Author: Daniel D. Watkins

First published, 4th March 2014 History is a novel without a future.  You know I rather despise the cheap tricks used in genre fiction to hook the reader, suspend the suspense, hang the cliff, as if all that matters is what comes next… I remember first reading Slaughterhouse-5. What hit me most was the way Vonnegut…

First published, 2nd May 2014 The universe is the mind in which we live. That’s all I could think of writing for this month’s blog and really, I didn’t much care to write that down either (or up, or do with it whatever one is supposed to do with words. Ideas). But I decided to…

First published, 5th December 2014 What you need, in order to win the Man Booker Prize is to win it. That may sound obvious or meaningless but it’s not. Okay, try this: what you need, in order to win the Turner Prize is to win it. See? It works there too. To understand how and,…

First published, 9th January 2015 In November 2011, soon after the fire bombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices, Time Paris bureau chief, Bruce Crumley wrote a diatribe against Charlie Hebdo. Crumley began: Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant,…

First published, 15th January 2015 It’s intriguing that when those who put their lives on the line in defence of their right to free speech, others so readily use it to condemn them.  I wanted to get my final thoughts written down before public domain discourse returns to shopping, kittens, puppies, Easter eggs and all…

First published, 13th February 2015 When the gods turned Narcissus into a flower, Ovid forgot to mention that they turned Echo into the girl from Ipanema. The DSM-V has given narcissism a bad name or, when I reflect on it, has turned a name into a bad word. Maybe it started with Freud’s deliberate –…

First published, 15th February 2015 I still get the flashbacks, wake up in the middle of the night … Did I cry out in my sleep? Pierce Brosnan singing SOS in Mama Mia scarred me for life. Back then, when I stomped around trying to work out whether it was Mel Brooks or Goebbels who first discovered that the…

First published 5th April 2015 Ursula K. Le Guin (a.k.a. Morgan Le Fey) has recently laid a curse on Kazuo Ishiguro (a.k.a. Don Quixote). Now, maybe an unread obscure indie dilettante novelist like myself (a.k.a. Bilbo Baggins) can get away with breaking all the genre rules, you know: write literary fiction beneath the invisibility cloak…

First published, 9th May 2015 Democracy is like all systems for power distribution in social groups in that it is a means that seeks to justify or, more importantly, legitimise the status of dominance in social hierarchy. Given that we are a social animal biologically hard-wired to behave always and ever like chickens, whenever two…

First published, 22nd February 2018 It’s a common fact of human nature that what people decide is right depends almost entirely on whether they understand it. What is difficult, complex and detailed is, for the average person, wrong. Truth is simple; simplicity itself. However, the way in which people decide what is true and what…