terrorism

“Prescience or eerie coincidence? On the eve of the anniversary of 7/7 Peter Millar examines thriller writers' knack for anticipating world-shaking events.”

Well, if writers can conceive of these events, surely the bad guys can as well. But then again, does art imitate life, or vice versa?

Authors of books banned in the UK talk about why their books were an important contribution to the terrorism debate and why it’s a shame that British readers have been denied access to their work.

I have a real problem with this, especially when I read things like: “In some instances, the books were thrown into pulping machines so that all evidence of their existence was destroyed.”

The world’s truly gone mad when reading a book can get you thrown out of a pub. An Australian teacher was bounced from a bar in Cairns, Queensland because he was reading a copy of Richard Flannigan’s The Unknown Terrorist. Ironically enough, the novel is a critique of post-9/11 paranoia.

At least one person thinks Samina Malik, the first female convicted under the Terrorism Act, is just a young person striving to be cool. The worst she is guilty of is writing really bad poetry. What think you? Are we making mountains out of juvenile molehills, or is al-Qaida really “out to poison the poetic bedrock of western civilisation with crass imagery and poor scansion?”

Ok, I’m not sure what to think,

I’m sure there would be a few science fiction writers here on wordsy