Edmund Gordon

Dec 18, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Greg Eghigian |Edmund Gordon

There are​ approximately twenty billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone. That’s one way of looking at it.

Sep 2, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Camille Bordas |Edmund Gordon

Fiction​ about creative writing programmes is always vulnerable to accusations of navel-gazing. Camille Bordas has, however, provided her new novel with an alibi. The Material follows the staff and students on the ‘MFA in stand-up’ at an unnamed Chicago university over the last day of the autumn term. It’s a clever conceit, giving the eternal question about writing programmes an unusual twist. Can you really teach someone how to be funny?

May 29, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Percy Bysshe Shelley |Edmund Gordon |Thomas Jones

J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the Daily Mail and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and Cronenberg. In a recent piece, Edmund Gordon unpicks the contradictions and contrarianism in Ballard’s non-fiction writing, and he joins Tom to continue the dissection.

May 15, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | J.G. Ballard |Edmund Gordon

By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines.

Dec 20, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Upton Sinclair |Edmund Gordon

Upton Sinclair​ was born in 1878 to a Baltimore family of rapidly diminishing respectability. His father was a whisky salesman who drank a good deal more than he ever managed to sell. When things got especially bad, Sinclair’s mother would seek refuge in the home of her own father, who was secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad, or that of her sister, who was married to one of the richest men in Baltimore.