New Stonehenge Visitor Centre Announced
May 13th, 2009The Government has announced plans for a new £25 million visitor centre at Stonehenge.
Finally.
The entire ritual site around Stonehenge is pretty much an atrocity, and a mockery of its World Heritage Site status. Moving the visitor centre a mile and a half away is one small step to redressing the shockingly poor stewardship of such an important site, but the site is still criss-crossed with noisy roads and ruined at night by light pollution.
I don’t blame English Heritage – they do a good job under difficult circumstances. I do blame successive British governments. The next step should be to get rid of the roads, if necessary through long tunnels, which would then give the entire site some of the gravity and majesty it deserves.
The usual Government argument is that the cost would be prohibitive. Perhaps they should have used some of the billions spent sending Iraq back into the Stone Age for no discernible reason.
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And No Maps, Either!
April 18th, 2007For all you fantasy fans who keep banging on about world-building, some words from M John Harrison:
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.
Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
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Passing Rant
January 24th, 2007The one-line description of a dvd box set on sendit.com:
‘4 movies from Orson Welles, star of The Muppet Movie.’
He really did waste his time making Citizen Kane – film critics’ choice of greatest movie EVER – didn’t he?
Idiots…
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The Author
Jack of Ravens, part one of the Kingdom of the Serpent series, is now available in mass-market paperback from Gollancz in the UK.
