Cassie McCullough

He's really like sometimes to the point of arguably irritation, but he does love it.

Well, I mean, the thing is I'm loathe to call them straight up speculative fiction or that because they've got this, like something like Never Let Me Go, it's kind of set in an alternative present or actually an alternative past almost because it's post-war at a time where they've developed this technology to essentially clone people and then, you know, house the clones in places

kind of specialist schools and what have you.

And also, I mean, Clara is also, it's like a very recognisable future, but sorry, it's a future, but it's a very recognisable one.

It's like an immediate future.

The thing that I find amazing about his, I'll use this term somewhat reluctantly, speculative worlds is that they are our world.

I find that amazing because it doesn't,

As you were saying, like, you know, using a few, like, terms like, you know, completing, like, the possibilities, like deferrals.

And also, like, in Clara, there's, you know, talk of the substitutions.

And the lift.

And the lifting, exactly.

And these are all perfectly familiar.

They all make perfect sense, even in our current context.

And that's what I think makes us consider

the questions he's asking a lot more deeply perhaps because we're not being asked to kind of step so far outside our world that it's an intellectual exercise.

This is just a riff on reality.

But it's interesting, even the buried giant where he went full fantasy for that one.

I haven't read that.

So this is the one that I personally think is his least successful, only because it's just not my sort of book, but it's almost like a Don Quixote type quest of this knight who goes off to slay this dragon and it's this search to find.

I read it a long time ago when it came out and I've sort of somewhat repressed it because I didn't love it.