A lovely, sad, tiny story by Leonard.

This large image (4400×2364 pixels) is completely marvellous: a genuine history, reaching back into trends from the dawn of literature, and with a healthy chunk of 19th century gothic/mystery in there. Makes me very happy, especially in terms of fond memories of books I've enjoyed.

"It's true that Wyndham's preference is for no-nonsense, brisk, wry narrators, and the horrors that visit the books can seem like opportunities to show off good old British pluck. But the books are surprisingly unheroic, and often (notably in the cases of Kraken and Triffids) peculiarly open-ended. And if you look closely, you begin to see that there's something very uncosy, persistently unsettling, about these books, that continues to ask profound questions about the limits of our culture and the foundations of the post-war world."

"Perhaps we should be turning up at the cinema expecting more stories about resilience, or reports from the future where the problems are what to do with limitless energy, or Japanese consciousness multipliers, rather than dustbowls and gasmask hipsters. Authors: is that nihilism really what you want to leave behind? Your silhouette a stoop, rather than a hurrah?" Jim, quite rightly, likes his "shiny retro shit".

"Dreamed up by American and European SF writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — at a time when Lamarckian evolutionary philosophy, which posits a tendency for organisms to become more perfect as they evolve (because such change is needed or wanted, e.g., by “life”), remained popular — many of the first fictional supermen were portrayed by their creators as examples of a more perfect species towards which humankind has supposedly long aimed. Radium-Age superman was, that is to say, homo superior, an evolved human whose superiority was mental, physical, or both." Lovely essay; a nice bit of SF history (and originally published on IO9, I believe).

"I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.

"Corridors make science-fiction believable, because they're so utilitarian by nature - really they're just a conduit to get from one (often overblown) set to another. So if any thought or love is put into one, if the production designer is smart enough to realise that corridors are the foundation on which larger sets are 'sold' to viewers, movie magic is close at hand."

"It’s somewhat embarrassing, but that’s how I got into economics: I wanted to be a psychohistorian when I grew up, and economics was as close as I could get." Paul Krugman, you are the best.

"The Theory of Interstellar Trade is a paper written in 1978 by economist Paul Krugman.... Krugman analyzed the question of 'how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer.'" Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, is officially awesome.

"These travel posters by Steve Thomas, Amy Martin and Adam Levermore-Rich promote travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age." Beautiful.

"Wells has received insufficient credit as a writer of rhythmic, incantatory prose, long-breath paragraphs to cut against his tight journalistic reportage. The War of the Worlds makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable. Wells predicts an era when fiction and documentary will be inseparable." Fantastic writing from Iain Sinclair on HG Wells.

Short story from 1909.