with extra tomato puree, loads of pepper and some tabasco sauce on a piece of toast for lunch counts as "really healthy oily-fish" right?

Where I’m calling from

"We can't live with our foot over the mine. We can't. For the first time since my youth I was unshackled. I had love, even though it scorched me." This book is actually not by William Heaney. It is by Graham Joyce and it is one of his very best. There is a reason for the conceit.

Portal number 34.

I was his editor. I shall miss him terribly. Here's 'Armada', about the death of his mother.

Mansion polish advert in the back of the 1938 Penguin Illustrated Classics edition of The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies.

New Jeff Noon novel! Contemporary fantasy and fantastical memoir. Like nothing else he's done but also entirely Noonish. (And quite Garnerish.)

Holes in the soles, tears in the sides, let in more water than they keep out. And winter is coming... I think it is time to let these dog-walking shoes go to their rest. #PratchettCheapBootsMaxim