Paperback Picnic
a newsletter about weird old books

Latest

Oct
14
book cover depicting a dragon perched on a crumbling stone arch that overlooks a distant city.

The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (1987)

teenage fantasy protagonist but make him act like an actual teenage boy
7 min read
Aug
02
book cover depicting a silver needle-shaped spaceship on a verdant alien landscape

Paradise and Hell: “The Gardens of Delight” by Ian Watson

with some thoughts on the value of modesty in fiction
6 min read
May
31
book covers of "Rogomelec" and "The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington"

Two Books by Surrealist Women

Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, and the ocean of literature
6 min read
Apr
30
dinosaurs and humans marching beneath a huge wooden crucifix with a pocketwatch hanging off it.

Discovering the True Nature of Time with Brian Aldiss’ “Cryptozoic!”

time travel, psychedelia and Freud
7 min read
Apr
09
Title page of a very old book with a stamped image of a fish coiling around an anchor.

Phantasmion: The First Fantasy Novel

Love and grief at the dawn of fantasy literature
7 min read
Mar
25
Cover depicting an Aboriginal figure reaching from the sky to a white silhouette or shadow on a desert landscape

Rage and Revenge in Aboriginal Australia’s First Fantasy Novel

"The Kadaitcha Sung" asks whether the crimes of colonisation can ever be set right
11 min read
Mar
10
book cover depicting a stone bust of a human head surrounded by animal heads

"The Zen Gun" (1983)

cosmic decadence and unionised robots
6 min read
Feb
15
book cover depicting a woman in a silvery bikini, standing before a spaceship and a reddish alien sky

Linguistic Superpowers: Samuel R. Delany's "Babel-17"

the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis jacked up on steroids
5 min read
Jan
29
an old map of the North Sea depicting both real and fictional islands

The First Secondary World

independent fictional worlds were invented more recently than the steam train
13 min read
Nov
29
A woman in a red silk blouse looks uncertainly at a man in a fur cloak, riding a green alien horse

Love and Hate in Superposition: "The Quantum Rose" by Catherine Asaro

The sci-fi romance novel that's also an in-depth allegory for quantum physics
7 min read