Wind From Nowhere: November 2010

I WAS BORN. DEVELOPED. PLAYED WITH MY ACTION-MEN AND THE YELLOW RUBBER SHARK. FILLED-IN COLOUR DRAWING BOOKS. FAILED MY 11+. DID SOME STUFF. HANGED AROUND. ATE SOUP. WENT TO TECHNICAL COLLEGE AND OTHER PLACES. DRANK EARL GREY TEA. LISTENED TO THE SEA. STARED DUMBLY AT THE STARS. NIBBLED IDLY ON HOME-MADE MERINGUES WHILST RECLINING ON A CHAISE LONGUE. FIDDLED WITH MY ANTIMACASSAR. HAD UNGODLY EROTIC FANTASIES. BRIEFLY JOINED THE 'DYNAMIC' BUT ULTIMATELY RATHER SILLY REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY [sic]. REFLECTED. WENT FOR LONG BRACING WALKS. I ESPECIALLY LIKE SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY, HORROR, REPLICANTS, EMPATHY, MY CHILDREN, THE NEW WEIRD, HARDBOILED & NOIR CRIME FICTION, CHESS, SUPERSTRINGS, QUATERMASS, PC GAMING, GEEKERY, CARTOONS, SPINACH, ANYTHING TO DO WITH LENTILS, RONDO HATTON, QUARKS, CHEAP BEER, CURRY, MOMENTARILY GLIMPSING THE HORROR OF ULTIMATE REALITY, MIND-BLOWING SEX (EXCEPT ON WEDNESDAYS), SELF-CONTAINMENT, COMICS & GRAPHIC NOVELS, PULSARS, LENNY BRUCE & BILL HICKS, CTHULHIC ESCAPADES, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA "RE-IMAGINED", SCULPTURE, ABIOGENESIS, DUPLICATING REALITIES, FREAKY INSTALLATIONS, BURIED TREASURE, TOLERANCE, REPRODUCING, SERBIAN SQUIRRELS & MALE SEAHORSES, DEAD RUSSIANS, GLUONS, THE NATURAL WORLD, TRANSGRESSIVENESS, SUNNY MORNINGS, C-BEAMS GLITTERING IN THE DARK NEAR THE TANNHAUSER GATE, PYTHONESQUE TOMFOOLERY, CALABI-YU MANIFOLDS, PAULINE'S PENS, THE ELDER GODS, WATERMELONS IN EASTER HAY, RESILIENCE, AFFECTION, ENDOSYMBIOTIC THEORY, CONTEMPLATING THE SUBLIME, PHILIP K. DICK'S DIVINE INVASIONS, BIG DUMB OBJECTS, TINY TACTILE SENSATIONS, WORD PROCESSORS, THE INFINITE VOID WHICH BINDS, TONY HANCOCK, EPIPHANOUS EPISODES, OBSCURE PUBLICATIONS, NEUTRINOS, WITTY REPARTEE, SOLID STATE HARD DRIVES, FERMIONS, BOKONONISM, ANTI-HOMOPHOBIA/TRANSPHOBIA, EXEGESIS, ART EVEN THOUGH I DON'T REALLY UNDERSTAND IT, VALIS, INTERSTITIALITY, NUTTY GIZZARDS, AXIONS, PEEP SHOWS INTO AN INSULAR WORLD OF ALIENATION, EUKARYOTES, POETRY ABOUT THE INEFFABLE, DISTURBING PLAYS, CRAZY FRENCH FILMS PLUS LOADS MORE, PYNCHONESQUE MADNESS, WE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE, THE BEAUTIFUL GRAMMATOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF KLINGON, THE KING IN YELLOW, PRE-SOCRATIC MATERIALIST PHILOSOPHY, EPICURUS, SPINOZA, ETHICS, ANTI-RACISM, DEMOCRACY, MARXISM, KINDNESS, VOIGHT-KAMPFF TESTS, ZOMBIE APOCALYPSES, EARTHY BANTER, TACHYONS, ERIC DOLPHY MEMORIAL BARBECUES, SLIPSTREAMING, EVOLUTIONARY THEORY/DARWINISM, RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, NIKHEDONIA, SAVING THE PLANET FROM ENVIRONMENTAL & ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION, OBJECTIVITY, MERVYN PEAKE'S VAST ALCHEMIES, LOYALTY, THE INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE, ANYTHING MODAL, HARMOLODICS, THE MUSIC OF FRANK ZAPPA & CAPTAIN BEEFHEART, IMAGINARY GUITAR SOLOS, THE BLUES, JAZZ NOODLING, BULGARIAN WEDDING MUSIC, HUUN-HUUR-TU AND TUVAN THROAT-SINGING, ENGLISH FOLK ABOUT EXACTING DREADFUL REVENGE, MODERNIST CACOPHONIES (THE GREAT EDGAR VARESE, ETC), SONGS ABOUT PUS AND THE GNATS, AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER THINGS. ONE DAY I WILL GET A PROPER JOB. I HAVE PROGENY.

("Trust your obsessions" - J.G. Ballard)

About Marxism

Notwithstanding the rich variety of its practical and theoretical articulations and interpretations, classical or orthodox Marxism - as a totalising but open-ended world view - constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena and generally understanding the world: analogous, in some sense, to Darwinism's relationship to the natural sciences/biology. By definition, it is 'interdisciplinary' and multanimous. More importantly still, Marxism provides us with the tools to actually CHANGE the world - not indulge in abstract, scholastic (and ultimately futile), theorising. Karl Marx famously demanded the "merciless criticism of everything that exists" - which of course includes Marxism itself. A Marxism that does not constantly seek to renew itself, think afresh, is not Marxism but rather a dogma or ideology and hence ultimately cannot serve an emancipatory purpose.

The Socialist Organization in Israel, founded in 1962 and known by the name of its journal "Matzpen" (Hebrew for "Compass"), was a revolutionary organization that viewed Zionism as a colonizing project, and strove for Arab–Jewish coexistence, based on full equality. Matzpen supported implementation of the Palestinians' human and national rights, and called for solving the region's national and social problems through struggle for overthrowing all the region's existing regimes, and creating a united socialist Arab East. Matzpen considered as enemies of the socialist revolution not only the capitalist regimes but also the repressive bureaucratic regimes of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Since the June 1967 war, Matzpen called for full, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israel from all the territories it occupied in that war, and supported the right of the Palestinian people to struggle for liberation.

My Outlook

"We have seen ... that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class - to win the battle of democracy."
(Karl Marx & Frederich Engels - 'The Communist Manifesto', 1848)
I'm a naturalist-materialist atheist or scientific humanist. There is nothing but Nature; natural things, natural forces and all the incredibly complex - but ultimately understandable - laws of nature (ie, philosophical monism or holism). In other words, Nature is literally everything: atoms, sub-atomic particles, quarks, planets, stars, Black Holes, brains, genes, DNA, neurons, synapses, mountains, bacteria, badgers, grass, etc. Meaning that - ultimately - industry, technology, factories, cars, etc are all products of nature, albeit in an alienated and reified form. There are no supernatural/supranatural entities or realms standing apart from, or separate, from, nature - no heaven, no hell, no nirvana, no reincarnation, no karma: above us only the infinite, indifferent, cosmos. Humanity, just like all Life - whether on this planet or possibly elsewhere - is a contingent and unintended product of nature: a happy accident (or unfortunate mishap). Hence there is no teleological-driven or preordained purpose ('end point') to human life - a theological fantasy. But nor is history purely accidental or random, a mere kaleidoscope of happenstance - the postmodern fallacy. Just as evolution itself is a bottom-up process whereby 'design' and complexity emerge out of blind - automatic - but non-random processes, so there is a broad spiral of directionality to history and human development (the general spread of 'excellence', etc); albeit a 'progressive' directionality which is subject, by definition, to countervailing tendencies towards relative regression or even collapse. Prior to the so-called 'farming revolution' of the Neolithic era (ca. 8,000-5,000 BC), we lived for two hundred thousand years or more in classless, egalitarian, matrilineal, societies & communities: the original Affluent Society of "primitive communism". Indeed, the origins of our species lie in a revolutionary act of female solidarity ('sex strike' theory) that overthrew alpha male domination: humanity is a revolutionary species. But "all the old crap" (Marx) began with the male-led counterrevolution of the emerging cattleocracy-cum-priestocracy: Pharaohs, kings, state bureaucracies, class oppression, inequality, warfare, etc (cattle>chattel>capital). As a consequence, the quality of life for the overwhelming majority of humans plummeted, with the lying stones of Stonehenge serving as a grim monument to the new epoch of class oppression and exploitation. We need not only to learn from our magnificent revolutionary-communist past but 'go back to it' - but on an exponentially higher, more advanced level. As for the present epoch, it is characterised by the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. The main contradiction is between a chronically malfunctioning capitalism, which is in visible crisis and decline, and an overdue communism. In fact, capitalism in its ceaseless and destructive search for profit puts the future of humanity at risk - being synonymous with war, pollution, exploitation and crisis. So neither Stalinism nor anti-communism, but revolutionary democratic communism. Indeed, Stalinism is anti-communism: the counterrevolution within the revolution. Contrary to popular prejudice, so assiduously cultivated by academia and the mainstream media, Marxism is not a dogma or 'outdated' but rather an open-ended - yet internally and logically consistent - guide to practice, and must be constantly added to and enriched. Communists are champions of the oppressed, tribunes of the people. Socialism represents victory in the battle for democracy. It is the rule of the working class - ie, of the majority as opposed to minority capitalist rule. For communists, or 'classical' Marxists, socialism and democracy are inseparable. Therefore the principle form of class struggle is the fight for 'extreme' democracy against exploitation, bureaucracy and state oppression. As the 20th century has brutally confirmed, there has never been - nor can ever be - 'socialism in one country'. All forms of national socialism - to use Leon Trotsky's apt phrase - are objectively counterrevolutionary, leading only to the creation of ectopic or "freak societies" (Karl Marx). Socialism is either democratic or, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union (a tyrannical monocracy), it turns into its opposite. Oppose all immigration controls - no worker is illegal! For the free movement of peoples - one world, one working class. Defend migrant workers and asylum-seekers. Racism, and all its offshoots, is a poison that must always be fought. I favour a European 'super-state', but one which is democratically united from below by the working class - not ruled from above by bankers and Eurocrats. Nationalist calls to 'pull out of the EU' or restore national currencies must be rejected. In so far as the EU and the Euro Zone represent an objective development towards the merging of the peoples & nations of the world - and the creation of a single world economy - communists oppose those who to break it apart and fight for the creation of a mass Communist Party of the European Union. Rather than being an endless goody bag to plunder at whim, our planet has finite resources - but which, if managed rationally, can indefinitely sustain and satisfy human & non-human life. Therefore the centrality of the struggle for environmental & ecological sustainability, as it is in the very nature of capitalism to pollute and despoil the natural world. Down with all forms of censorship and anything that impedes free speech and general democratic openness in society: for the open clash of different and contending ideas. Ban paid-for advertising, a system of heavily subsidised profit that acts to stifle political debate and difference. Break-up the corporate, monopolistic, mass media empires (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, CBS Corporation etc), which pump out a monolithic rightwing diet and strangle democratic diversity. For the immediate abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. Disestablish the Church of England. Annual parliaments. Elect judges. Introduce a party-list proportional representation voting system with no undemocratic barriers - such as artificial minimum-percentage thresholds for elections and the requirement for large deposits. No more state secrecy, 'official' secrets or underhand diplomacy. Full equality for gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, trans, intersex people, etc - including the right to marriage, adopt, etc. Replacement of the bourgeois standing army, effectively a mercenary army, with a universal workers' militia - the people armed. Immediate abolition of all nuclear & biological/chemical weaponry, as they are hideous weapons of mass destruction that can serve no defensive purpose: there is no 'socialist bomb'. Imperialism, neo-colonialism and Great Power chauvinism can serve no progressive role - equality for all nations and peoples. End the irrational 'war on drugs' and legalise all drugs - use the monies to fund proper, non-moralistic, drugs education and treatment Abolish the death penalty and al forms of corporal punishment. All prisoners should have the right to vote and access to high quality education, medical treatment, the internet, conjugal rights, etc. Put an end to all forms of 'factory farming', 'battery farming', etc which brings needless suffering to animals and is dehumanising for humans - whether as workers (eg, abattoirs, farming, food processing) or consumers (ie, eating shit). Workers have a right to high-quality, varied, genuinely appetising food - not the present 'one size fits all' mass-produced crap that is so unhealthy and produced at such cost to society and nature itself. Ban all cruel and unusual 'sports': fox-hunting, bull-fighting, grouse-shooting, etc. Nationalise all the big farms and landed estates, fight for the 'right to roam'. No more monoculture and the inexorable spread of rural deserts - allow nature to return by designating whole tracts of land as as wilderness areas, so as to re-establish or make forests, marshes, glades, woods, etc. Reintroduce species drive to the point of extinction - wolves, bears, bison, wild pigs, etc. In other words, communists are for the greening of the cities and the humanising of the countryside - which would entail ending overpopulation and underpopulation, a rational redistribution of people, much better housing, many more parks, free urban public transport, curbing car use in towns and cities and massively lowering air and river pollution. Instead of fenced off green belts we want forests around every city with free access. The unproductive and parasitical City of London should be taken over for people. Today it has no more than a few thousand permanent residents; it could easily house a million. Turn the office blocks into beautiful living spaces. As part of our struggle for real democracy, communists favour using parliament and other electoral-political arenas so as to secure the biggest possible working class representation (a barometer to gauge our strength). Yet the obvious reality is that the capitalist class will never willingly allow their wealth and power to be taken away by a mere parliamentary vote, and will resist using every means at their disposal (including 'extra-parliamentary' ones, of course). Hence the working class must be readied to make revolution - peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must. Historically and theoretically, socialism is communism which emerges from capitalist society, the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism - a system which knows neither wars, exploitation, money, classes, states nor nations. The goal of communists therefore is universal human emancipation, not the 'politics of envy' or a petty revenge project against the ruling class. Communism is the free association of direct producers - everybody will contribute according to their ability and take according to genuine human need, the real meaning of 'abundance' (as opposed to the ceaseless production and accumulation of things). That is, communism is general freedom and the real beginning of human history: the true flowering of the human personality and the full realisation (or re-realisation) of our human nature.

CURRENTLY READING:
Karl Marx - "Capital Vol. 3" (1894)
I.I. Rubin - "Essays on Marx's theory of value" (1928)

Moshe Machover - "Israelis and Palestinians: conflict and resolution" (2012)
Weekly Worker #937 (November 8 2012)
Ramsey Campbell - "Alone with the horrors" (1993)

Norman Spinrad - "The star-spangled future" (1979)
CURRENTLY LISTENING:
Freddie King - "Taking Care of Business" (2009) (7-CD)

Pee Wee Crayton - "Essential recordings" (2001), "Things I used to do" (1971)

Kevin Ayers - "Songs for Insane Times 1969-1980" (2008) (4-CD)

Loudon Wainwright III - "40 Odd Years" (2011) (4-CD)

John Fahey - "Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You" (2011) (5-CD)

Chris Wood - "Trespasser" (2008)

Martin Simpson - "Purpose + Grace" (2011)

The Modern Lovers - "23 great recordings", "Live at the Longbranch and more" (1998), "Precise Modern Lovers Order" (1994)

CURRENTLY WATCHING:

"Savages" (2012), "Prometheus" (2012), "Cosmopolis" (2012), "Detention" (2012), "Absentia" (2011), "Rampart" (2011), "Drive" (2011), "Shame" (2011), "The Divide" (2011), "Carnage" (2011), "Michael" (2011), "Once Upon A Time in Anatolia" (2011), "We Need To Talk About Kevin" (2011), "A Dangerous Method" (2011), "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" (2011), "Tyrannosaur" (2011), "Melancholia" (2011), "Another Earth" (2011), "Taking Shelter" (2011), "Apollo 18" (2011), "In Time" (2011), "Source Code" (2011), "Limitless" (2011), "Drive" (2011), "Contagion" (2011), "The Skin I Live in" (2011), "Bullhead" (2011), "The White Ribbon" (2009), "Inside" (2007), "Martyrs" (2008), "Hunger" (2008), "Brick" (2006), "Half Nelson" (2006), "Hidden/Cache" (2003), "Time of the Wolf" (2003), "The Believer" (2001)

CURRENTLY PLAYING:
Dishonored, XCOM Enemy Unknown, Dark Souls, Black Mesa, Max Payne 3, The Witcher 2, Alan Wake, Deux Ex Human Revolution (at last!!)**, La Noire, Dead Island, Portal 2, Fallout New Vegas, Dead Space 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (permanently!), Aliens versus Predators Classic 2000, Dragon Age Origins, Crysis 2, Blade Runner, System Shock 2 & Morrowind (again!), Strider Mountain (Half-Life 2 mod)
(** and what a disappointment it is)

Check These Out Now!

* MY FACEBOOK PAGE (or what's left of it after the Facebook bosses put it through the homogenising corporate mincer)
* MY WEEKLY WORKER ARTICLES (selected)
* SUPPORT THE JOLLY FARMER ONE! (non-violent campaign to put people before beer glasses - the exact reverse, of course, to the Jolly Farmer's management policy. I have a dream!)
* THE DAINTY BLUNDER (my sister blog)
* COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN/WEEKLY WORKER ("without organisation the working class is nothing; with the highest form of organisation it is everything")

* COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN'S DRAFT PROGRAMME (Third Edition)
* COMMUNIST STUDENTS ("exists to promote Marxism on our campuses, campaign for democracy in all spheres of life, and fight to replace capitalism with communism")
* HANDS OFF THE PEOPLE OF IRAN ("no to imperialist war. No to sanctions. No to the theocratic regime")
* RADICAL ANTHROPOLOGY GROUP ("the study of what it means to be human")
* CHRIS KNIGHT/WIKIPEDIA

* LABOUR PARTY MARXISTS ("the central aim is to transform the Labour Party into an instrument for working class advance and international socialism")
* MARSHALL SAHLINS (and The Original Affluent Society)

* PEOPLE AND NATURE ("some socialist ideas about society, the earth and their interaction")
* BECOMING HUMAN
* CHRIS STRINGER (leading proponents of the 'human revolution' or 'out of Africa' theory, which hypothesises that modern humans originated in Africa over 100,000 years ago)
* RED MIST ("join us on our journey through the bizarre, contradictory cultural life of capitalism")
* NOVEMBER PUBLICATIONS ("books for revolution")
* LONDON BOOK CLUB
* COMMUNIST MANIFESTO of 1848 (just gets better and better - the 1888 English Edition of course)
* READING MARX'S CAPITAL (DAVID HARVEY's Video Lectures CLASSES 1-14, and of course The Text)

* CRITIQUE ("the problems of our time are governed by the necessity for democratic control over all aspects of society")
* HISTORICAL MATERIALISM (an 'interdisciplinary’ journal that "opposes the compartmentalisation of knowledge" - get the HM book series)

* REVOLUTIONARY HISTORY ("dealing with the history of the revolutionary socialist movement from a mainly Trotskyist viewpoint")

* MARK FISHER (capitalist realist k-punk)

* CHRISTOPHER SCHWARTZ
* READING CAPITAL (by Louis Althusser - 1970 translation)
* RICHARD D. WOLFF (and his Guardian column)
* MICHAEL PERELMAN (and his Unsettling Economics blog)
* KEVIN B. ANDERSON (theorist and author of the important work, Marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity and non-western societies)

* JOHN RIDDELL (outstanding Marxist historian of Comintern and editor of the 'Communist International under Lenin' series')

* DAVID McNALLY (member of the New Socialist Group and author of "Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism")
* BORDERLANDS E-JOURNAL ("aims to promote transdisciplinary work across the humanities & social sciences")
* MONTHLY REVIEW ("from 1949 for socialism and against US imperialism")

* HAYMARKET BOOKS ("a non-profit, progressive book distributor and publisher that take inspiration and courage from our namesakes, the Haymarket Martyrs, who gave their lives fighting for a better world in heir 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day - which gave us May Day")

* BRILL ("founded in 1683")
* VERSO BOOKS ("the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world")
* NEW LEFT REVIEW
* ZERO BOOKS ("in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before" - its Blog)

* ZED BOOKS ("critical and dynamic publisher, committed to increasing awareness of important international issues and to promoting diversity, alternative voices and progressive social change")

* OR BOOKS ("embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business")

* JAMES HEARTFIELD

* STAHL PRESS (Steel Press, Hamburg)

* LAWRENCE & WISHART
* ISAAC DEUTSCHER PRIZE ("awarded for a book which exemplifies the most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition")
* VICTOR SERGE (outstanding anti-Stalinist Russian revolutionary)
* ERICH FROMM (Marxist social psychologist, psychoanalyst & humanistic philosopher)
* JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (the UK Sartre Society)
* HILLEL H. TICKTIN, ISTVAN MESZAROS, TERRY EAGLETON, ELLEN MEIKSINS WOOD, JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

* BORIS KAGARLITSKY & UNOFFICIAL SITE (see Wikipedia)
* CHRISTOPHER HILL & BRIAN MANNING

* SLAVOJ ZIZEK ARCHIVES
* ECONOMY IN CRISIS (America's economic report)
* WHO RULES AMERICA? ("power, politics & social change")
* AMERICANS AGAINST THE TEA PARTY ("enlightened progressive values")

* ZERO HEDGE ("on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero")
* ROBIN BLACKBURN
* NAKED CAPITALISM (Yves Smith's blog, author of "ECONned: how unenlightened self interest undermined democracy")
* STALIN'S MOUSTACHE (Roland Boer)

* JACOBIN ("a magazine of culture and polemic that Edmund Burke ceaselessly berates on his Twitter page")
* NEW LEFT PROJECT ("a belief in the value and equality of human life")
* A VERY PUBLIC SOCIOLOGIST ("sociology with a socialist twist")
* DAVID OSLER (covers questions "from an unorthodox Marxist standpoint")
* TENDANCE COATESY (offering "news and comments from a Militant Secularist Ipswich Allotment Holder")
* BOFFY'S BLOG ("analysis of politics, philosophy and economics from a Marxist perspective")

* HARRY PATTERSON ("music politics culture life ... and sheer bloody-minded intransigence")
* JONESBLOG ("Hackney lefty originally from oop norf")

* ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE ("occasional rants from an angry Yorksireman")

* THE NORTH STAR

* DONNACHA DeLONG ("the revolution will be streamed")

* LEFT FLANK
* INFANTILE DISORDER ("news, views and reviews from a communist perspective")
* SPLINTERED SUNRISE
* COREY ROBIN (author of "The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin")
* MIKE MARQUESE ("writings on politics, culture and sport")
* MARXIST LEGSPINNERS ("cricket, ale and politics")
* KENAN MALIK (and his Pandaemonium)
* IRISH LEFT REVIEW

* THE COMMUNE ("for workers' self-management and communism from below")
* SOCIALISM AND/OR BARBARISM
* THE RUSTBELT RADICAL ("straight from the ravaged middle of the post-industrial American Midwest and yearns for the refounding of the Marxist project")

* THE RED PLEBEIAN ("a revolutionary socialist based in the lion’s den of world capitalism and militarism, the United States")

* THE CURRENT MOMENT ("on the politics and economics of the present")
* NOTES & COMMENTARY (M.A. Krul's Amazon Profile)

* STEVE KEEN (Debunking Economics)

* THE SLACK WIRE ("dreary, out-of-date academic controversializing")

* MICHAEL ROBERTS ("blogging from a Marxist economist")
* ALIENATED LEFT ("looks for the facts behind the big-parties', governments' and big-media groups' propaganda")
* Luna17 ("another world is not only on her way ... on a quiet day I can hear her breathing")
* NEWS FROM NOWHERE ("analysis and comment from a different point of view")
* LOUIS PROYECT: THE UNREPENTANT MARXIST (also moderator of the Marxmail Mailing List, "a forum for activists and scholars in the Marxist tradition who favour a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic approach")
* DOUGLAS LAIN (and his Diet Soap Podcast, exploring "surrealism, marxism, anarchism and continental philosophy")

* JODI DEAN (Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace)

* ADAM KOTSTO (Why We Love Sociopaths: a Guide to Late Capitalist Television)

* GRAHAM HARMAN (Object-Orientated Philosophy)

* OWEN HATHERLEY (A Guide to the New Ruins of Britain)

* GROUNDWORK ("a blog for everyone and no one")

* MEDIATIONS (Journal of the Marxist Literary Group)
* ALEX GABRIEL (athesit blogger)

* ANTI-IMPERIALIST CAMP

* 21st CENTURY MANIFESTO ("politics, analysis, action and culture from the left in Britain")

* ANTI-CAPITALIST INITIATIVE ("a radical new project: for unity, debate and action")
* TOWARDS A NEW INTERNATIONAL TENDENCY

* NEW SOCIALIST GROUP (Canada)
* LENIN'S TOMB
* SOCIALIST UNITY

* GREEK SOLIDARITY CAMPAIGN
* eBEEFS (telling it like it is from a progressive, leftist perspective")
* INSURGENT NOTES ("journal of communist theory and practice")
* THE CEDAR LOUNGE REVOLUTION ("for Lefties too stubborn to quit")
* NEW POLITICS ("insists on the centrality of democracy to socialism")

* PAUL CROFTS ("views from an independent socialist")

* INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST NETWORK ("home of independent socialists who support the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition")

* SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE (Australia)

* OXFORD RESEARCH GROUP

* SOCIALIST PROJECT

* SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES
* HOWARD ZINN (writer of the seminal, A People's History of the United States)
* ANTIPODE ("further the analytical and political goals of a broad-based Leftwing geography")
* MARX MYTHS AND LEGENDS ("to lay to one side the myths, legends, distortions and misinterpretations to which perhaps no thinker has been more prone")
* MARXIST INTERNET ARCHIVE

* MARX & ENGELS COLLECTED WORKS VOLS 1-50 (plus Selected Works, Correspondence, etc)

* V.I. LENIN COLLECTED WORKS

* A MARX BIBLIOGRAPHY (Dr Andrew Chatty: also Hegel & Social and Political Philosophy)

* THE AUTODIDACT PROJECT ("Marx and Marxism web guide")

* KAPITALISM101

* RADICAL DEMON ("home of the 'Future of World Capitalism' series)

* ASSOCIATION FOR HETERODOX ECONOMICS ("primarily committed to pluralistic analyses of contemporary society and its alternatives")

* INTERNATIONAL WORKING GROUP ON VALUE THEORY

* ALAN FREEMAN

* ANDREW KLIMAN

* RICK KUHN (his 'Marxism' Page)

* A CRITIQUE OF MARXIST THEORY ("from a Marxist perspective")
* COMMUNIST CORRESPONDING SOCIETY ("the goal is communism - a society with no private property, no class system, and no state")

* MARXIST UPDATE
* LIBCOM ("libertarian communism is the political expression of the ever-present strands of co-operation and solidarity in human societies")
* SOLIDARITY FOUNDATION (British section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association)
* RACHEL CARSON (and Wikipedia)
* MURRAY BOOKCHIN ("a pioneer of the social ecology movement" - see the Bookchin Archive and his Libcom Page)
* THE INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL ECOLOGY (also Social Ecology London and Communalism Journal)
* THE ECOLOGIST

* ECOGEEK
* THE DARK MOUNTAIN PROJECT
* MARX & PHILOSOPHY SOCIETY and its Review of Books ("aims to encourage scholarly engagement with, and creative development of, the philosophical and foundational aspects of Marx's work")
* DIALECTICAL MARXISM (The Writings of Bertell Ollman)
* WORKERS' FILM AND VIDEO
* THE OTHER ISRAEL - THE RADICAL CASE AGAINST ZIONISM (and for the 'non-radical' case against Zionism, Jews Against Zionism)

* JEWS AGAINST ZIONISM
* THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA ("Palestine's weapon of mass instruction")
* ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER ("progressive, joint Palestinian-Israeli activist organization, located in Beit Sahour and Jerusalem")
* THE PALESTINE INFORMATION CENTER
* ISRAELI OCCUPATION ARCHIVE

* INSTITUTE FOR PALESTINIAN STUDIES ("the most reliable source of information and analysis on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict")

* TIKUN OLAM ("promoting Israeli democracy, exposing secrets of the national security state")

* JEWS SANS FRONTIERES ("an anti-Zionist blog, browsing the media")

* MIDDLE EAST RESEARCH AND INFORMATION PROJECT

* HOLY LAND STUDIES ("paying particular attention to issues that have a contemporary relevance and a wider public interest")

* THE INVENTION OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE (Shlomo Sand)

* ROBERT EISENMAN

* MATZPEN/THE SOCIALIST ORGANISATION IN ISRAEL (the English version of the previous site)

* THE ISRAELI LEFT ARCHIVE
* +972 MAGAZINE ("the name is derived from the telephone area code that is shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories")

* THE ANGRY ARAB NEWS SERVICE
* NORMAN G. FINKELSTEIN (exposing Zionism, Israeli war crimes, the Holocaust Industry, etc)
* TONY GREENSTEIN'S BLOG ("socialist, anti-Zionist, anti-racist")
* JEWS FOR JUSTICE FOR PALESTINIANS
* JEWISH SOCIALISTS' GROUP
* QUIT! (Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism)

* OPEN ZION BLOG (The Daily Beast)

* JONATHAN COOK ("Disappearing Palestine", etc)
* ROBERT FISK (and Journalisted)
* REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS
* INFORMED COMMENT ("independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics")
* THE CHRONIKLER ("seeks to shed an alternative light on contemporary events and ideas")
* THE ARABIST ("Arab politics and culture")

* AN ARAB CITIZEN ("covers Egypt, the region and current affairs")
* JADALIYYA
* TRUTHDIG ("drilling beneath the headlines")
* CHINA STUDY GROUP ("aims to provide alternative perspectives on issues pertaining to China")
* THE LUXEMBURGIST ("Marx and Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, classical social contract theory, etc")

* ROSA LUXEMBURG BLOG ("debate, publications and scholarship")
* SPECULATIVE HERESY ("an exploration of speculative realism, non-philosophy and other heresies")
* THE DISORDER OF THINGS
* ROUGH THEORY ("to present a new interpretation of the first six chapters of the first volume of Marx’s Capital")

* YANIS VAROUFAKIS ("thoughts for the post-2008 world")
* HISTOMAT ("adventures in historical materialism")
* THE PLATYPUS AFFILIATED SOCIETY ("a project for the self-criticism, self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left")

* CHRIS CUTRONE (The Last Marxist)

* SOCIALIST PARTY USA

* U.S. MARXIST-HUMANISTS

* MARXIST-HUMANIST INITIATIVE

* 491
* CROOKED TIMBRE
* OPEN MIND ("science, politics, life, the universe, and everything")

* ALLIANCE (New Zealand's Democratic Socialist Party)

* DISSENT (“a pillar of leftist intellectual provocation”)

* THE RAW STORY ("completely independent news and politics source")
* THINK PROGRESS (Alyssa's column)

* MOTHER JONES

* DAILY MAVERICK (South Africa)

* DAILY KOS (United States)

* KATHA POLLITT (her column for The Nation)
* PHILOSOPHY NOW ("aims to corrupt innocent citizens by convincing them that philosophy can be exciting, worthwhile and comprehensible")
* RADICAL PHILOSOPHY ("journal of socialist and feminist philosophy")
* NEW HUMANIST ("ideas for godless people")
* JARED DIAMOND
* MARY MIDGLEY
* MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI (also his Plato Footnote)
* PHILOSOPHY & THEORY IN BIOLOGY ("biology is an inherently historical science with a long tradition of conceptual theorizing")
* TED HONDERICH (consciousness, determinism, freedom, ethics and morality)

* MIKHAIL BAKHTIN & BAKHTIN CIRCLE
* BIG THINK ("a YouTube for ideas")
* THOUGHT CATALOG ("reading Thought Catalog will probably make you more interesting")
* MICHAEL POLLAN (the politics of food)
* CLOSER TO THE TRUTH ("explores fundamental issues of universe, brain/mind, religion, meaning and purpose")
* THE BIG VIEW (pre-Socratic Greek Philosophy, Buddhism, quantum physics, etc)
* DEMOCRITUS ca. 460-370 BC (formulated an atomic theory of the universe)
* EPICURUS 341-270 BC (get more Epicurean insight here)
* HUMANIMALIA ("a journal of human/animal interface studies")
* SciTech Daily ("in association with Closer To The Truth")
* MIND HACKS ("neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what's going on inside your brain")
* SCIENCE DAILY ("your source for the latest research news")
* SCIENCE NEWS
* DISCOVER MAGAZINE ("science, technology and the future" - and the blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science)
* SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
* TECHNOLOGY REVIEW ("the authority on the future of technology")
* TREE OF LIFE WEB PROJECT
* CHARLES DARWIN ARCHIVE (complete works, now your duty to study)
* ALFRED RUSSELL WALLACE (the man who wasn't Darwin - and now, at long last, the Wallace Online archive)
* ERNST HAECKEL (another man who wasn't Darwin)
* JOHANNES KEPLER (the man, the man)
* STEPHEN JAY GOULD ARCHIVE (after Darwin, perhaps the next best thing)
* RICHARD DAWKINS FOUNDATION ("support critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering")

* MICROBIAL LIFE
* THE SECULAR WEB ("dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview")
* THE GOOD ATHEIST ("chilling tales of godlessness")
* POSITIVE ATHEISM ("serving people with no reason to believe")
* FRIENDLY ATHEIST
* THE BLESSED ATHEIST BIBLE STUDY ("a Bible study by the only people truly qualified to study the bible - those who don't believe")
* THE BRICK TESTAMENT ("the world's largest, most comprehensive illustrated Bible")
* THE BYGONE BUREAU ("a journal of modern thought")
* THE PANDA'S THUMB ("giving another voice for the defenders of the integrity of science")
* PHARYNGULA ("evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal")
* CARL ZIMMER ("reporting from the frontiers of biology, especially regarding the study of evolution and parasites")
* NICK LANE (winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books 2010 for Life Ascending: the Ten Great Inventions of Evolution)
* WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE (Jerry Coyne)
* JOHN GRIBBIN ("the master of popular science writing")
* FRANK CLOSE (Neutrino, The Void, Nothing, Antimatter, Lucifer's Legacy, Cosmic Onion)
* PETER WOIT (Not Even Wrong)
* STEVEN PINKER (an unofficial page)
* JOHN HAWKS ("paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution")
* EVOLUTION BLOG ("commentary on the endless dispute between evolution and creationism")
* LETS KEEP EVOLVING! (Niles Eldredge)
* REALITY SANDWICH ("evolving consciousness. bite by bite")
* BUTTERFLIES AND WHEELS ("fighting fashionable nonsense")
* CENTER FOR INQUIRY ("to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values")
* THE BRIGHTS ("illuminating and elevating the naturalistic worldview")
* SKEPTIC ("promoting science and critical thinking")
* THE SKEPTICS GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSE
* NATURALISM.ORG ("science-based naturalism as a rational and fulfilling alternative to faith-based religions and other varieties of supernaturalism")
* MEMEING NATURALISM ("occasional explorations of science-based, humanistic naturalism and its implications")
* APEX NATURALISM ("Apex Naturalism means being dedicated to becoming the best Naturalist that we can be")
* SAM HARRIS (One of the Four Horsemen of 'new atheism')
* DANIEL DENNETT (another Horseman and Wikipedia)
* VICTOR J. STENGER (American particle physicist and "outspoken" atheist)
* KILLING THE BUDDHA ("god for the godless")
* RELIGION DISPATCHES ("devoted to exploring the intersections of religion, values and public life")
* TECHGNOSIS ("peels away the utilitarian shell of technology")
* THE DAILY GRAIL (""exploring the fringes of science and history")
* COUNTER-CURRENTS PUBLISHING ("books against time")
* A FISTFUL OF SCIENCE ("when violence fails, resort to words")
* THE SCIENCE BIT ("attempts to demystify science and scientists")
* SCIENTIFIC AMERICA
* NATURE
* BAD SCIENCE
* GUNS AND ELMO
* RENNIE'S LAST NERVE ("educated opinions, knee-jerk reactions, thoughtful reflections")

* MORAL MACHINES (Teaching Robots Right from Wrong)

* ACCELERATING FUTURE
* MAREK KOHN ("the implications of scientific thinking for ideas about human nature and society")
* RICHARD CARRIER (writings on atheism, materialist & ontological naturalism, the dubious historicity of Jesus, etc)
* ROBERT M. PRICE (deconstructing Jesus and blasting apart Biblical authority, inerrancy, and Christian apologetics)
* SUSAN BLACKMORE (consciousness, Zen, Buddhism, memes, atheism, free will, science, Guardian Blog, etc)
* CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (he may be hungry, but he sure ain't weird - just look at his Home Page Replica)

* FRANK ZAPPA (You Are What You Is)
* ZAPPATEERS (Mecca for all true Zappa fanatics)
* ZAPPA WIKI JAWAKA

* ZAPPA PATIO

* IDIOT BASTARD (son of T'Mershi Duween!)

* FRANK ZAPPA LYRICS (Information is Knowledge)

* HUNGARIAN FRANK ZAPPA ASSOCIATION

* THE RONDO HATTON REPORT ("for people who have outgrown the ordinary")

* ARF ("The Home of Frank Zappa Heritage Studies")

* ZAPPA BOOKS
* ZAPPACAST (the Frank Zappa podcast)
* SPB PUBLISHING (Zappa-rich goodness)

* G & S MUSIC ("dedicated purveyors of Frank Zappa & related artists")
* DWEEZIL ZAPPA

* GARY LUCAS
* MIKE KENEALLY

* BRYAN BELLER & THE ARISTOCRATS

* KING CRIMSON (go listen to the Elephant Talk)
* ADRIAN BELEW & THE BEARS

* TONY LEVIN

* TREY GUNN

* CALIFORNIA GUITAR TRIO

* BILL BRUFORD

* NO-MAN

* JAKKO M. JAKSYZK
* STEVE VAI
* JIMI HENDRIX (who is In From The Storm)

* JOHN FAHEY (a Homage)
* LOU REED
* THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
* THE VELVET UNDERGROUND WEB PAGE

* MOE TUCKER
* JOHN CALE
* JOHN CALE (Fear is a Man's Best Friend)
* ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS

* THE MOLDY PEACHES

* JONATHAN RICHMAN AND THE MODERN LOVERS
* IGGY POP AND THE STOOGES & IGGY

* RICHARD HELL (Neon Boys, Television, The Heartbreakers, The Vovoids, etc)

* THE HEARTBREAKERS
* NEW YORK DOOLS, JOHNNY THUNDERS & CHATTERBOX

("the Church of the Venerated Saint Johnny Thunders - Patron Saint of Rock & Roll Guitarists)

* THE WONDER (Television, Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd & stiff)

* RICHARD LLOYD
* LUNA

* A HEAD FULL OF WISHES (Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Deay & Britta)
* FLAMIN' GROOVIES & CHRIS WILSON

* THE FEELIES

* IRON AND WINE

* UNDER BYEN (and of course Fansite)

* X (John Doe & Exene Cervenka)

* THE BLASTERS & DAVE ALVIN
* PATTI SMITH

* NEIL YOUNG
* ROY BUCHANAN (and discography)
* MIKE BLOOMFIELD
* DANNY GATTON
* HARVEY MANDEL

* OTIS RUSH

* BUDDY GUY
* B.B.KING

* ALBERT KING

* FREDDIE KING

* MUDDY WATERS

* HOWLIN' WOLF
* JOHN LEE HOOKER
* JOHNNY GUITAR WATSON (and Wikipedia)

* ROBERT NIGHTHAWK

* ROBERT LOCKWOOD Jr
* ALBERT COLLINS

* JOHNNY OTIS
* GEORGE CLINTON, FUNKADELIC, PARLIAMENT, P-FUNK, ETC (enter the Motherpage)
* VERNON REID & LIVING COLOUR
* SCOTT HENDERSON
* ARTHUR LEE & LOVE (and Fan Site)
* ALBERT LEE and his Hogan's Heroes
* ALVIN LEE
* BILLY JENKINS (more fun at the Babel Label and The Vortex Jazz Club)
* THE RESIDENTS (and the Residents UK)

* FLOWER TRAVELLIN' BAND & JOE YAMANAKA
* BUTTHOLE SURFERS

* CRANIUM PIE
* ROKY ERICSON/13th FLOOR ELEVATORS

* SKY SAXON & THE SEEDS (a Fan Site and a "comprehensive" look at The Vintage Years)

* THE FUGS
* EUGENE CHADBOURNE
* HENRY KAISER

* GLENN PHILLIPS

* FRED FRITH
* PERE UBU ("art is forever, an audience comes & goes")

* ROCKET FROM THE TOMBS
* MAYO THOMPSON (aka Red Crayola/Red Krayola)

* CARDIACS and their Museum (the fan site)

* JON POOLE

* PRIMUS & LES CLAYPOOL
* KEVIN COYNE
* KEVIN AYERS
* PATTO & OLLIE HALSALL
* RICHARD BUCKNER
* JOHN PRINE
* PETER BRUNTNELL
* J.J. CALE
* LEONARD COHEN (the Leonard Cohen Files)
* GIANT SAND /HOWE GELB (and Calexico)

* LOREN 'MazzaCane CONNORS

* MICHAEL HEDGES

* DAVID LINDLEY & KALEIDOSCOPE

* LAMBCHOP

* WILLARD GRANT CONSPIRACY

* M. WARD

* SCOUT NIBLETT

* VICTORIA WILLIAMS

* KRISTIN HERSH (Throwing Muses & 50 FOOT WAVE)

* NEKO CASE & THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS

* CAT POWER
* VIC CHESNUTT (fan site, Rabbits Are Cooking Breakfast)

* BILL FAY
* JACKIE LEVEN

* BILL CALLAHAN/SMOG

* STEPHEN MALKMUS & PAVEMENT (fansite)

* ESPERS & MEG BAIRD (The Baird Sisters)

* YEASAYER

* GEOFF FARINA/KARATE

* LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III

* MICKEY NEWBURY

* KRIS KRISTOFFERSON

* RAMBLIN' JACK ELLIOTT

* WILLIE NELSON

* JIMMY WEBB

* HARRY NILSSON (the Web Pages)
* ROY HARPER (visit his HQ and The Stormcock)
* JOHN MARTYN (the Big Muff pages)
* BILL FRISELL
* MICHAEL CHAPMAN
* WILL OLDHAM/BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY (pay your respects at The Royal Stable and The Pulpit)

* TORTOISE
* WIZZ JONES
* STEVE TILSTON, MARTHA TILSTON & MAGGIE BOYLE
* STEVE ASHLEY
* BILL CADDICK, JOHN TAMS & HOME SERVICE
* ROBB JOHNSON
* MARTIN CARTHY (at Mainly Norfolk and Come Sing It Plain)

* WATERSON: CARTHY
* ASHLEY HUTCHINGS & THE ALBION BAND (get Caught Riding a Bicycle, Toad In The Hole, The Albion Dance Band, The Albion Chronicles, A Guide)

* SHIRLEY COLLINS
* FAIRPORT CONVENTION (with Expletive Delighted)

* JOHN JAMES
* BERT JANSCH, JOHN RENBOURN, JACQUI MCSHEE/PENTANGLE & DANNY THOMPSON
* DAVEY GRAHAM
* ISAAC GUILLORY
* MARTIN SIMPSON
* ROY BAILEY
* LEON ROSSELSON
* CHRIS WOOD
* ALLAN TAYLOR
* ANDY CUTTING
* KATE RUSBY
* KATHRYN TICKELL

* CHRISTY MOORE & PAUL BRADY

* ANDY IRVINE (the fansite)

* STRAWBS
* INCREDIBLE STRING BAND (and Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending, Relics Of The Incredible String Band, Robin Williamson, Mike Heron & Clive Palmer)
* THE STRAWBS
* THE BEES KNEES, Mainly Norfolk, Free Reed Records, Talking Elephant, Folk Roots Magazine & FOLK AND ROOTS)

* TOPIC RECORDS
* DOC WATSON
* ROBYN HITCHCOCK (watch out for The Asking Tree, fegMANIA! & The Glass Hotel - and Robyn Hitchcock is God, Okay?)
* RICHARD THOMPSON

* TEDDY THOMPSON & KAMI THOMPSON

* JUDY DYBLE
* JUNE TABOR
* NIC JONES
* DAVID SYLVIAN

* RYUICHI SAKAMOTO (and Fansite)

* DAVID TORN

* MARC RIBOT

* PHIL MANZANERA
* GONG & DAEVID ALLEN/University of Errors

* NOT JUST ANOTHER GONG WEBSITE
* ROBERT WYATT
* SOFT MACHINE

* CARAVAN & RICHARD SINCLAIR

* MAN & ORIGINAL FAN SITE (Deke Leonard)

* HAPPY THE MAN

* BRIAN ENO (and the EnoWeb)

* JON HASSELL

* KRONOS QUARTET
* PETER HAMMILL ("most noted for his vocal abilities, and his refusal to make anything resembling middle-of-the-road music")

* IONA

* THE ROCHES
* TIGER LILLIES
* MILES DAVIS (still Miles Ahead and Kind of Blue)
* CHARLIE PARKER
* JOHN COLTRANE

* SUN RA
* WES MONTGOMERY
* MARTIN TAYLOR
* ALLAN HOLDSWORTH (and Fan Page)
* JOHN MCLAUGHLIN
* MIKE STERN
* JOHN SCOFIELD
* IAN CARR/NUCLEUS
* AL DI MEOLA & RETURN TO FOREVER

* JIM HALL

* RALPH TOWNER

* JOHN SURMAN

* BRIAN AUGER

* KEITH TIPPETT

* KEITH JARRETT & Fansite

* ERNEST RANGLIN

* EBO TAYLOR
* LITTLE AXE/SKIP MCDONALD
* BOB DYLAN (always Expecting Rain but Still On The Road and the Bob Links)
* HUUN-HUUR-TU (Tuvan throat-singers, etc)
* THE GRATEFUL DEAD & JERRY GARCIA (the Jerry Site)

* THE GRATEFUL WEB

* QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE

* JEFFERSON AIRPLANE & HOT TUNA

* JORMA KAUKONEN

* THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND (GREGG ALLMAN & DUANE ALLMAN)

* JEFF BECK

* ERIC CLAPTON

* PETER GREEN

* ALVIN LEE & TEN YEARS AFTER

* BILL NELSON
* QUINTESSENCE

* THE JAYHAWKS (the Lost Highways and FanPage)

* GARY LOURIS & MARK OLSEN

* WILCO

* UNCLE TUPELO (and Factory Belt, the unofficial archives)

* JAY FARRAR & SON VOLT (and Gumbo Pages)

* JOHNNY DOWD

* ATOMIC ROOSTER

* GRAHAM BOND

* FELA KUTI

* THE BEVIS FROND

* UNIVERS ZERO & ART ZOYD

* MARILLION & FISH

* PORCUPINE TREE

* HAWKWIND & HAWKLORDS (Starfarer's Page and Hawklords Sound Awesome)

* IAN NEAL

* SHWETA JHAVERI

* CURTIS MAYFIELD

* RICHIE HAVENS (the Fan Site)

* NEKTAR (the Nektar Project)

* SPIN CDs

* HUX RECORDS

* CUNEIFORM RECORDS
* VOICEPRINT RECORDS

* CALYX ("the Canterbury Music website")
* WEIRDOMUSIC ("discovering the darkest corners of the musical universe since 2001")
* THE RISING STORM ("we focus on lost gems in the genres of garage, country rock, psych folk, psychedelic rock, and other overlooked classics")
* AQUARIUM DRUNKARD ("bridges the gap between contemporary indie with vintage garage, psych, folk, country, New Orleans funk, r&b, soul and everything that falls in between")

* SOMETHING ELSE!
* THE TERRASCOPE (aka 'Ptolemaic Terrascope')
* NONESUCH RECORDS
* THE QUIETUS ("we're here to give music ranging from dubstep, death metal and post punk to hip hop, pop and spacerock the coverage it deserves")

* GONZO DAILY ("because some of us are still crazy enough to think that this stuff is important!")

* ALL ABOUT JAZZ

* MUSIC MONK

* TINY MIX TAPES

* MUSIC TAP

* THE SECOND DISC
* GUERNICA ("a magazine of art & politics")
* n+1 ("politics, literature, culture")
* h+ Magazine ("covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing human beings in fundamental ways")
* NPR ("to create a more informed public")
* PROJECT GUTENBERG
* OXFORD WORLD CLASSICS
* CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
* PENGUIN CLASSICS
* WORDSWORTH EDITIONS
* THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA (cultural treasure trove)
* NORTON CRITICAL EDITIONS (indispensable thinking aids)
* EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
* DANTE (his worlds and his digital worlds)
* GEOFFREY CHAUCER (the first ever English novelist?)
* JOHN MILTON (the author of the ever great Paradise Lost)
* WILLIAM BLAKE ARCHIVE (and Zoamorphosis, the Blake Blog 2.0)
* CHARLES DICKENS (his page and portal)
* POETRY FOUNDATION
* WALLACE STEVENS
* THE PARIS REVIEW
* LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (standing up since 1979 for the "tradition of the literary and intellectual essay")
* LITERARY REVIEW ("a lively, intelligent literary magazine for people who love reading, but hate academic and intellectual jargon")
* THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
* BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
* LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
* THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

* NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
* GRANTA MAGAZINE
* HTML GIANT ("a literature blog that isn’t always about literature")

* THE BOOK (online review at The New Republic)

* BOOK FORUM
* PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
* THE VALVE ("a literary organ")
* THE BOTTLE IMP ("exists to promote and support the teaching and study of Scottish literature and language")

* HIS FUTILE PREOCCUPATIONS (Guy Savage)

* A COMMON READER ("reading for my own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or to correct the opinion of others")
* THE SECOND PASS
* THIS LITERARY MAGAZINE
* TIN HOUSE
* THE MODERN WORLD

* THE SCRIPTORIUM ("an index of experimental 20th Century writers")
* THE NEW CANON ("the best in fiction since 1985")
* CONCEPTUAL FICTION
* GREAT BOOKS GUIDE

* FANTASTIC METROPOLIS (archived)

* TELOS ("a quarterly journal of politics, philosophy, critical theory, culture and the arts")

* 5CENSE

* VULPRES LIBRIS ("a collective of bibliophiles writing about books")

* THE RUMPUS ("the literary equivalent of stolen Wi-Fi")

* BOOKS FROM FINLAND
* WAGGISH
* WRITERS NO ONE READS

* THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION

* CONVERSATIONAL READING

* THE CRITICAL FLAME
* ROLAND BARTHES: UNDERSTANDING TEXT
* JAMES JOYCE & JAMES JOYCE CENTRE (have a drink at The Brazen Head then read the Annotated Ulysses, Jon Barger's Internet Ulysses, the Here Comes Everybody's Edition(s) of Ulysses, Michael Groden's Notes on Ulysses and the HYPERTEXTUAL versions of Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man - then the Finnegans Wake Wiki, Concordance and the wondrous Extensible Elucidation Treasury)

* SAMUEL BECKETT (the Apmonia site and the Samuel Beckett Society's Endpage - for more Online Resources)
* FLANN O'BRIEN

* JOHN MCGAHERN
* WILLIAM FAULKNER
* HERMANN HESSE (cross into the Portal)
* HAROLD PINTER

* EDWARD BOND (and Wikipedia)

* CARYL CHURCHILL

* BERTOLT BRECHT (and Wikipedia)

* HENRIK IBSEN (the Ibsen Society of America and Wikipedia)

* ANTON CHEKHOV

* LUIGI PIRANDELLO (and Wikipedia)
* MERVYN PEAKE (genius creator of the Gormenghast books, sublime illustrator and other Vast Alchemies)
* PHILIP K. DICK (our Father-Thing, his Bookshelf, his fans and a Total Dick-Head)
* HERMAN MELVILLE ("It is - or seems to be - a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes": The Life and Works and short biography)
* FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (yet more Dostoevsky, and visit the Research Station)
* H.G. WELLS (the "father of SF" and, seminally, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr Moreau)
* FRANZ KAFKA (dive deep into Das Schoss and The Kafka Project)
* JOSE LUIS BORGES ("labyrinths, universal randomness and madness, literary forgeries & hoaxes, the review of imaginary books in the forms of modern day pseudoepigrapha", etc - wander into The Garden of Forking Paths and the Borges Center)
* VLADIMIR NABOKOV (Russian literary genius of Lolita fame "noted for his complex plots, clever word play, use of alliteration and synesthetic detail": leaf through Zembla)
* ITALO CALVINO (master fabulist, pioneering 'magical realist', postmodern surrealist, writer of metafiction, poet, essayist, journalist - to be found Outside the Town of Malbork)
* STANISLAW LEM (the great Polish writer of SF, philosophy and satire)

* STRUGATSKY BROTHERS
* MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (brilliant Russian surrealist & satirist "dealing with the correlation of humanity and power in the Soviet reality" - author of The Master and Margarita)
* UMBERTO ECO and his Travels in Hyperreality (the Porta Ludovica resource and Wiki)

* MARCEL PROUST (and Wikipedia)
* HARRY CREWS
* CHARLES BUKOWSKI
* KATHY ACKER
* DEBORAH LEVY
* JANET KAUFFMAN

* NICOLA BARKER (Darkmans)

* MARK SMITH (The Death of the Detective)

* DAVID STACTON (The Judges of the Secret Court)

* NICHOLSON BAKER (and Fan Page)
* JOHN FANTE (and Fan Site)

* STEPHEN WRIGHT (Meditations in Green)
* ROBERT STONE (author of Dog Soldiers, etc)
* TIM O'BRIEN (author of The Things They Carried)

* KATE ZAMBRENO (Green Girl)

* A.M. HOMES (May We Be Forgiven)
* RICHARD CURREY
* JAMES SALTER
* ROBERT COOVER (yes, The Public Burning and Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?)

* TOM WOLFE (The Bonfire of the Vanities)

* WILLIAM KENNEDY (The Albany Cycle)
* PATRICK McGRATH ("mental illness, repressed homosexuality and adulterous relationships" - what's there not to like?)

* DENIS JOHNSON (Jesus' Son)
* COLM TOIBIN (The Blackwater Lightship)

* SCOTT PHILLIPS (Rum, Sodomy and False Eyelashes)

* EDWARD ALLEN (Straight Through the Night)

* LAUREN GROFF (Arcadia)
* PAUL THEROUX
* JAMES PURDY (and Wikipedia)
* KNUT HAMSUN
* TARJEI VESAAS (author of The Ice Palace)
* JOHN DOS PASSOS (the USA Trilogy and Manhattan Transfer)
* LAWRENCE DURRELL

* ANTHONY BURGESS
* KATHERINE MANSFIELD (and her Society)
* SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER
* ROGER ZELAZNY
* KURT VONNEGUT (satire, black comedy, science fiction, atheist humanism - invaluable)
* WILLIAM BURROUGHS ("one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century" - get your Naked Lunch)
* JOHN BANVILLE (aka Benjamin Black)
* J.M. COETZEE
* BRUNO SCHULZ (and his Art)

* ROBERT WALSER (a project dedicated to Wandering with Robert Walser)

* JOSEPH ROTH (Radetzky March/Job)

* ROBERT MUSIL (The Man Without Qualities)

* HERMAN HESSE (another Page)

* THOMAS BERNHARD (get some Bernhardiana and blog)

* HEINRICH BOLL (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum)
* STEFAN GRABINSKI (enter his Dark Domain)

* GUIDO GOZZANO (his Requiems & Nightmares)
* WITOLD GOMBROWICZ (and Wikipedia)
* JAVIER MARIAS
* MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
* GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ (the town of Mocondo)
* JOSE DONOSO
* CARLOS FUENTES
* JULIO CORTAZAR
* ROBERTO BOLANO (and Wikipedia)
* FELIPE ALFAU
* GEORGES PEREC (at the Scriptorium)
* ROMAIN GARY
* RAYMOND QUENEAU
* JEAN ANOUILH & JEAN GENET & JEAN COCTEAU
* ALBERT CAMUS (the Albert Camus Society US)

* GEORGES BATAILLE (Blue of Noon/Story of the Eye)
* JACQUES CHESSEX
* BORIS VIAN (and Fanpage)
* AlAIN ROBBE-GRILLET (at Fantastic Fiction)

* LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE (and Wikipedia)
* MARCEL BEALU

* J.M.G. LE CLEZIO

* GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
* ALFRED JARRY
* JOSE SARAMAGO
* ISMAIL KADARE
* GUNTER GRASS
* YUKIO MISHIMA (and Wikipedia)
* HARUKI MURAKAMI (more at Exorcising Ghosts and Resources)

* ORHAN PAMUK (My Name is Red)

* KOBO ABE
* MILORAD PAVIC
* DAMBUDZO MARECHERA (and Wikipedia)
* CHINUA ACHEBE
* MIA COUTO
* BEN OKRI (and Wikipedia)

* AMOS OZ

* DAVID GROSSMAN

* ANDRE BRINK

* BREYTON BREYTENBACH

* NADINE GORDIMER

* JACQUES STRAUSS (The Dubious Salvation of Jack V)

* SERGIO DE LA PAVA (A Naked Singularity)

* MAGDA SZABO (The Door)

* DEZSO KOSZTOLANYI (Anna Edes)
* AMELIE NOTHOMB (author of The Hygiene of the Assassin, Fear and Trembling, etc)

* PATRICK CHAMOISEAU (Texaco)

* LUIS FERNANDO VERISSIMO (Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans)

* GREGOR VON REZZORI (Memoirs of an anti-Semite)

* AMOS TUTUOLA (The Palm Wine-Drinkard)
* NOTABLES: Michal Ajvaz ("The Golden Age" & "The Other City"), Jean-Christophe Valtat ("Aurorarama" & "03"), Sebastien Doubinsky ("The Babylonian Trilogy" & "Absinth/The Song of Synth"), Angelica Gorodischer ("Kalpa Imperial" & Trafalgar"), Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud ("A Life on Paper"), Johanna Sinisalo ("Birdbrain" & "Not Before Sundown"), Leena Krohn (Tainaron: Mail from Another City"), Antoine Volodine ("Minor Angels" & "Naming the Jungle"), César Aira ("An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter" & "The Hare"), Yoko Ogawa ("The Driving Pool", "Hotel Iris" & "The Housekeeper and the Professor"), Karen Tei Yamashita ("I Hotel")

* WU MING FOUNDATION & LUTHER BLISSETT

* DONALD RAY POLLOCK
* RICHARD KALICH
* SCOTT BRADFIELD
* PERCIVAL EVERETT
* DENNIS COOPER
* BLAKE BUTLER
* JEREMY REED
* JOHN BURNSIDE

* RUPERT THOMSON (Death of a Murderer)
* PAUL BOWLES
* ROBERT GRAVES
* JONATHAN LITTELL (The Kindly Ones)

* ALISON MOORE (The Lighthouse)
* ANNA KAVAN (her life & books)

* HARI KUNZRU (My Revolutions & Gods Without Men)

* EDWARD ST. AUBYN (the Patrick Melrose novels)

* DON DELILLO ("we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean" ... in Don DeLillo's America)
* THOMAS PYNCHON ("investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology, sociology, mathematics, science, and technology": for more see the Pynchon wiki, the Inherent Vice wiki, the Mason & Dixie wiki, the Against the Day wiki, PynchonNotes, the Illustrated Gravity's Rainbow and enter if you dare the Spermatikos Logos)
* PYNCHONESQUE
* JOHN BARTH

* HENRY ROTH (the brilliant Call It Sleep)

* HAROLD BRODKEY (The Runaway Soul/Stories In An Almost Classical Mode)

* WILLIAM T. VOLLMAN (try Reading Vollamann, You Bright and Risen Angels)

* WILLIAM H. GASS (try Reading Gass)

* WILLIAM GADDIS (The Recognitions)
* PHILIP ROTH (and his Society: "greed, fear, racism, and political ambition are disclosed as the motive forces behind the 'all-American ideals'")
* CORMAC McCARTHY (and his Society: "he imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls")
* T.C. BOYLE ("explores the ruthlessness and the unpredictability of nature and the toll human society unwittingly takes on the environment")
* RUSSELL BANKS (and Wikipedia)
* JAMES BALDWIN

* ROBERT PENN WARREN (most notably, All the King's Men)
* THOMAS WOLFE (and Wikipedia)

* THEODORE DREISER (and Wikipedia)

* JOHN STEINBECK (and Wikipedia)

* WALKER PERCY (and Wikipedia)

* THORNTON WILDER

* NELSON ALGREN (go on, take A Walk On The Wild Side)

* KENNETH PATCHEN (and Wikipedia)

* DELMORE SCHWARTZ
* PAUL AUSTER
* PETER CAREY
* ALEKSANDAR HEMON
* ALAN WALL

* KEITH RIDGEWAY (Hawthorn & Child)

* CLARE VAYE WATKINS (Battleborn)

* PETER MATTHIESSEN (The Watson Trilogy/Shadow Country)

* MICHAEL CHABON (The Yiddish Policemen's Union)

* VICTOR LAVALLE (Big Machine & The Devil in Silver)

* HELEN DEWITT (Lightning Rods)

* DORIS LESSING (dip into The Golden Notebook and the Canopus in Argos Archives)
* IRIS MURDOCH
* JOYCE CAROL OATES (Celestial Timepiece)

* RICHARD FORD (Frank Buscombe books)

* RICHARD YATES (Revolutionary Road)

* JOHN UPDIKE

* SAUL BELLOW

* RAYMOND CARVER

* JOHN CHEEVER

* BERNARD MALAMUD

* ALICE MUNRO

* CYNTHIA OZICK
* HENRY MILLER
* ANAIS NIN (the Blog and fan site)
* JOHN RECHY
* GORE VIDAL (reach for the Index)
* GENE WOLFE (consult Ultan's Library, Hoof & Hide, Silk For Caldé and the WolfeWiki)
* JACK VANCE (the Vance resource site, Foreverness and the essential Vance Vocabulary Search Tool, Totality)
* SAMUEL R. DELANY (SF pioneer, especially with regards to sex/sexuality, possibly most famous for Dhalgren - "an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe")
* SAMUEL DELANY INFORMATION & ERRATA (for the serious fans/scholars!)
* ADAM ROBERTS (also transmitting on Europrogocontestovision, Punkadiddle and Translating Hugo)
* NEAL STEPHENSON (dazzling confabulating and 'baroque' exploration of mathematics, cryptography, computing, nanotechnology, political philosophy, currency, economics, the history of science, culture, ETC)
* JON COURTENAY GRIMWOOD (author of the alternative history, Arabesk Trilogy)

* GEOFF RYMAN (Th Child Garden)
* CORDWAINER SMITH (the truly weird & wonderful Instrumentality of Mankind stories)
* GEORGE SAUNDERS
* JONATHAN LETHEM (inventive mixing and bending of hardboiled detective fiction, science fiction and autobiography)
* MATT RUFF (American author of thriller, science fiction and comic novels)

* RICK MOODY
* NICHOLAS ROYLE
* RICHARD POWERS ("explore the effects of modern science and technology")
* DAVID FOSTER WALLACE ("fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being")
* JIM CRACE ("fables with a metaphysical cut")
* LIONEL SHRIVER (We Need to Talk About Kevin)

* SARAH HALL
* THE EDGE ("the sharpest magazine in the world")
* ANTIQUARIAN WEIRD TALES
* THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION #THIRD EDITION (work in progress)
* THE SCIENCE FICTION DICTIONARY OF NEW CRITICISM ("making it up as we go along")

* AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION: CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE 1950s
* REVOLUTION SF
* SCIENCE FICTION CITATIONS ("hunting for the earliest citations of sf words")
* ANSIBLE (DAVID LANGFORD'S "infamous" British SF/Fan newsletter)
* LOCUS ONLINE (probably the best 'one-stop shop' for all the latest LITERARY Science Fiction news, reviews, interviews, etc)

* SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS DATABASE
* TTA PRESS (publishers of Interzone, Black Static, Crimewave and more)
* SPIRAL GALAXY REVIEWING LABORATORY (Karen Burnham)
* io9 ("we come from the future")
* SCI-FI LONDON
* SF SITE
* LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE

* NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE
* CLARKESWORLD MAGAZINE
* SALON FUTURA (read Cheryl's Musings)
* ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION
* THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION (founded in 1949)
* ANALOG (founded in 1930, "it is the longest continually published magazine of that genre")
* SF SIGNAL
* TANGENT ("the genre's premiere review magazine for short SF & Fantasy since 1993")
* BEST SF
* STRANGE HORIZONS (and its Blog)
* ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE
* THE ZONE
* TOTAL SCI-FI ONLINE
* ECLECTICISM E-ZINE
* ON SPEC MAGAZINE
* THE DREAM PEOPLE ("a journal of irreal text")
* FRUITLESS RECURSION ("a journal devoted to discussing works of SF criticism")
* RUTHLESS CULTURE (Jonathan McCalmont's criticisms)
* FUTURISMIC (near-future science fiction and fact since 2001)

* THE REVELATOR ("since 1876")
* BIBLIOPHILE STALKER
* EVERYTHING IS NICE (Martin Lewis)

* RICH PUCHALSKY

* GARETH RESS
* ASKING THE WRONG QUESTIONS (Abigail Nussbaum)
* BIG OTHER (Paul Kincaid, etc)

* PAUL KINCAID (Through the Dark Labyrinth)

* NADER ELHEFNAWY (Raritania)

* NIALL HARRISON (Strange Horizons)

* MAX CARINDUFF (Pechorin's Journal)

* DAVID HEBBLETHWAITE (Follow the Thread)

* THE VERY SPRING AND ROOT

* C.S. SAMULSKI ("the author is dead")

* FINGER-STEEPLING AND SHARKS (Richard Cooper)

* M. DARUSHA WEHM ("explorer of worlds real and imagined")

* EUROPA SF ("the European science fiction portal")

* OPINIONS OF A WOLF
* GRASPING FOR THE WIND
* OUT THERE BOOKS ("sci-fi, fantasy, you know, weird stuff")
* EAT MY ZOMBIE ("the zombie apocalypse is nearly upon us. We must prepare")
* BLOODY DISGUSTING ("your Number 1 source for all things horror")
* HORROR REANIMATED ("a literary plague resistant to every drug and all bad press")
* URBANOMIC ("address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror")

* CTHEORY ("peer-reviwed journal of theory, technology and culture")

* THE HORRIFICALLY HORRIFYING BLOG
* FRANKENSTEINIA ("tracking Frankenstein and all things related")
* THE RONDO HATTON AWARDS
* THE DRUNKEN SEVERED HEAD
* THE COBWEBBED ROOM
* THE HORROR FICTION REVIEW
* THE BLACK ABYSS
* THE HELLFORGE (Matthew Fryer)

* HELLBOUND TIMES

* THE ARKHAM DIGEST
* HELLNOTES

* HORROR WORLD
* TWISTED TALES
* THE SUPERNATURAL TALES BLOG
* WEIRD TALES ("the original magazine of the unique, fantastic & the bizarre")
* WEIRD FICTION REVIEW ("your non-denominational source for source for The Weird")

* WEIRD FICTION REVIEW (edited by S.T. Joshi)

* DISTRICT OF WONDERS
* A GUIDE TO SUPERNATURAL FICTION (Tartarus Press)
* EDGAR ALLAN POE (master of the macabre, inventor of detective fiction and PoeStories)
* SHERIDAN LE FANU (and more, plus Wikipedia)

* AMBROSE BIERCE & THE AMBROSE BIERCE PROJECT
* GUY DE MAUPASSANT
* M.R. JAMES
* ARTHUR MACHEN (and The Order of the Twilight Star & The Friends of Arthur Machen)
* HENRY JAMES (the Scholar's Guide and Reading Henry James blog)
* WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON (innovator of 'scientific' or cosmic horror, and the Dying Earth sub-genre, in his milestone works - The House on the Borderland and The Night Land)
* H.P. LOVECRAFT (fantastically influential cosmic horror writer, most famously/notoriously the Cthulhu Mythos - featuring a "pantheon of ancient humanity-nullifying entities")
* H.P. LOVECRAFT AND HIS LEGACY

* READERS GUIDE TO THE CTHULHU MYTHOS
* CTHULHU FILES & CTHULHU LEXICON

* CRYPT OF CTHULHU
* CthulhuWiki
* THE LOVECRAFTSMAN

* THE LOVECRAFT EZINE
* YOG-SOTHOTH ("for H.P. Lovecraft & Cthulhu")
* YOG-BLOGSOTH ("hideous blasphemies")
* TENTACLII
* THE KING IN YELLOW and its Wikia (Robert W. Chambers)

* A SEASON IN CARCOSA
* DAVID LINDSAY (Scottish author famous for A Voyage to Arcturus)
* CLARK ASHTON SMITH (inspired by Hodgson and Lovecraft, his Zothique stories provided the prime inspiration for Jack Vance's Dying Earth series)

* THE DOUBLE SHADOW ("a Clark Ashton Smith podcast")
* JAMES BRANCH CABELL (most known for the "obscene" Jurgen, about a "monstrous clever fellow" - and part of the 18-volume The Biography of Manuel, many of which take place in the fictional country/province of Poictesme)

* MANLY WADE WELLMAN (The Voice of the Mountains)
* S.T. JOSHI (chronicler of The Weird and the word's greatest living expert on H.P. Lovecraft)
* SHIRLEY JACKSON (and her Works, especially the highly influential - The Haunting of Hill House & The Lottery)
* ROBERT BLOCH (of Psycho fame, etc)
* RICHARD MATHESON (known for I Am Legend and The Incredible Shrinking Man)
* CLIVE BARKER (the Lost Souls fansite)
* POPPY Z. BRITE

* KARL EDWARD WAGNER (and Wikipedia)
* GERARD HOUARNER
* DAVID B. SILVA
* RAMSEY CAMPBELL ("welcome to my haunted domain")

* DENNIS ETCHISON
* BRIAN EVENSON (philosophical & epistemological flavoured horror)

* S.J. CHAMBERS ("I imbibe words and consume past minds. As a result, I often awake next to strange sentences and forgotten meanings")

* ROBIN SPRIGSS (the unofficial House of Nine)

* RICHARD A LUPOFF (Lovecraft's Book)

* PETER CANNON (Lovecraft Chronicles)

* PETER ATKINS
* BRIAN CONN ("The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season")

* GRACE KRILANOVICH ("The Orange Eats Creeps")
* MICHAEL CISCO (terrifyingly awesome horror/New Weird writer)
* T.E.D. KLEIN (accoladed for his "meticulous construction and subtle use of horror")
* THOMAS LIGOTTI (Lovecraftian 'philosophical horror' from a cult figure with a distinct literary bent)
* CONRAD WILLIAMS (brilliant horror writer with a "fearless heart and an absolutely gorgeous soul")
* MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH (another brilliant horror/SF writer)
* ADAM L.G. NEVILL (one of the Young Turks of British horror - watch out)

* TOM FLETCHER (The Thing on the Shore)

* CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
* LAIRD BARRON (the Domination of Black blog, Weaponised reviews and his Ology)

* JOHN LANGAN
* JOHN HORNOR JACOBS (Southern Gods)

* T.E. GRAU ("The Cosmicomicon")

* THOMAS S. ROCHE (The Panama Laugh)

* PAUL FINCH ("walking in the dark")

* DANIEL MILLS (Revenants)

* CHARLES PALLISER (The Quincunx: The Inheritance of John Huffam - and the fan website)

* HARRY KARLINSKY (The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin 1857-1879)
* JOE HILL
* JOEL LANE
* REZA NEGARESTANI (and his teeming Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials)
* MATT CARDIN (his Teeming Brain and Demon Muse)
* JOSEPH S. PULVER (and This Yellow Madness)
* W.H. PUGMIRE (the A View From Sesqua Valley blog and'Lovecraftian' Amazon reviews)

* RICHARD GAVIN

* GEMMA FILES (her Handful of Dust journal)

* SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA

* JOHN B. FORD (Dark Shadows on the Moon)

* BRIAN McNAUGHTON (The Throne of Bones)

* ANN K. SCHWADER (her Yaddith Times journal)

* CHARLES L. GRANT (and Wikipedia)
* JAMES COOPER (You Are The Fly)

* CHARLEE JACOB (Dread in the Beast)

* DAVID RIX (Feather: tales of Isolation and Descent)

* CAROLE JOHNSTONE (Cold Turkey)

* JOE SIMPSON WALKER

* MICHAEL LAIMO (and Blog)
* MATT BELL (and The Collagist)

* JEFF STRAND

* RICK HAUTALA
* IAN ROGERS (featuring the private eye Felix Renn and his disturbing battles with creatures from the The Black Lands, a supernatural dimension adjacent to our own)
* MIRA GRANT (more zombies apocalypses in the Newsflesh Trilogy)

* STEPHEN BACON (Peel Back the Sky)

* RAY CHULEY ("probably monsters")

* DANIEL G. KEOHANE

* MIKE SHEVDON
* JONATHAN MABERRY
* DALE BAILEY
* DAVID NICKLE
* GARY FRY
* SIMON BESTWICK
* STEPHEN VOLK

* JOSEPH D'LACEY
* ALLYSON BIRD
* ANGELA SLATTER

* BRENDAN MOODY
* NINA ALLAN
* KAARON WARREN

* ANNA TAMBOUR

* ANDREA HAIRSTON (Redwood and Wildfire)

* G. WILLOW WILSON (Alif the Unseen)

* TANITH LEE (Daughter of the Night)

* STORM CONSTANTINE

* SANDRA McDONALD (Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories)

* BRIT MANDELO (Beyond Binary)

* ROBERT J. WIERSEMA
* BRIAN HODGE
* CLAUDE LALUMIERE ("storyteller of the strange")
* MICHAEL BLUMLEIN
* CHET WILLIAMSON ("riteing wurds sinze 1981")
* KEALAN PATRICK BURKE
* ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT
* ORRIN GREY
* NICHOLAS KAUFMANN
* JAMES BRADLEY (City of Tongues)

* BRADFORD MORROW
* NEIL GAIMAN
* STEPHEN KING
* PETER STRAUB (one of the 'old guard' but still one of the best - guaranteed chills)
* TIM LEBBON (stylish & original Dark Fantasy and horror)
* CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN (and his blog)
* KIM NEWMAN and the Official Archive (writer of Anno Dracula, set in an 'alternative' 1888 in which Dracula is not killed by Van Helsing but instead is married to Queen Victoria and has become the de facto dictator of Great Britain and its sprawling empire)
* JAMES SALLIS (includes hardboiled private detective, Lew Griffin - a black man moving through a white man's world
* JOE R. LANSDALE (zombie westerns, alternative history, bizarre horror, extremely dark crime and "Elvis & JFK battling a soul-sucking Ancient Egyptian mummy in a nursing home")
* F. PAUL WILSON (best known for his saga about Repairman Jack, a mysterious urban underground mercenary who is hired by ordinary people to 'fix' problems that cannot be dealt with legally - all part of the The Secret History of the World)
* THE UNOFFICIAL F. PAUL WILSON WIKI (features a useful The Secret History of the World timeline)
* JONATHAN CARROLL (enjoy some Glass Soup)
* GRAHAM JOYCE
* NICK ANTOSCA
* MICHAEL ROWE (new author of Enter Night)
* TOM PICCIRILLI ("enter the Deep South swamps where deformed children, serial killers, ghosts, preachers and granny witches all beg for your attention")
* STEWART O'NAN
* LEE THOMAS (The German)

* MERCEDES M. YARDLEY (Beautiful Sorrows)
* RONALD KELLY
* MIKE ARGENTO (Don't Be Cruel)
* CHESYA BURKE & LIVE JOURNAL (Let's Play White)

* LIVIA LLEWELLYN (Engines of Desire)
* DAVID MOLES (keeper of the Chronautic Log)

* JANE ROGERS (The Testament of Jesse Lamb)

* ERIN MORGENSTERN (The Night Circus)

* GARY SHTEYNGART (Super Sad True Love Story)

* MARINA WARNER ("writer and mythographer")
* MATTHEW HUGHES & ARCHONATE
* JACK WOMACK ("packed with grimly amusing social satire and powerful little allegories exploring urban breakdown, class war and racial tensions")
* WILLIAM GIBSON (the "noir prophet" of Cyberpunk and the "man who mad us cool" at last, our ALEPH)
* BRUCE STERLING (his Beyond the Beyond blog)
* LEWIS SHINER
* JOHN SHIRLEY (author of the "protoplasmic mother of all cyberpunk novels", City Come A-Walkin - and the influential short story collection, Heatseeker)
* RUDY RUCKER (writer of the acclaimed Ware Tetralogy, a "cyberweird future history about the first robot revolution and immortality")
* BRUCE BETHKE (who gave to the world the word 'cyberpunk' in his 1980 short story of the same name)

* WILL MCINTOSH (Soft Apocalypse)

* ROB ZIEGLER (Seed)

* RICHARD E. GROPP (Bad Glass)
* THE CYBERPUNK PROJECT
* DA VINCI AUTOMATA (a blog about clockpunk)
* SIMON INGS ("a lapsed Islamic cyborg with a defective exoskeleton nostalgic is reduced to making blue movies to get access to exotic sensory equipment" - and other such mundane tales)

* TIM MAUGHAN (Paintwork)
* DAVID MARUSEK (and Wikipedia)

* NEAL BARRETT Jr (Through Darkest America)
* CHRIS BECKETT
* KARL SCHROEDER

* KEITH BROOKE

* ERIC BROWN
* JASON SANFORD ("fiction, thoughts, ramblings")

* JAMES LOVEGROVE
* DAVID HERTER (writer of October Dark)
* IAIN BANKS (the man who brought us the interstellar, post-scarcity, semi-anarchist-cum-semi-socialist utopian society of The Culture)
* DAN SIMMONS (the vast and sometimes overwhelming Hyperion Cantos and Ilium/Olympos Notes)
* JEFFREY THOMAS (welcome to the "nightmarish future city of Punktown, a crime-ridden megalopolis on the colony world of Oasis - home to the scum of countless alien races, clones, mutants, and sentient machines")
* J.G. BALLARD ("at the age of 16, I discovered Freud and the surrealists, a stick of bombs that fell in front of me and destroyed all the bridges I was hesitating to cross")
* BALLARDIAN ("explores tropes and motifs found in the work of J.G. Ballard")
* CHRISTOPHER PRIEST
* MICHAEL MOORCOCK (enter The Terminal Cafe, the Michael Moorcock Information Node)
* M. JOHN HARRISON (SF/fantasy/slipstream prose-master, most noted for his highly influential VIRICONIUM sequence - an endlessly shifting city that "lies in a dying Earth littered with the detritus of the millennia")
* JOHN T. SLADEK & THOMAS M. DISCH

* NORMAN SPINRAD (and Wikipedia)
* DAVID R. BUNCH (the violent cyborg dystopia of Moderan)
* BARRINGTON BAYLEY (and his Astounding Worlds)
* KEITH ROBERTS (most famous, rightly or wrongly, for Pavane - which depicts a 1968 in which the Roman Catholic Church still rules supreme after Protestantism was destroyed during the wars that resulted from the aftermath of the assassination of Queen Elizabeth in 1588)

* MICHAEL BISHOP (No Enemy But Time)

* STEVEN UTLEY (The 400-Million-Year Itch)
* FRITZ LEIBER (creator of the immortal Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, set in Nehwon - "a world like and unlike our own", especially its greatest city, Lankhmar: consult The Scrolls of Lankhmar and Maps)
* THEODORE STURGEON (and the 'official' Literary Trust)
* PHILIP JOSE FARMER
* HARLAN ELLISON
* BRIAN STABLEFORD (and Wikipedia)
* ROBERT SILVERBERG (and Wikipedia)

* JOE HALDEMAN (The Forever War)
* ROBERT SHECKLEY

* BOB SHAW (and Wikipedia)

* ALGIS BUDRYS (Who?)
* JOHN BRUNNER

* WILLIAM TENN

* FREDRIC BROWN
* ERIC FRANK RUSSELL (and Wikipedia)
* HENRY KUTTNER & C.L. MOORE
* FLETCHER PRATT
* LEIGH BRACKETT (and her Ology)

* MIKE RESNICK ("words of wonder")
* IAIN SINCLAIR (exploring the psychogeography of London)
* WILL SELF (modern day flâneur "known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastical" writings, who likes the madness of crowds and real meals)
* BRIAN ALDISS (the Old Man himself - we are not worthy)
* theinferior4+1 (joint blog by LUCIUS SHEPARD, Elizabeth Hand, Paul Di Filippo, Paul Witcover & Lisa Goldstein)
* RHYS HUGHS (look out for The Spoons That Are My Ears!, The Rime of the Postmodern Mariner, The Man Toucan, The Gloomy Seahorse, Rhysop's Fables & Aardvark Caesar)
* THE PASSAGE (we need to Find Subject Zero)
* SIMON KURT UNSWORTH (and Wikipedia)
* BRENDAN CONNELL
* SIMON STRANTZAS
* MARK SAMUELS (writing "in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft, his stories often focus on detailing a shadowy modern London in which the protagonists gradually discover a dark and terrifying reality behind the mundane urban world")
* R.B. RUSSELL ("love and loss tear at the fabric of everyday life and distort reality")

* BASIL COPPER
* D.F. LEWIS
* REGGIE OLIVER
* LAWRENCE C. CONNOLLY
* GARY A. BRAUNBECK
* GREG F. GIFUNE
* DAVID MOODY
* QUENTIN S. CRISP

* SIMON MAGINN
* ROBERT DUNBAR

* JAMESON CURRIER
* WESTON OCHSE
* WILLIAM HJORTSBERG
* R. THOMAS RILEY
* DONALD BARTHELME
* BENJAMIN PERCY
* DAN CHAON
* JACK CADY

* JONATHAN WOOD
* KEVIN BROCKMEIER (his Brief History of the Dead)
* THE AFRIKA REICH (Guy Saville)

* NICOLE CUSHING ("laughing at the abyss")

* LYNNE JAMNECK ("writer, academic, nerd. Likes tea")

* SARAH PINBOROUGH

* SARAH LANGAN
* TODD GRIMSON (Brand New Cherry Flavor)
* CHRISTOPHER FARNSWORTH (The President's Vampire)
* BEN H WINTERS (Bedbugs)
* DAN WELLS (I Am Not A Serial Killer)

* STEPHEN M IRWIN
* PAUL DI FILIPPO (prolific satirist known for his science fiction pastiches - welcome to the "postmodern apocalypse")
* BILL ECTRIC
* STEVE AYLETT (writer of satirical science fiction, slipstream and Bizarro books)

* JEFF LINT ("author of some of the strangest and most inventive satirical pulp science fiction of the late 20th century")

* JEFF NOON (Vurt)

* TIM DAVYS (Mollisan Town Quartet)
* TOM BRADLEY (Bizarro fiction about "a harelip with a six-figure book advance, a seven-foot-tall banjoist losing his mind in the London tube, a cannibal organist in the basement of the Mormon Tabernacle," etc)
* JEREMY C. SHIPP ("a place where toasters run free and hippos climb trees")

* JEREMY ROBERT JOHNSON (Extinction Journals)

* ANDERSEN PRUNTY (I am a Social Disease)

* CODY GOODFELLOW (Perfect Union)

* JOHN SKIPP
* MICHAEL A. ARZEN
* JORDAN KRALL
* D. HARLAN WILSON

* JAMES SMYTHE (his The Sparrows Are Flying Again blog dedicated to reviewing "every book Stephen King has written in chronological order")

* KRIS SAKNUSSEMM (The Enigmatic pilot)

* COLSON WHITEHEAD (Zone One)

* KIRSTEN IMANI KASAI

* ROBERT SHEARMAN (Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical)

* LISA L. HANNETT (Bluegrass Symphony)

* CHRISTOPHER BUEHLMAN (Those Across the River)

* MIKE ALLEN

* DAN PEARLMAN

* TIM WAGGONER
* BIZARRO CENTRAL ("sometimes surreal, sometimes avant-garde, sometimes goofy, sometimes bloody, sometimes borderline pornographic, and almost always completely out there")
* IAN SALES (and A Space About Books About Space)

* DOUGLAS THOMPSON (Mechagnosis)
* GWYNETH JONES (consistently thought provoking & challenging 'feminist' science fiction/fantasy)
* URSULA LE GUIN (creator of the Earthsea series set in a vast archipelago world, depicting the adventures of a budding young wizard named Ged - and the Hanish Cycle, recounting the efforts to re-establish galactic civilisation using an instantaneous interstellar communication device called the ansible)
* SHERI S. TEPPER
* L. TIMMEL DUCHAMP

* ELEANOR ARNASON (A Woman of the Iron People)

* CAROLYN IVES GILMAN (Halfway Human)

* PATRICIA ANTHONY

* CONNIE WILLIS
* JO WALTON (and her Tor page)
* TRICIA SULLIVAN
* AMANDA DOWNUM (and the Bride of Rain Dogs)
* NICOLA GRIFFITH

* KELLEY ESKRIDGE (Dangerous Space)
* JOAN SLONCZEWSKI (her blog, Ultraphyte)

* VANDANA SINGH (The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet)

* KIINI IBURA SALAAM (Ancient, Ancient)

* KAREN LORD (Redemption in Indigo)

* NALO HOPKINSON (Brown Girl in the Ring)

* NNEDI OKORAFOR (Who Fears Death)

* KEN LIU (The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary/Paper Menagerie)

* E. LILY YU (The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees)

* CHARLES YU (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)

* JULIANNA BAGGOTT
* LAUREN BEUKES (author of Zoo City)
* JAMES MORROW ("scientific humanist" author of the Godhead Trilogy - in which the "corpse of God, a two-mile long white male with a grey beard, is discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean")
* JOHN WHITBOURN & Binscombe Tales ("confessions of a Counter-Reformation Green Anarcho-Jacobite")
* LINDA NAGATA (and her Blog)
* PHILIP PULLMAN (and his Dark Materials and More)
* MARK CHADBOURN ("a post-industrial Taliesin whose visionary novels are crammed with remixed mythologies, oneiric set pieces, potent symbols, unsettling imagery and an engaging fusion of genre elements")
* M.T. ANDERSON (author of the brilliant The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing - about a boy who has grown up with his mother Cassiopeia, an African princess, in a house full of philosophers and scientists in colonial Boston)
* MICHELLE PAVER (Dark Matter)
* ALAN GARNER (writer of The Owl Service, etc)
* PATRICK NESS
* DARIN BRADLEY
* JASPER FFORDE
* SUZANNE COLLINS
* JIM BUTCHER (the great Dresden Files about a private investigator-cum-wizard Harry Dresden, involving supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago)
* HARRY CONNOLLY (convicted felon Ray Lilly works for the mysterious Twenty Palace Society, a group of sorcerers devoted to hunting down and executing rogue magicians)

* KATE GRIFFIN (the Matthew Swift series)

* ANTHONY HUSO (The Last Page)
* DOUGLAS COUPLAND
* GUY GAVRIEL KAY
* MARGO LANAGAN
* CORY DOCTOROW (and his legendary Boing Boing)
* CHARLES STROSS (his 'The Laundry' series, Lovecraftian spy thrillers set in a secret history of the 20th century - and his Ology)
* GREG BEAR ('hard' SF veteran)

* DAVID BRIN
* JAMES PATRICK KELLY & JOHN KESSEL (frequent collaborators and two great writers, especially when it comes to short stories & 'novelettes')
* TIM POWERS

* JAMES BLAYLOCK (and Fansite)

* K.W. JETER (Steamwords)
* JON ARMSTRONG (stories set a "superficial, dystopic near-future ruled by fashion and consumerism")
* PETER WATTS ("imagine a a first contact with aliens story from the point of view of a zombie post-human crewman aboard a starship captained by a vampire")

* MINISTER FAUST (Alchemists of Kush)

* CLIFF BURNS (So Dark the Night)
* KEN MACLEOD ("explores socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas and his themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection")
* IAN R. MACLEOD ("the future was a fact that had arrived and had already been forgotten")
* GREG EGAN ("specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness" - and his Ology)

* ELLEN KLAGES (The Green Glass Sea)

* LANCE OLSEN

* CHRIS ROBERSON
* JAMES BLISH (and Wikipedia)
* TED CHIANG
* ALASTAIR REYNOLDS (his Approaching Pavonis blog, and his Ology)
* NANCY KRESS
* KIM STANLEY ROBINSON ("his primary themes are concerned with the nature of a plausible utopia and ecological sustainability")
* WALTER JON WILLIAMS ("has explored a number of different styles and genres, including cyberpunk, farce, post-cyberpunk space opera, military science fiction, alternate history, science fantasy, disaster thriller, a Star Wars novel, historical adventure and police procedural in a SF context")
* CHRIS MORIARTY (and her SFness blog)
* ROBERT CHARLES WILSON (""probably the finest science-fiction author now writing")
* PAOLO BACIGALUPI (intense, politically-charged, ecological-themed SF from a brilliant new writer, and his Ology)
* TOBIAS BUCKELL and PAUL MELKO
* CAITLIN R. KIERNAN
* CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE and her Live Journal (Rules for Anchorites)
* EKATERINA SEDIA
* FELIX GILMAN (follow Arjun, an innocent, in his efforts to map the mapless city of Ararat and liberate its masses with the power of knowledge)
* SARAH MONETTE (creator of The Doctrine of Labyrinths series, set in the world of Meduse and concerning the adventures of Felix Harrowgate - a wizard - and his half-brother Mildmay the Fox, a former assassin)
* RACHEL SWIRSKY (writes about That Which Deranges the Senses)
* NATHAN BALLINGRUD
* MOLLY GLOSS
* K.J. BISHOP (surrealist/Decadent and dark urban fantasy about two former revolutionaries, Gwynn and Raule, fleeing to the tropical and dangerous city of Ashamoil)

* MICHAEL MARANO (Stories from the Plague Years)
* ZORAN ZIVKOVIC
* STACEY LEVINE
* WILL ELLIOTT
* BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS

* MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI (and Exploration Z)
* ANDREW CRUMEY ("his novels combine history, philosophy, science and humour")
* DAVID CONSTANTINE
* DAVID ROSE (Posthumous Stories & Vault)
* BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM ("gentle gadfly and plausible-fabulist")

* RICHARD BOWES (Minions of the Moon)
* DARYL GREGORY
* STEPH SWAINSTON (set in 'the Fourlands', a "secret childhood paracosm", the series focuses on 'the Circle' - an elite group of immortals created by the Emperor, a near god-like figure engaged in a prolonged conflict with insectoid creatures, and follow the life of Jant: a winged humanoid with a distinctly flawed personality")
* THEODORA GOSS
* GREER GILMAN ("complex mythology centered around the seasons and constellations of her fictional world of Cloud")
* EDWARD WHITTEMORE
* ANGELA CARTER
* RUSSELL HOBAN (then participate in The Slickman A4 Quotation Event)
* ALASDAIR GRAY ("his works combine elements of realism, fantasy, and science fiction, plus clever use of typography and his own illustrations")

* JAMES KELMAN

* IRVINE WELSH

* JANICE GALLOWAY (All Made Up)

* DUNCAN McLEAN (Bucketful of Tongues)

* ALAN WARNER (Morvern Callar)

* CATHI UNSWORTH (Weirdo)

* GORDON BURN (Fullalove)

* EOIN MCNAMEE/JOHN CREED

* A.L. KENNEDY (Original Bliss)

* LEIGH KENNEDY (The Journal of Nicholas the American/Saint Hiroshima)

* PAT BARKER (Regeneration Trilogy)

* LESLIE CANNOLD (The Book of Rachael)

* ALAN DENIRO
* CHRISTOPHER BARZAK
* BRIAN FRANCIS SLATTERY
* JESSE BULLINGTON
* J.M. MCDERMOTT
* CAT RAMBO
* PETER S. BEAGLE (his Conlan Press and Green Man special)

* SALADIN AHMED (The Crescent Moon Kingdoms)
* KAGE BAKER (and her sister's blog)
* EMMA BULL

* ALIETTE DE BODARD (Obsidian and Blood)

* JENNIFER PELLAND (and Live Journal)

* MADELINE ASHBY (vN)
* CHARLES DE LINT

* DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM
* JEFF VANDERMEER (leading New Weird figure, signature world of Ambergris - "an urban sprawl populated by humans after its original inhabitants, the mushroom-like humanoids known as "gray caps", were violently driven underground: and who continue to cast a shadow over the city with their unexplained nocturnal activities")
* CHINA MIEVILLE (New Weird inventor of Bas-Lag - a world where both magic ('thaumaturgy') and steampunk technology exist and is home to many intelligent races: the jewel in the crown being the monstrous city-state of New Crobuzon)
* JEFFREY FORD (fabulous creator of worlds, particularly the nightmarish metropolis of the Well-Built City - which exists only because the satanic genius Drachton Below, the Master, wished it so: within which resides the Physiognomist Cley, who can divine good and evil with his scalpels and callipers)
* MICHAEL SWANWICK (groundbreaking SF writer, especially knows for his "revisionist" or "anti-fantasy" fantasy novel - The Iron Dragon's Daughter, about a changeling who is a slave at a dragon factory building part-magical, part-cybernetic monsters that are used as jet fighters for cruel elves in Armani suits)

* LUCIUS SHEPARD
* KELLY LINK (Magic for Beginners)
* JOHN CROWLEY (superb author the fantasy masterpiece Little, Big, the "story of the Drinkwater family and their relationship with the mostly obscured world of Faery" - and the Ægypt Cycle, "set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills")
* JAY LAKE (his Live Journal)
* ELIZABETH BEAR ("turns steel into peanut brittle")
* MELISSA SCOTT (author of Shadow Man, a future world where intersex conditions have become more common - with five sexes and nine sexual orientations - and one planet where the old two-sexes model is still the norm)
* KAREN LOWACHEE (the Warchild Universe)
* KAREN TRAVISS (the Wess'Har Wars series)
* PAUL JESSUP ("strange, surreal stories that take the basic symbols of fairy tales and combining it with literary, contemporary settings and themes")
* NICK MAMATAS
* PAUL G. TREMBLAY ("completely original, utterly whack-a-doodle reinvention of the detective novel, like a weird telepod accident blending Mickey Spillane and Philip K. Dick")
* GLEN HIRSHBERG
* CHARLIE HUSTON (great "pulp" writer responsible, amongst other things, for the Joe Pitt Casebooks - a hardboiled private detective who happens to be an unaffiliated Vampyre)
* RICHARD MORGAN (brilliantly brutal combination of cyberpunk and hardboiled detective fiction, laced with dark humour, featuring his anti-hero TAKESHI KOVACS - a former United Nations envoy and a native of Harlan's World, a planet settled by a Japanese keiretsu with Eastern European labour)

* E.J. SWIFT ("Osiris")
* CLIFFORD D. SIMAK (yet more Simak, and Wikipedia)

* D.G. COMPTON (The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe & Nomansland)

* RICHARD COWPER (The White Bird of Kinship & The Twilight of Briareus)
* NICK CATO (Antibacterial Pope)
* LEE THOMPSON (Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children)
* DOUGLAS CLEGG

* JONATHAN MABERRY
* BOB FREEMAN (The Occult Detective)
* JACK KETCHUM ("who is the scariest guy in America? Probably Jack Kecthum")

* CHRISTOPHER FAHY (Fever 42)

* DANIEL PYLE (Dismember)

* DAVID J. SCHOW
* NORMAN PRENTISS
* NORMAN PATRIDGE
* WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER
* WILLIAM JONES
* GARY MCMAHON ("horror writer & gardener of lost souls")
* JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST
* STEVE & MELANIE RANSIC TEM
* KATHE KOJA ("frequently concern characters who have been in some way marginalized by society, often focusing on the transcendence and/or disintegration which proceeds from this social isolation")
* KIJ JOHNSON (At the Mouth of the River of Bees)

* KARIN TIDBECK (Jagannath)

* KARIN BOYE (Kallocain)

* NISI SHAWL (Filter House)
* THOMAS MULLEN
* KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN
* CAROL EMSHWILLER (and the Project)
* STEVEN MILLHAUSER

* NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER (A Trip to the Stars)
* STEVE ERICKSON
* HAL DUNCAN (Notes From The Geekshow)
* MARK CHARAN NEWTON
* DANIEL ABRAHAM
* JOE ABERCROMBIE ("if you're fond of bloodless, turgid fantasy with characters as thin as newspaper and as boring as plaster saints, Joe Abercrombie is really going to ruin your day")
* K.J. PARKER (and Wikipedia)
* R. SCOTT BAKKER (and Wikipedia)
* SCOTT WESTERFIELD (romping Steampunk & Alternative History novels, etc)

* AMELIA BEAMER (The Loving Dead)
* GED MAYBURY (Steamed Up)
* RED PLENTY (comrades, let's optimise!)
* JOHN SCALZI'S WHATEVER (blogging daily since 1998, but You Hate Mail Will Be Graded)
* SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY WORLD
* FANTASTIC FICTION (have a guess)
* FANTASTIC REVIEWS (useful resource, as is its Blog)
* STOMPING ON YETI ("vile beasts. Like giant, slightly-less-evil, albino squirrels")

* FerretBrain (""pick 'n' mix for the discerning mind!")
* SF & FANTASY MASTERWORKS (exploring and rediscovering The Canon)
* SF MISTRESSWORKS ("first there was the meme")

* DAUGHTERS OF PROMETHEUS ("21st Century women writers of SF")
* BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION (keeping up to date)
* TORQUE CONTROL (blog of the editorial staff of "Vector", the BSFA's critical journal)

* MICHAEL MOORCOCK'S NEW WORLDS
* THE WRITER AND THE CRITIC
* SCIENCE FICTION AWARDS WATCH
* CHINESE SCIENCE FICTION NEWSLETTER
* SUBTERRANEAN PRESS
* NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
* TACHYON PUBLICATIONS (and its Blog)
* BEACON PUBLICATIONS
* UNDERLAND PRESS
* SMALL BEER PRESS
* PS PUBLISHING
* PRIME BOOKS
* NIGHTFALL BOOKS ("explorations in speculative fiction literature")
* WILDSILD PRESS ("the future of fantasy")

* NIGHTJAR PRESS
* HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS
* CHAOSIUM
* WILDSIDE PRESS
* DEAD LETTER PRESS
* BURNING EFFIGY PRESS

* HIEROGLYPHIC PRESS
* ASH-TREE PRESS
* DEDALUS BOOKS
* EIBONVALE PRESS
* EX OCCIDENTE PRESS ("specialises in rara et nova fiction of the supernatural, the odd and the weird, the strange and the decadent, the fantastic and the obscure, the very holy and the luxuriously heretical")

* GAUNTLET PRESS
* DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS
* NON-STOP PRESS ("publishers of art, pop culture and fantastika")
* CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS
* NECROPOLITAN PRESS
* ELDER SIGNS PRESS
* GRAY FRIAR PRESS
* ANGRY ROBOT BOOKS
* CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
* BLACK ROOM BOOKS
* RAW DOG SCREAMING PRESS (and its non-fiction division, Guide Dog Books)
* BITING DOG PRESS
* LEAPING DOG PRESS/ASYLUM ARTS
* TICONDEROGA PUBLICATIONS
* EARTHLING PUBLICATIONS
* CHOMU PRESS ("new vistas of irreality")

* LAZY FASCIST PRESS ("publishes authors who, through careful exploration of unique linguistic landscapes, create monstrous, unclassifiable fictions")

* CONCORD EPRESS ("where books aren't dead")

* INNSMOUTH FREE PRESS (Fungi)

* SCREAMING DREAMS
* CIVIL COPING MECHANISMS
* BAD MOON BOOKS
* DELIRIUM BOOKS
* TARTARUS PRESS
* MORTBURY PRESS
* ORBIT BOOKS
* TOR BOOKS
* SOLARIS BOOKS (and its Blog)

* GOLLANCZ BLOG
* TITAN BOOKS (and its Blog)
* COLD TONNAGE BOOKS
* PERILOUS PRESS
* MONKEYBRAIN BOOKS
* DARK REGIONS PRESS

* MISKATONIC RIVER PRESS

* MISKATONIC BOOKS
* RE-PRESS

* HAIKASORU ("space opera. dark fantasy. hard science.")
* ANARCHY BOOKS ("changing the world ... one book at a time")
* AMBLING ALONG THE AQUEDUCT ("conversations about all thins Aqueductian")
* FEMINIST SF - THE BLOG! ("feminists blog about science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy")
* THE FREEZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
* GARDNER DOZOIS (anthologist)
* JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS (anthologist)
* LOU ANDERS (anthologist)
* JONATHAN STRAHAN/NOTES FROM COODE STREET(anthologist)
* ELLEN DATLOW (anthologist)
* PAULA GURAN (anthologist, and her The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror)
* RICH HORTON (anthologist, and his The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy)

* LAST SHORT STORY (A Review of Short SF/F)

* GEEK'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

* THE BAT SEGUNDO SHOW ("a cultural broadcast in tenebrous standing")
* OMNIVORACIOUS ("hungry for the next good books")
* REVIEW FIX
* EMPTY YOUR HEART OF ITS MORTAL DREAM (we obviously have similar tastes)

* GOGOL'S OVERCOAT

* HEROIC TIMES
* THE OF BLOG ("Eclectic and striving never to follow paths into ruts" - also runs Vaguely Borgesian)
* THE MUMPSIMUS ("displaced thoughts on misplaced literature")

* ARCFINITY ("the future always win")
* T.N. TOBIAS
* LINGUA FANTASTIKA ("fabulous speculations on the art of the story")
* UNFASHIONED CREATURES ("incoherent ramblings from a science fictional mind")

* THE PARISH LANTERN ("a club for the discussion of our obsessions")

* THE TRUTH INSIDE THE LIE (Bryant Burnette's blog)

* ALVARO ZINOS-AMARO ("blog about watching, waiting and writing")

* OCTOBER COUNTRY

* LGBT FANTASY FANS AND WRITERS

* ROSE LEMBERG
* SPARKS IN ELECTRICAL JELLY ("anything that sets the sparks a-crackling and fizzing through the old grey jelly")

* TOMCAT IN THE RED ROOM ("in which I rant about books")

* INTERNATIONAL SPECULATIVE FICTION ("How great would be to be able to read non-anglophone Speculative Fiction on a regular basis?")

* SHE NEVER SLEPT ("creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots")

* WELCOME TO MY WORLD (Martin McGrath)
* THE FUTURE FIRE ("social, political & speculative cyber-fiction")

* THE PAGE OF REVIEWS ("it's your world, we just write aboit it")

* MISSIONS UNKNOWN ("science fiction, fantasy & horror in San Antonio")

* WAX BANKS
* THE COGSMITH ("adventures in reading and writing")

* CAUSTIC COVER ART ("one man's endless ranting about book design")

* MOURNING GOATS

* PHENDERSON DJELI CLARK ("the musings of a disgruntled Haradrim")
* THEAKER'S QUARTERLY AND PAPERBACKS
* RICK KLAFFEL'S AGONY COLUMN
* SPECULATIVE FICTION JUNKIE
* GENREVILLE (a SF, fantasy and horror publishing blog")

* THE PIPER AT THE GATES OF FANTASY
* GRIM REVIEWS ("illuminating H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Fiction, and other dark phenomena")
* BARKING BOOK REVIEWS ("literary pontification from the Gecko's Bark")

* SKI-FFY ("SF art, pulps, paperbacks & more")

* STARSHIP RECKLESS
* READING THE LEAVES
* THIS IS HORROR
* PAPERBACK HORROR
* WEIRDMONGER
* THE CROW'S CAW

* BIBLIOMANCY (Jason Rolfe)

* DAILY DEAD

* HORROR TALK & HORROR NEWS

* RELY ON HORROR

* THE HORROR ZINE

* KAMVISION (Jason Baki)

* DARK MUSINGS ("the horror, the horror ...")

* WAG THE FOX ("a den for dark fiction")

* HORROR NOVEL REVIEWS (Matt Molgaard)

* SPOOKY READS
* LITERARY MAYHEM (horror fiction has gone insane!!)

* UNDERWORLDS ("a popular fiction literary blog")
* THE GREEN MAN REVIEW ("the roots and branches of arts and culture")
* THE BLOG THAT TIME FORGOT ("fraught with dinosaurs, barbarians, Transformers, heavy metal, monsters, spaceships, and all manner of madness")

* MORE2READ
* BLDGBLOG ("speculation about architecture, landscape, and the built environment")

* ICON EYE

* IN THE SHADOW OF THE OLYMPICS
* QUIET BABYLON ("a website about cyborgs & architects")
* RISE REVIEWS ("dedicated to reviewing quality genre fiction which received less than professional rates")
* A SUBTLE KNIFE ("reflections of myth, politics and desire")
* PAPER KNIFE (Maureen Kincaid Speller)
* COLD IRON & ROWAN-WOOD (SAM KELLY)
* YET THERE ARE STATUES
* SOLAR BRIDGE ("witterings about SF, with a smattering of lit fic so I can pretend that I'm clever")

* NERDS OF A FEATHER, FLOCK TOGETHER

* THE QWILLERY ("a blog about books and other things")

* TIGER BEATDOWN

* REQUIRES ONLY THAT YOU HATE ("hatred being the Emperor's greatest gift to hukanity")
* BOOMTRON
* THE HAT RACK

* SHELF MONKEY ("reviews from a literate primate")

* @NUMBER 71

* FANTASTICAL ANDREW FOX
* SCIENCE FICTION AND OTHER SUSPECT RUMINATIONS

* THE RANTING DRAGON ("rants & raves on speculative fiction")

* BEST SF BOOKS

* INSPIRED BY DUBIOUS VIRTUES

* CYBERMAGE

* SFF META HOME

* THE PINOCCHIO THEORY

* THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION
* BOOKGASM ("the site dedicated to READING MATERIAL TO GET EXCITED ABOUT")

* READY STEADY BOOKS ("an independent website which is devoted to reviewing the very best books in literary fiction, poetry, history and philosophy")

* PORNOKITSCH
* KRISTIN'S BOOK BLOG ("a blog about life and literature")
* STAINLESS STEEL DROPPINGS ("eclectic musings of a Renaissance geek")
* POTPOURRI OF SCIENCE FICTION LITERRATURE ("sci-fi Tyrannical Tirades, Vague Vexations, and Palatial Praises")
* TheoFantastique ("a meeting place for myth, imagination, and mystery in pop culture")
* NOT IF YOU WERE THE LAST SHORT STORY ON EARTH ("overdosing on short fiction since 2007")

* PANGLOSSOAN HUBRIS (Jim Steel's "adventures in publishing")
* GRAHAM SLEIGHT (SF and fantasy critic)
* ELITIST BOOK REVIEWS ("just a couple guys with much better taste in books than you")

* BOOKMUNCH ("acerbic, pithy and/or witless bookstuff")

* ARCHITECTURES OF POSSIBILITY ("after innovative fiction")

* THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ARDA ("intended to evolve into an illustrated hypertext encyclopedia of Tolkien's realms and peoples")

* MEMORY ALPHA! ("project to create the most definitive, accurate, and accessible encyclopedia and reference for everything related to Star Trek")
* STAFFER'S MUSINGS ("reviews of science fiction and fantasy media and other omfoolery")
* TERRIBLE MINDS ("please wipe your feet")
* THE LEFT ROOM (Steve Mosby)
* PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
* ELMORE LEONARD (the always hip "Dickens of Detroit", famous for his gritty realism and strong dialogue - and, of course, Get Shorty)
* ED MCBAIN (87th Precint)
* KEN BRUEN (Irish king of hardboiled, noir-ish crime)
* PETE DEXTER
* JASON STARR
* ALLAN GUTHRIE

* RAY BANKS (Cal Innes series)

* RUSSELL D. MCLEAN (J McNee books)

* TONY BLACK (Gus Dury series)

* DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI (Secret Dead Blog)
* MO HAYDER
* HENNING MANKEL (his permanently insecure, angry and tortured Inspector Kurt Wallender - and Fan Site)
* HAKAN NESSER (the inspector Van Veeteren stories)
* FRED VARGAS ("the adventures of Chief Inspector Adamsberg and his team")
* ARNALDUR INDRIOASON (the Detective Erlendur series)

* JUSSI ADLER-OLSEN
* GEORGE PELECANOS (also a scriptwriter & producer for The Wire - enough said)
* DON WINSLOW
* DENNIS LeHANE
* JOHN CONNOLLY (where crime meets the supernatural, so to "explore the issues of compassion, morality, reparation and salvation")
* JACK O'CONNELL (the Quinsigamond books)
* THOMAS H. COOK
* DANIEL WOODRELL (powerful, moving, 'country noir' crime fiction)
* JAMES ELLROY (and Ellroy Confidential)
* R.J. ELLORY ("corruption, redemption, and the relentless persistence to find the truth")

* SHANE STEVENS (By Reason of Insanity)
* HUBERT SELBY JR
* JAMES LEE BURKE (fighting crime, corruption, injustice, inequality, racism and bigotry in Louisiana)
* WALTER MOSLEY ("the exploration of the complex tensions at the heart of race in America" - most famously with the hard-boiled detective stories featuring Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles)
* JAMES CRUMLEY ("patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel and a cross between Raymond Chandler & Hunter S. Thompson" - author of the seminal, THE LAST GOOD KISS)
* JIM THOMPSON ("grifters, losers, sociopaths and psychopaths - revealing a frighteningly deep understanding of the warped mind")

* GERALD KERSH (apparently, Harlan Ellison's favourite writer)

* TIM WEAVER (David Raker novels)
* CRAIG MCDONALD
* DAVE ZELTSERMAN

* MICHAEL KORYTA

* SCOTT SPARLING (Wire to Wire)
* THE VELVET (joint home of Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger & Stephen Graham Jones)
* WILLIAM GAY (and Wikipedia)
* TIM GAUTREAUX (and Wikipedia)
* TOM FRANKLIN
* PHILIPP MEYER
* WILLY VLAUNTIN (The Motel Life/Lean on Pete)

* REX STOUT

* JOSEPH WAMBAUGH
* LAWRENCE BLOCK
* SARA PARETSKY
* ROBERT B. PARKER
* PHILIP KERR
* SAM REAVES
* DEREK RAYMOND (The Factory series and the Revubar)
* JEAN-CLAUDE IZZO (the Marseilles Trilogy)
* LEO MALET (Nestor Burma books)
* ANDREA CAMILLERI (Inspector Montalbano books)

* LEONARDO SCIASCIA (The Day of the Owl)
* DIDIER DAENINCKX (Murder in Memoriam)
* MANUEL VAZQUEZ MONTALBAN (Murder in the Central Committee)
* SJOWALL & WAHLOO (Martin Beck series)

* MASSIMO CARLOTTO (The Goodbye Kiss)

* ANDREA MARIA SCHENKEL (The Murder Farm)
* GEORGES SIMENON (of Inspector Maigret fame)
* DAVID PEACE ('Yorkshire noir' from the author of the splendid Red Riding Quartet)

* BORIS AKUNIN (the Erast Fandorin series)

* CHARLES JACKSON (The Lost Weekend)

* DASHIELL HAMMETT (yes, Sam Spade and The Malthese Falcon)

* RAYMOND CHANDLER (yes, Philip Marlow and The Big Sleep)

* CHESTER HIMES (the Harlem Detective stories featuring Gravedigger Jones & Coffin Ed Johnson)

* DAVID GOODIS (The Burglar)

* DONALD WESTLAKE/RICHARD STARK (the Violent World of Parker)

* ROSS MACDONALD (the Lew Archer books)

* JOHN D. MACDONALD (the Travis McGee series)

* JAMES M. CAIN (The Postman Always Rings Twice)

* CLASSIC HARDBOILED & NOIR CRIME FICTION: W.R. Burnett ("Little Caesar"/"High Sierra"/"The Asphalt Jungle"), George V. Higgins ("The Friends of Eddie Coyle"), Cornell Woolrich ("Night has a Thousand Eyes"/"The Black Angel"), Charles Willeford ("Miama Blues" - the Hoke Moseley series), Dorothy B. Hughes ("In a Lonely Place"), Charles Williams ("Hell Have No Fury"), Nigel Balchin ("Mine Own Executioner"), Vera Caspary ("Laura"), Lewis Elliott Chaze ("Black Wings Has My Angels), Martin M. Goldsmith ("Detour"), Geoffrey Homes ("Build My Gallows High"), Horace McCoy ("Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye"/"They Shoot Horses, Don't They?")

* HARD CASE CRIME

* THOMAS ROCHE'S BOILED HARD
* SHOTS (crime & thriller ezine")
* PULP SERENADE ("a home for pulp, noir, hardboiled, mystery and crime fiction")

* THRILLING DETECTIVE

* DETNOVEL
* CRIMESPREE MAGAZINE
* CRIME CULTURE
* CRIME TIME
* BOOKDAGGER ("crime writing to die for")

* SCANDINOIR

* SERPENT'S TAIL

* NO EXIT PRESS ("more than just the usual suspects")

* EURO CRIME

* TANGLED WEB UK

* ERIC AMBLER (The Mask of Dimitrios)

* JOHN LE CARRE (Unlike James Bond, "unheroic men aware of the amorality of their work")
* CHARLES CUMMING

* LEN DEIGHTON (most for The Icipress Files, plus SS-GB)

* GRAHAM GREENE ("the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety")

* ANTHONY PRICE (the Dr David Audley/Colonel Jack Butler series)

* ALAN FURST (Night Soldiers novels)

* TOM ROB SMITH (Leo Demidov books)
* COLIN HARRISON

* ROCK, PAPER SHOTGUN (PC gaming since 1873)

* PC GAMER (just about everything you reasonably need to know)
* GAY GAMER ("for boys who like boys who like joysticks!")
* REDDIT
* GameBanshee
* RPG WATCH (keeping an eye on computer Role-Playing Games)
* RPG CODEX ("doesn't scale to your level")
* GAMING DAILY ("the home of PC gaming", apparently)
* USER CREATED (yes, the stuff that you make for nothing in your lonely teenage bedrooms - Mods for PC games)
* MOD DATABASE (hoarding all those lovely, and sometimes not quite so lovely, Mods made by you)

* MODSAHOLIC
* MOD INFORMER
* GAME MODS CORE
* GAME INFORMER
* WORLD ONE-TWO ("notes from the gaming underground")

* NEW WORLD NOTES ("reports first-hand from the Metaverse")
* PLANET PHILLIP (Mods for the Half-Life series of computer games)
* STALKER COMPLETE (superb series of 'complete' mods by Pavel Dolgov for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of PC games)
* THE GIBBERLINGS 3 (Mods, etc for the Infinity Engine-powered series of PC games)
* SPELLHOLD STUDIOS (modding and gaming community for Computer Role-Playing Games)
* SOMETHING FOR NOBODY (modding Morrowind, Oblivion, etc)
* KILL SCREEN ("the voice for a generation of consumers who grew up on games")

* DUSTY CARTRIDGE ("our aim is to provide you with consistently original editorial content of the highest quality")

* SCRIPTED SEQUENCE ("it exists to provide writing about games: the experiences we have with them, what they can do and why they’re amazing")

* IDLE THUMBS

* BAG OF GAMES

* DARK SIDE OF GAMING
* THE WARGAMER ("for all your strategy gaming on the net")

* SPACE SECTOR ("your source for spcae & Sci-Fi strategy games")

* QUARTER TO THREE
* GAME RANT

* PLOT IS GAMEPLAY'S BITCH

* GNOMES LAIR
* OLD MAN MURRAY
* 3am THINKING ("philosophy, computer games, politics, music, literature and art. In that order")
* MAGICAL WASTELAND
* TAP REPEATEDLY ("games, media, opinions, attitude")
* BEEFJACK/RESOLUTION MAGAZINE ("covering all corners of the videogame world")
* DIGITAL ROMANCE LABS ("investigating love+romance in videogames")
* THE BORDER HOUSE ("breaking down borders in video games")
* THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VIDEO GAMES ("dedicated to understanding why gamers do what we do")
* THE BRAINY GAMER ("thoughtful conversation about video games")

* THE ONTOLOGICAL GEEK ("a site for people who like to think about the games they play, people who can unironically use terms like 'procedural rhetoric,' or might like to learn how to do so)

* SPLIT SCREEN
* LazyAss Gamer
* GAMERS' VOICE ("making a stand for the players of video games and their right to enjoy them")
* AMBIENT CHALLENGE ("playing games so you don't have to")
* NIGHTMARE MODE ("we tend to write about things that we are very passionate about")

* MEDIUM DIFFICULTY

* ART OF THE TITLE (""we honour the artists who design excellent title sequences")

* BOOT OF JUSTICE (Rich Stanton)

* LOST GARDEN

* PLAY SF ("space & science fiction gaming")

* PRESS X OR DIE
* SINISTER DESIGN
* OPPOSABLE THUMBS ("what you need to know to play")

* TWENTY SIDED
* HOW GAMES SAVED MY LIFE ("testimonials about the positive, life-changing power of video games")

* RADIATOR BLOG

* IRON ENCLAVE

* BOOTHAMMER

* CRUDEPIXEL
* CRITICAL DAMAGE ("trying to hear the dumb machine sing")
* THE POISONED SPONGE ("because sometimes cleaning products can’t be trusted")

* SNEAKY BASTARDS ("the definitive hub for all things stealth gaming")

* QUINNS ("this reality is better")
* JIM ROSSINGOL (who sometimes lives Offworld)

* BRADTRAMEL

* DEFAULT PRIME
* BOOM CULTURE ("musings on video games and education")
* INFINITE LAG
* NO ADDED SUGAR ("uncompromising videogames coverage")

* ZUMBS' BLOG ("the truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head")
* PLAY THE PAST ("dedicated to thoughtfully exploring and discussing the intersection of cultural heritage and games")
* SEXY VIDEOGAMELAND ("I think people should be able to be into games and still have a cool life")

* SPECS+HEADPHONES

* ZoKnowsGaming
* NIGHTMARE MODE

* ARCADIAN RHYTHMS ("stay a while and listen")

* (T)RUE (P)C (G)AMING ("since 2011")

* CHRIS JONES GAMING ("the game will not remain the same")

* PC GAMING WIKI ("our goal is to provide fixes for every single PC game")

* FUYOH! ("in the wild, mouse at the ready, hunting down links")
* THREE PARTS THEORY ("theorising and analysis of game spaces")
* DEAD END THRILLS ("the art of gaming")
* THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS FORUMS (keeping alive the glory days of Thief, System Shock 2, etc)
* TERRA ARCANUM (the world of Troika Games, Troikapedia and the Troika Connection)
* CHARLIE BROOKER (always cynical, always spot-on, always hilarious)
* REASONS WHY IT'S WORTH TO BE A PC GAMER
* THE RETICULE ("taking aim at gaming")
* FLASH OF STEEL ("the best strategy game blog in the house")
* LEFT4DEAD MAPS (not that I'm addicted or anything)
* TWEAK GUIDES (everything PC/Windows related)
* GESTALT MASH (comics & graphic novels)
* BLEEDING COOL ("comic book industry news, gossip, rumour, reviews, previews, features, interviews and general tomfoolery")
* INTERNET ARCHIVE
* GOOD SHOW SIR ("only the worst Sci-Fi/Fantasy book covers")
* ROBERT CRUMB (often imitated, never surpassed - the one and only genius artist/illustrator and founder of the Underground Comix movement)
* KIM DEITCH (another Underground Comix pioneer)
* GARY PANTER (leading member of the 'second generation' Underground Comix movement)
* MINESHAFT MAGAZINE ("mining the depths for unpredictable visual and literary ore!")
* SHAUN TAN (fantastic Australian illustrator, and author, of children's books)
* MIKE MIGNOLA ("all I really want to do is draw monsters")
* ALAN MOORE ("cyber slum" home of the Magic Man - the Fan Site and A Moment of Moore)
* WILL EISNER
* FRANK MILLER (and his Complete Works)
* WARREN ELLIS
* DANIEL CLOWES (and his Bibliography)
* JEFFREY BROWN
* CRAIG THOMPSON (Doot Doot Garden Blog)
* BILL WILLINGHAM
* BRYAN TALBOT
* MIKE CAREY & PETER GROSS

* NICK ABADZIS

* GAHAN WILSON
* GRANT MORRISON (fan sites, Deep Space Transmissions and The Bomb)
* JOHN BACKDERF (aka Derf's 'The City')
* BECKY CLOONAN ("comics rule everything around me")
* SCHLOCK MERCENARY (Howard Tayler's blog/journal)
* PAUL POPE
* CHRIS WARE (the Acme Novelty Archive)
* STEVE DITKO (and Wikipedia)
* CHEW (John Layman)
* ALEX TOTH
* DAN HIPP
* KAZUO UMEZZ
* JUNJI ITO

* DAVID HO
* DARK HORSE COMICS
* ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDERLY
* SEQUART ("advancing comics as art")
* THE COMICS REPORTER
* SCANS DAILY
* 2000 AD
* THE WALKING DEAD (and now the TV series)
* THE HORROR OF IT ALL
* GIRL GENIUS ONLINE COMICS ("Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!")
* comicbookGRRRL ("do not offend the chair leg of truth; it is wise and terrible")
* MACLEOD CARTOONS

* NOBROW CARTOONS/MARK HEATH ("a 30-year cartoonist, not to be confused with a 30-year-old cartoonist")
* KITCHEN SINK PRESS
* FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS
* THE CENTER FOR CARTOON STUDIES (Schulz Library)
* THE COMIC BOOK DATABASE
* COMIC BOOK RESOURCE
* TOONOPEDIA ("a vast repository of Toonological knowledge")
* LAMBIEK.NET ("Europe's first and most famous antiquarian comic shop")
* S.R. BISSETTE (legendary cartoonist, writer, etc best-known for Saga of the Swamp Thing, Taboo, ‘1963,’ Tyrant, etc)

* GEEK TYRANT
* JESUS AND MO
* CHURCH OF THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER ("anything that comes across as humour or satire is purely coincidental")
* STEVE BELL (the Guardian's brilliant political cartoonist)
* MICHAEL LEUNIG (and Wikipedia)
* BIZARRO BLOG
* THIS MODERN WORLD (aka Tom Tomorrow)
* CoolVibe ("digital art & inspiration")
* BORED PANDA ("showcasing everything that’s really weird or wonderful")

* THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN ("word to your mother")

* NOTES FROM A ROOM ("everyone carries a room about inside him")
* A DRIBBLE OF INK
* PASTE MAGAZINE ("signs of life in music, film & culture")
* DARK DREAMS (the largest site on the internet dedicated to Dario Argento")

* LUCIO FULCI (Shocking Images)
* DREAMS: THE TERRY GILLIAM FANZINE
* AKIRA KUROSAWA
* ALFRED HITCHCOCK (the Master of Suspense, his MacGuffin, his fans, his year, writing with and his Wiki)
* STANLEY KUBRICK & STANLEY KUBRICK WEB PAGE

* THE OVERLOOK HOTEL ("ephemera related to The Shining")

* REMEMBERING ALIEN
* DAVID CRONENBERG (and his Guardian page)
* DAVID LYNCH (his World, his Universe and his Guardian page)
* PETER GREENAWAY (a Tribute, and Fans)
* KEN LOACH (his Sixteen Films production company, Wikipedia and Guardian page
* MIKE LEIGH (and his Guardian page)
* NEIL JORDAN
* CATHERINE BREILLAT
* SYDNEY LUMET
* THE CRITERION COLLECTION
* THE INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE
* BFI SCREENONLINE ("the definite guide to Britain's film and TV history")
* ALT-FLIX
* MUBI EUROPE (your online cinema)
* FOREIGN FILMS
* LOVE FRENCH FILMS
* NEW WAVE FILM
* CINEUROPA
* THE MOVIE SCENE ("movie reviews from a film fan")

* SEQUENCE ONE ("an experimental, peer-reviewed, sequential edited-collection format")
* FILMSITE
* SCREEN RANT
* REVERSE SHOT
* THEY SHOOT PICTURES, DON'T THEY?
* SENSES OF CINEMA
* OBSESSED WITH FILM

* OBSESSIVE MOVIE NERD ("an uncomfortable look into the dark soul of a film critics")

* BEING CHARLIE KAUFMAN

* FILM SOCIETY LINCOLN CENTER

* FLICKFEAST ("gorge yourself on film")

* BY KUBRICK'S BEARD
* IN THE REALM OF CINEMA ("serious film criticism")
* FIN DE CINEMA

* FILM SCHOOL REJECTS
* SBCC FILM REVIEWS
* TWITCH
* SEE HORROR ("the voice of horror cinema")
* EYESORE MOVIES
* BRIGHT LIGHT FILM JOURNAL
* EUREKA! VIDEO
* FIRST RUN FEATURES
* ONLY THE CINEMA & THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
* THE CORRIERINO
* ION CINEMA
* EYE FOR FILM
* PHIL ON FILM
* FILM JUICE
* VIDEO VISTA
* SPACE RAMBLINGS
* SERGIO LEONE AND THE INFIELD FLY RULE
* SELF-STYLED SIREN
* WE GOT THIS COVERED

* ROPE OF SILICON
* THE COOLER ("cinema ruminations")
* DREAD CENTRAL

* HORROR MOVIES

* CINEMATIC SHOCKS ("in-depth analysis on horror, exploitation and other shocking cinema")

* FILM QUATERLEY

* DAVID BORDWELL'S WEBSITE ON CINEMA

* SCREEN CRUSH

* FILM ON PAPER

* EAT MY BRAINS

* RED LETTER MEDIA
* FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND
* FILM CRITIC HULK & FILM MAKING FRENZY ("Hulk have deep and abiding love of cinema")
* indieWIRE ("filmmakers. biz, fans")
* LUCIUS SHEPARD'S FILM REVIEWS (or, The Fall of Civilization by Way of Pop Culture)
* ROGER EBERT & RICHARD ROEPER
* PAULINE KAEL ARCHIVES
* THE GUARDIAN (pages for Culture, Comment Is Free, Science Fiction Reviews and PC Gaming)
* DEMOCRACY NOW!
* KAFILA ("run from big media")
* MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA ("progressive research and information centre dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media")
* FINANCIAL TIMES (eg, Martin Wolf), WALL STREET JOURNAL & THE ECONOMIST (get the inside view!)
* ECONOMISTS: Faisal Islam, William Keegan, Will Hutton, Richard Murphy (Tax Research UK), Larry Elliott, Robert Preston, Paul Mason, Doug Henwood

* TAX POLICY CENTER (Urban Institute and Brookings Institution)
* ROBERT REICH & PAUL KRUGMAN & JOSEPH STIGLITZ
* HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
* LEFT LIBERALS: Nick Cohen, Johann Hari, Laurie Penny, George Monbiot, Gary Younge, Poly Toynbee, Timothy Garton Ash, Francis Beckett
* AL JAZEERA/al-ğazīra (for a different, Qatar-based, slant on the news)
* HAVANA TIMES ("open-minded writing from Cuba")

* COMMENT IS FREE

* INDEPENDENT VOICES
* THE DAILY MASH, THE ONION & GAWKER (if you want to know what's really going on)
* INDEPENDENT SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE ON DRUGS
* WIKILEAKS
* OPENLEAKS (a 'rival' to Wikileaks)
* spEak You're bRanes ("a collection of ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar")
* ANGRY MOB (" the mob who read the tabloids solely to have their buttons pushed, to be fed who to like and who to hate")
* ... AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM?
* THAT'S HOW IT HAPPENED
* HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT
* IF CHARLIE WAS A GUNSLINGER, THERE'D BE A WHOLE LOT OF DEAD COPYCATS
* FUTILITY CLOSET ("an idler's miscellany of curious amusements")
* SPLINISTER ("oddments and oddities")

* MY GROWING PASSION ("Australian flora and fauna, gardening, biological sciences and related joys")
* SCHOLARPEDIA
* SUE KATZ: CONSENTING ADULT
* PETER TATCHELL ("human rights, democracy, global justice, LGBTI freedom")
* GAY RUSSIA ("equal rights. no compromise")
* THE STANTON PEELE ADDICTION WEBSITE (opponent of the reductive, 'disease' model of addiction - see Why Addiction Isn't a Disease, etc)
* PsycCRITIQUES
* THE THOMAS S. SZASZ CYBERCENTER FOR LIBERTY AND RESPONSIBILITY
* SOCIOPATH WORLD
* KILL YOUR DARLINGS ("fresh, clever writing that combines intellect with intrigue")
* THE ARTY SEMITE
* SCARY DUCK ("genius, gentleman explorer, French cabaret chantoose and small bets placed")

* BLACK GIRL DANGEROUS ("a place where queer-identified women of color can make our voices heard)
* MINDLESS ONES
* HAPPY PLACE
* POP BIOETHICS
* WEREWOLF
* LinkMachineGo ("because everybody needs a place to link")

* SO BAD SO GOOD ("the best and worst of the web")
* OBAMA CONSPIRACY THEORIES
* BATTLESTAR GALACTICA "RE-IMAGINED" (the best science fiction ever to appear on TV)
* QUATERMASS (still the scariest thing ever)
* INFORMATION IS BEAUTIFUL ("ideas, issues, knowledge, data - visualised!")
* RCP WATCH & LM WATCH (no intrinsic merit, just because I used to be a Revolutionary Communist Party member)
* SHAREABLE ("when we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world")

* XIPH.ORG ("dedicated to protecting the foundations of internet multimedia from control by private interests")
* ECHOBIT ("platforms for a more connected world")
* 2phatgeeks ("what geekery is this?")

* THE GEEK ASYLUM

* TERMINALLY INCOHERENT ("I will not fix your computer")

* ERRATA SECURITY ("advanced persistent cybersecurity")
* TORRENT FREAK ("bringing the latest news about BitTorrent and everything that is closely relate")
* the bblog ("complaining, nerdery, errata")
* PEPPER SPRAYING COP
* I LOVE CHARTS ("by people who love charts for people who love charts")
* BLOGGING VIA TYPEWRITER
* THIS ISN'T HAPPINESS ("most images seen here have been retouched or manipulated by me for propaganda purposes")
* YOU MIGHT FIND YOURSELF
* MIRROR, MASK, AND CAMERA
* TWIST STREET
* UNDERGROUND MAN

* NO USELESS LEGACY ("for it is the duty of the good man to teach others the good that you could not work because of the malignity of the times or of fortune, so that when many are capable of it, someone of them more loved by heaven will be able to work it")
* FIGURE/GROUND COMMUNICATION ("the meaning of meaning is relationship")

* SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGES ("inspiring sociological imaginations everywhere")

* LACK OF BELIEF
* RELIGIOUS RAGINGS
* ContraRarian ("“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves”)

* CARDBOARD KHOMEINI ("I am nothing but a humble admirer who is fascinated by this cardboard cutout's omnipresence")

* JEZEBEL

* BRAIN PICKINGS

* THINK BOX ("problem solved")

* SHIT LONDON

* MONKEON ("fun stuff")

* LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS ("the sound of one synapse snapping")

* HULLABALOO

* iCOPYTHAT

* CABINET

* JACK DYSON ("he imparts essential life skills, such as how to shake hands and the importance of walking on the outside")

* BEN ABRAHAM DOT NET

* HUH

* DIGITAL DIGGING

* THE VERGE

* THE KNOW(e)

* BADASS DIGEST

* JULIAN SANCHEZ ("just another geek in the geek kingdom")

* KEVIN KELLY
* ANTONY GORMLEY

* OBIT ("live death transition")

* THE I.B. TAURUS BLOG

* CEREAL RECORDS

* COILHOUSE ("a love letter to alternative culture, written in an era where al culture no longer exists")

* PHANTOM FIELDS AND GHOST SQUADRONS

* TEA LEAF NATION ("making sense of China through social media")

* CHOICE IN DYING ("arguing for the right to die and against the religious obstruction of that right")

* SO IT GOES (John Fleming)

* THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (What? Us? Worried?)

* DELPHIANINC ("the best bullet you can dream")

* GRANT MAIERHOFER

* JON RONSON

* NICK BROOMFIELD

* LOUIS THEROUX

* THE WEEKLINGS

* THE TRUTH INSIDE THE LIE

* THE XERCES SOCIETY ("for invertebrate conservation")

* TYPOGRAPHICAL GLOSSARY

* SHATTERSNIPE ("malcontent & rainbows")

* RIGHT WING EMAIL REPOSITORY (Fwd: Re:)

* SEXLESS BEAST ("the world is a terrible place, and worth falling for")

* THE PRIVATE INTELLECTUAL ("Ecclesiastes-based real estate advice")

* ACEPHALOUS

* BLISSBLOG (Simon Reynolds)

* FRANTIC PLANET DOT BLOG ("Writer. Time Traveller. Jack the Ripper")

* LETTERS OF NOTE ("correspondence deserving of a wider audience")

* BALLOON JUICE ("this is how realignments happen")

* 150 GREAT THINGS ABOUT THE UNDERGROUND ("an unofficial birthday salute to a public transport titan")

* SETI ("the search for extraterrestrial intelligence")

* LOOKATLUCA ("you gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are")

* HUSK

* THE SUMP PLUG ("purging popular culture glop by glop and wallowing in the goo")

* LAWYERS, GUNS & MONEY

* LUCIFEROUS LOGOLEPSY ("dragging obscure words into the light of day")

* FAN STUDIES NETWORK

* LOUDER THAN WAR
* THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE BETTERMENT OF SEX

OVERSPILL!

* INKERMEN PRESS

* SORTIV ("succinctly sardonic. remarkably honest")

* NAMELESS MAGAZINE ("edgy, engaging, informative")

* WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS

* PRACTICALLY MARZIPAN ("All those words," said Lawrie wiggling. "Ugh!")

* GEEK RAGE! ("everything truly dangerous is afraid of itself, and cannot resist a mirror")

* RUSS'S BOOK REVIEWS ("fear the man of one book")

* THE LITERARY OMNIVORE

* ONE LAST SKETCH ("the blog of the New Sun")

* MILORAD PAVIC (Dictionary of the Khazars)

* HASSAN BLASIM (The Iraqi Christ)

* LASZLO KRASZNAHORKAI (Santango)

* RICHARD BRAUTIGAN (Trout Fishing in America)

* JESS WALTER (Beautiful Ruins)

* LYDIA MILLET (Oh Pure and Radiant Heart)

* JED MERCURIO (Ascent)

* TOBIAS HILL (The Cryptographer)

* HOLLY PHILLIPS (At the Edge of Waking)

* ALISON MACLEOD (The Wave Theory of Angels)

* SIMON LELIC (The Facility)

* KENNETH J. HARVEY (The Town That Forgot How to Breathe)

* JOHN LOVE (Faith)

* TEJU COLE (Open City)

* JAMES RENNER (The Man From Primrose Lane)

* GILLIAN FLYNN (Gone Girl)

* ALEX ADAMS (White Horse)

* LENI ZUMAS (The Listeners)

* AMELIA GRAY (Threats)

* KATIE WARD (Girl Reading)

* BERIT ELLINGSEN (Beneath the Liquid Skin)

* KATIE KITAMURA (Gone to the Forest)

* JULIE OTSUKA (The Buddha in the Attic)

* JONATHAN LEE (Joy)

* THANA NIVEAU (From Hell to Eternity)

* ROSA MONTERO (Tears in Ruin)

* V.M. ZITO (The Return Man)

* STEPHEN BLACKMOORE (City of the Lost)

* LOU MORGAN (Blood and Feathers)

* DOYCE TESTERMAN (Hidden Things)

* DANIEL JOSE OLDER (Salsa Nocturna: Stories)

* SOFIA SAMATAR (A Stranger in Olondria)

* MOLLY TANZER (A Pretty Mouth)

* ROBERT HOOD (Fragments of a Broken Land: Valarl Undead)

* ANDRES NEUMAN (Traveller of the Century)

* ALEX JEFFERS (You Will Meet a Stranger Far From Home/The New People)

* KATHARINE BEUTNER (Alcestis)

* KIRSTEN ALENE (Unicorn Battle Squad)

* JASON HELLER (Taft 2012)

* PETER FARRIS (Last Call for the Living)

* ADAM CESARE (Tribesmen)

* ED KURTZ (Bleed)

* CARYS BRAY (Sweet Home)

* MARLY YOUMANS (Thalid)

* M.C. PLANCK

* DAVID ALMOND (The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean)

* ELIZABETH MASSIE (Sineater/Stephen)

* RAMEZ NAAN (Nexus)

* LYDIA NETZER (Shine Shine Shine)

* CHRISTIAN KIEFER (The Infinite Tides)

* STEVEN POPKES

* ERIC NYLUND

* BARBARA KINGSOLVER (Flight Behaviour)

* ZEN CHO

* MARK DERY (I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams)

* SUSAN PALWICK (The Necessary Beggar)

* MORT CASTLE (Moon on the Water/Cursed Be the Children)

* BENJAMIN KANE ETHRIDGE (Bottled Abyss)

* JOHN EVERSON (NightWhere)

* MICHAEL BOCCACINO (Charlotte Markham and the House of Darling)

* DEBORAH COATES (Wide Open/Deep Down)

* L.L. SOARES (Life Rage)

* JOE MCKINNEY (Red Empire/Quarantined/Inheritance)

* WESTON OCHSE (Seal Team 666/Blood Ocean/Scarecrow Gods/Multiplex Fandango)

* SANDY DELUCA (Manhattan Grimoire/Descent)

* ALEJO CARPENTIER (The Kingdom of This World/Explosion in a Cathedral)

* ELIZABETH BOWEN (The Heat of the Day)

* S.P. MISKOWSKI (Knock Knock/Delphine Dodd)

* RICHARD CALDER

* MURIEL SPARK
* THOMAS H. COOK (Frank Clemons)
* COLIN HARRISON (Manhattan Nocturne)
* CHARLES CUMMING (A Colder War)

* DAVE BURLAND

* DAVE SWARBRICK

* RALPH MCTELL

* ELIZA CARTHY

* FAMILY (BANDSTAND)

* MATT TAIBBI

* TRUTHOUT

* MICHAEL MOORE

* LEFT FUTURES ("forward thinking for the democratic right")

About Me

"It is better to be Hated for what you are, than Loved for what you are not."
(Andre Gide, 1869-1951)
Since my unwanted ejection from the womb I've strived - though not always successfully - to live as orderly and boring a life as possible. Without doubt, when the light is right, I am cute and cuddly. I have a strong gut aversion, if not allergy, to all forms of bigotry and ignorance (racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, religious fundamentalism, etc). A life-long internationalist/globalist - as opposed to a nationalist or patriot - I am resolutely anti-militarist and anti-imperialist: down with the warmongers! Adhere to a militant or 'fundamentalist' secularism, there should be a strict separation between church and state - with the state giving no preferential treatment or privileges to any religion or faith. In other words, there should be absolute equality between all faiths and those who subscribe no faith: freedom to practice religion, freedom not to practice religion. Subscribe to the view that democracy, like civilisation, is an excellent idea - so let's fight to make it real. I believe in the fundamental, or substantive, equality of all nations, peoples and individuals. In turn, I reject all forms of elitism: who educates the educators? Unsurprisingly, I am an ardent opponent of 'intellectual property rights', etc, and stand for unfettered freedom of information. Similarly, I'm against 'commercial secrecy' and 'state secrets' - there should be total transparency in all business and political transactions. All our elected representatives and officials - parliament, trade unions, etc - should be fully accountable and subject to the power of instant recall. Not being perfect, I do admit to not particularly enjoying the company of coarse, vexatious, aggressive or shrilly opinionated people. I do not kowtow to anyone - forget it. Disapprove of idle & malicious gossip and two-facedness: hypocrisy sucks big time too. Like to avoid pubs that victimise the victim or foster a culture of loutishness & criminality. Getting wasted - off your trolley - isn't smart, cool or funny. Nor is violence or brutality. Opposed to the irrational 'war on drugs' and call for the legalisation of all drugs - get the gear out of the scummy hands of organised crime, tax it like booze & tobacco, and then use the money/revenue to fund proper drugs rehabilitation & educational programmes. Besides trust and loyalty, strongly believe that tolerance, empathy and kindness is everything - alongside the continual, life-long struggle to educate and develop yourself into a fully-rounded individual: to become a very human human being. Always do your best to help the genuinely misinformed or misguided. I've been a member and supporter of the Communist Party of Great Britain Provisional Central Committee/Weekly Worker group since 1991 - the year that according to mythology saw the final 'collapse of communism' in the Soviet Union. Previously, for my sins, I was a member of the (Furedite) Revolutionary Communist Party - which did not live up to its name. Also done time - earned my stripes - in the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliance (the real one). In my time, I have even been known to pen a 'heavy' article or two for that voice of Common-Sense & Decency, the "Weekly Worker". Indeed, since about the age of 6 I've been a compulsive scribbler - doubtlessly motivated by deep neurosis and insecurity. Between the ages of 8-10, I wanted to be a Chess Grandmaster - even had lessons from an ex-pro with fuzzy hair who looked a bit like a cross between Albert Einstein and Edgar Varese. But I moved on. I'm especially interested in Pre-Socratic materialist philosophy; Ancient Indian materialism & atheism (Ajita Kesakambali, Lokāyata/Cārvāka, etc); Epicurean school of materialism; Spinoza'a concepts of Ethics, Tolerance & Immanence; positive atheism, naturalism and non-religious spirituality; the history, political movements and philosophies of Greece & Rome in the Classical Era/Antiquity; the history of secularist & humanist thought; Utopia & Dystopia in political writings and literature; eschatological & apocalyptic themes in science fiction; evolutionary & Darwinian theory; radical anthropology and the human revolution ('sex strike' theory, etc); "imaginary communities", nations, nationalities, nationalism and the right to Self-Determination; the Balkans & Central Europe, "non-historic peoples", "counterrevolutionary nations" and the National Question; the symbiotic relationship between anti-semitism and Zionism, and the foundation myths of Israel; critiquing official/institutional anti-racism, multi-culturalism and 'political correctness'; human & sea-horse sexuality, customs and practices; theatrical and performance arts; Surrealist, Dada & Expressionist art - especially Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Max Beckmann, John Heartfield; the life, times and work of Pablo Picasso - who "never got called an asshole"; the debates around 'Artificial Intelligence'; philosophical & political implications raised by Fermi's Paradox ("Where Are They?"); Red, as opposed to Green, environmentalism and ecologism; the origins and politics of religion; Jesus the revolutionary apocalyptic communist (as opposed to the other-worldly, rather creepy, figure of Christian anti-semitic fabrication); Islam in historical context; is Buddhism an atheist religion?; the history & politics of Irish republicanism; bureaucracy, organisational forms and the "tyranny of structurelessness" ; the Levellers, Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley and the roots of English communism; American communism - what went wrong?; the revolutionary contribution of Karl Marx & Frederich Engels to the Democratic Breakthrough; the genesis and development of Classical Marxist theory; the relationship between VI Lenin and Karl Kautsky, "the Pope of Marxism"; the Russian Revolution and the origins of the counterrevolution-within-the revolution; the birth, evolution and death agony of 'official communism'; the theory and practice of Trotskyism; and contemporary 'real life' far left & communist politics - and organisations - in the UK and USA. Needless to say, I am a voracious reader - yes, a Book Geek, run! - having a special passion for literature: especially the 'genres' of science fiction, (non-generic) fantasy, horror, slipstream, surrealism, and crime that vaguely belongs somewhere in the disturbing nether regions between Hardboiled/Noir and horror. Within science fiction & fantasy, I have a particular fondness for sub-genres of Steampunk, Cyberpunk, post-Cyberpunk, Squidpunk (watch out for it), New Space Opera and the 'New Weird' - though the New Wavers and Avant-Garders still remain like Colossuses on the beach. A few favourites to get me through the day are Mervyn Peake, Homer, Dante, John Milton, William Blake, Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Flann O'Brienm, Robert Graves, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, Anton Chekhov, Henryk Ibsen, Bertolt Brecht, Caryl Churchill, Jorge Luis Borges, Reza Negarestani, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, W.B. Yeats, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Dan Simmons, Angela Carter, Jeff VanderMeer, Jay Lake, Steve Erickson, Stanislaw Lem, Italo Calvino, Peter Watts, China Mieville, Michael Cisco, Brian Stableford, Gene Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, Brian Evenson, John Crowley, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Catherynne M. Valente, Mary Gentle, Storm Constantine, Neal Stephenson, Jeffrey Thomas, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Barrington Bayley, Thomas M. Disch, John T. Sladek, Lucius Shepard, Michael Swanwick, Greg Egan, Ian R. MacLeod M. John Harrison, Peter Straub, Conrad Williams, Dexter Palmer, Ian McDonald, Maureen McHugh, Elizabeth Hand, Michael Marshall Smith, Michael Ajvaz, Jean-Christophe Valtat, Sebastien Doubinsky, Gwyneth Jones, Joanna Russ, Peter Carey, Roger Zelazny, William Kennedy, Jon Courtenay Grimwod, Kurt Vonegut, William S. Burroughs, Herman Melville, Homer, Mario Llosa Vargas, Gunter Grass, Jose Donoso, Huraki Murakami, Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robert Bolano, Javier Marias, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Richard Yates, James Salter, Robertson Davies, Carol Emshwiller, Don Delillo, Adam L.G. Nevill, Laird Barron, Ted Chiang, K.J. Bishop, Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Pat Cadigan, Alasdair Gray, Robertson Davies, James Salter, George Saunders, Felix Gilman, Sarah Monette, Steph Swainston, Ekaterina Sedia, Elizabth Bear, Richard Morgan, Ursula Le Guin, Raymond Chandler, Jonathan Lethem, Matt Ruff, Nick Mamatas, Glen Hirshberg, Paul G. Tremlay, Alan Deniro, J.M. McDermot, Paul McAuley, Charlie Huston, James Sallis, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Paul Russo, Ken Bruen, Paolo Bacigalupi, John Banville, Kelly Link, Jim Crace, Samuel R. Delany, Alastair Reynolds, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod Christopher Priest - and so on. Possible all-time favourite stories are Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan (J.G. Ballard, 1968), Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones (Samuel R. Delany, 1968) and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy (1946-59) . I am a relatively recent convert to computer Nerdism/Geekism, being historically an Arty-Farty-cum-Humanities kind of guy, and was not (properly) introduced to a PC until May 2003. But I have certainly made up for it ever since! Now a zealous and ever vigilante Netizen, permanently alert for any act of injustice or idiocy anywhere in the world (keeps you busy). Since my computer/internet epiphany I've become, amongst many fascinating things, an unabashed computer games buff - currently obsessed to the point of near mania with Metro 2033 and I have quite a slobbering thing for Left 4 Dead 2 (love zombies like any sensible person). This is only to be expected though, being a seasoned War Gamer and Dungeons & Dragons campaigner. Indeed, I am a highly decorated armchair general and goblin slayer - even the Uruk-hai fear me. Though late to the show, as per usual, now a Facebook devotee. I also really like the gritty ("re-imagined") Battlestar Galactica TV series - appeals to the frustrated starship trooper in me. And Babylon Five was pretty great too in its own (sometimes frustrating) way. Though of course nothing will ever beat Quatermass - after all these years, I still regularly wake up in the middle of the night screaming in terror about that damned Pit. Somewhat unexpectedly, some of the best innovative TV around can be found in the US - most notably "The Wire", "Breaking Bad", "Rubicon" (sadly cancelled), "Mad Men", "The Killing", "The Bridge" & "Spiral". At one point I was quite enamoured by The Stage. Like sculpture. And fine art. Comics & graphic novels too. To further increase my Geek Profile, I am a big fan of jazz - particularly people likes Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John & Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Mal Waldron, Cannoball Adderley, Joe Henderson, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass and so on, though I do like the occasionally lively dash of fusion/jazz-rock a la Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return to Forever, Nucleus, etc; modern & contemporary classical music (Edgar Varese, Anton Webern, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Kronos Quartet, etc); 'progressive' & psychedelic rock (especially my all-time favourite FRANK ZAPPA, Captain Beefheart, Grateful Dead/Jerry Garcia, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Robert Fripp/King Crimson, Soft Machine, Van Der Graaf Generator/Peter Hammill, Caravan, etc); the Blues and R&B (Guitar Slim, Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Freddie King, BB king, Albert Collins, Johnny Guitar Watson, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, etc); the so-called American Primitives and related - the brilliant JOHN FAHEY, Leo Kottke, Sandy Bull, Stefan Grossman, Robbie Basho, Peter Lang, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Michael Hedges, etc; Funk & Soul (Funkadelic, Parliament, James Brown, Tower of Power, War, Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Otis Redding, etc); many things a bit on the 'left field' or avant garde-ish side (Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith, Henry Cow, Jim O'Rourke, The Residents, Eugene Chadbounre, Pere Ubu/David Thomas, Red Crayola, etc); Americana and Alt Country (eg, Giant Sand/Howe Gelb, Calexico, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Lambchop,), and of course I can never get enough of gloomy, doom-laden, intense, preferably angst-ridden and full of bottled-up rage, songwriters & performers who offer a "peep-show view into an insular world of alienation" (Richard Thompson, Vic Chesnutt, Kevin Coyne, Smog/Callahan, Jackie Leven, Will Oldham/Bonnie Prince Billy, Robert Wyatt, Roy Harper, John Cale, etc). Also have quite a passion for 'traditional' English Folk Music - Davey Graham, Shirley & Dolly Collins, The Watersons, Martin Carthy, Martin Simpson, June Tabor, Roy Bailey, Fairport Convention, Ashley Hutchings/Albion Band, (early) Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Nic Jones, etc). And obviously I still love the greats like Jimi Hendrix, Peter Green, Jeff Beck, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Velvet Underground, Bob Marley, Tom Waits, etc. Possible all-time favourite songs are Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Sexually Aroused Gas Mask, Frogs With Dirty Little Lips, Baby, Take Your Teeth Out and I Feel So Good. Obviously, I hope to eventually fuse/meld my consciousness into the circuitry of my PC - enabling me to roam the data highways for eternity like the Lawnmower Man. Back to the womb at last. Sex is always a permanent option - please leave a message. Oh yes, I've got progeny, and a strange Irish surname. I have never been into outer space, not even once - though I am reasonably proficient in Klingon: "tlhIngan maH!"

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
(Buddha - allegedly)