Essays and Articles
Selected Essays and Articles
Summer in the inner west: fig trees, cicadas and the warm possibility of night
No mow: is Australia’s long love affair with lawn ending?
The agony and the ecstasy: MDMA therapies
My sci-fi novel about recreating an extinct species is becoming a reality
How are our cities going to look in a rapidly heating world?
Falling: grief and loss in the pandemic
Could bringing Neanderthals back to life save the environment?
Terror, hope, anger, kindness: the complexity of life as we face the new normal
Elemental summer: into the deep
Unearthed: Last Days of the Anthropocene
Five Books: the best climate change novels
How Australia’s Coal Madness Led to Adani
A Family of Disguises: Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight
Work in Progress: On writing The Resurrectionist
Writers on Reading: Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams
Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene
The Death of Negative Man: On writing comics
The Beginning is Nigh: Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Encounters With The Uncanny: On Ghosts, Ghost Stories and Brain Science
The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide (available for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo)
“We have pierced the veneer of outside things”: Four books about Antarctica
A New Type Of Conversation
Some reflections on why I started blogging and the ways the experience has affected my life as a writer and my writing. Originally published in Australian Author.
The Hugo Award for Best Novel Shortlist 2010
John Wyndham and his Plan for Chaos
Growing content: a big future for little mags
Never real and always true: on depression and creativity
Also available in pdf form from Griffith Review.
The idiot box grows a brain
A piece from the Australian Literary Review about the rise of the new television.
Great White Tale
An account of several days spent cage-diving with Great White Sharks off the southern coast of South Australia, together with some reflections on wildness, and the place of the shark and the predator in the human imagination.
Bloody Beauties: The Rise and Rise of Vampire Lit
Stealing Memory’s Thunder: James Frey and the rise and rise of fake memoir
The Island in the Mind: Rodney Hall’s Metahistories
Beyond the Break: On Surfing and Writing
The Lands Within
A discussion of the allure of fantasy, originally written to coincide with the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007.
The Final Countdown
Western culture has been waiting for the end of the world for more than 2000 years. What is it that makes the notion of the apocalypse so seductive?
Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs
city of tongues 