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The turning point in this book is where the author renounces his piratical ways. He takes all his hard drives full of music downloaded illegally from Napster and the like, and destroys them. But why do that? Music got free, only to be locked up again on youtube, where google uses every microgram of surveillance they can muster to make money from their audience. Or spotify, where artists get even less than they did in the bad old days of record company debt bondage, and the profits are used to invest in the global arms industry.

If his title was to be accurate, he would keep his hard drives, and continue to defy the corruption of music capitalism, with a civil disobedience campaign to download as much music as possible and not pay for it. Give me excess of it!

Apart from that, there are some interesting historical accounts, including how the mp3 format got started, and how CD factory workers were the source of leaked albums, sabotaging the carefully planned release schedule of the big music companies.

China Mieville turned me on to these children's books, and I treasure them. They were originally published in 1978, 1981 and 1986... not exactly synchronous with the emergence of punk, but for me the parallel is there. They are set in a grotty contemporary London, with descriptions of crumbling landmarks which are now almost certainly gone. Some of the settings were photographed by fans before they disappeared.

The Borribles are a cross between elves and street children. A Borrible never grows up, unless the top of their pointed ears are cut off, thus ending their joyous existence, allowing them to become adults and enter the mundane world of ordinary people - a terrible fate. The vile chief of police is their nemesis, committed to catching every Borrible and clipping their ears.

It might sound like some sort of twee Peter Pan type of thing, but it is gritty and violent, an evocation of the war of destruction waged by the establishment against emerging youth culture in the decades after the second world war.

It's nine years since I first read this trilogy, a re-read is due!

I have read many post-apocalypse novels, and this is one of the best. Where it differs from the others is that it includes a lot of contemplative ideas about memory and loss, about what we value in our lives. There are parallel narratives from before and after the apocalypse. The "disaster porn" element of it, where you imagine what it would be like to be one of the survivors, is superbly done. But the accounts of the everyday life of the characters beforehand are also compelling . Emily is just a great writer, she has that way with words that creates an internal voice you just can't stop listening to.

Like Margaret Attwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, this author is one of those writers who denies they are SF authors. I am an unashamed genre tribalist - conventions, cosplay, the lot. But it doesn't matter in the end. This is just a great book. Also, I have to admit the non-genre focus really sets this book apart. I think Emily does it better than Kazuo Ishiguro.

Long time on this one. TBF there were a lot of self care re-reads in this period because I wanted to take this in chunks and ruminate on each chunk. If you have an interest in the intersection between art and the arc of history then this is an important book. At first glance, yes, an ostensible children's comic written by guys whose brief was to pump out pages for late 1970's kids seems like an unlikely candidate to not only be prescient but so long lasting. This book covers all of that, and more. For those who read the comics as kids, the history of the Dredd character and it's development is worth a buy of this book. How Dredd the strip held up a mirror to the modern carceral state is the real depth here. This is meant as a scholarly work (I think) but it is written in an engaging style nonetheless. Whilst this is written by a fan it isn't shy of pointing out where there might have been things that were not done well (race, in particular). Dredd was never my favourite 2000AD jam mostly because it made me feel a little uncomfortable and it didn't have a resolution arc like so many of my preferred characters from the comic (Mills work on Nemesis being a good example of this). Reading this book and seeing how on the nose it was explains that unease to adult me that maybe went over the head of 7 year old me. 5 stars up there. If this kind of thing tickles your pickle then just buy it already.

The second time I read "The Book of the New Sun" I felt like I had a good grasp on the events of the saga as well as the characters and their relationships with each other. It was a gripping tale, a page-turner filled with monsters and adventure and politics and war and love and conflict. But there's still a high degree of mystery and fantasy in the book. Some of the events seems to come about as the result of some kind of destiny, the result of a prophecy perhaps. Or is it a projection of the author's beliefs? Gene Wolfe was a Catholic, and - spoiler alert - Catholicism makes no sense and has no internal logic. So maybe this book is no more coherent than that. It could be like a creation myth where things just happen because that's how the story evolved as it was passed through the generations. Wolfe's story includes rockets and a reference to a journey into space, but that shouldn't deceive you into thinking that this is a science fiction story and everything that happens in it has a scientific explanation.

Confounding this, "The Book of the New Sun" is complex, and you could think you didn't read it closely enough to get a grip on its internal logic.

I don't know how many times I'll have to read it to settle those questions. What I do know is that I find it to be a beautiful book, with beautiful words and characters an hugely tragic events, dealing with love and death and memory and pain and guilt.

I have a presentiment of my future, that I'll be reading it again soon.