Alan Moore at the Cambridge Science Festival, 17.03.12

- science and the occult have been almost completely equivalent as feedlines for stories
- science as an intellectual playground ("New Scientist is weirder than science fiction")
- you can write better fantasy if you understand science -- know the rules you're breaking
- on Heaven: "not really my kind of place ... all that marble and goldware sounds like a 1980s plasterer's bathroom"
- his current work-in-progress is over half a million words long: "longer than the Bible and, I hope, more socially instructive"
- he spoke about time as the fourth dimension and transience as an artifact: everything happens once, simultaneously, and is always happening. Quoting Einstein, 'the persistent illusion of transience'. (Unlike Nietzche, who thought that everything repeated eternally, AM thinks everything happens just once and we experience it repeatedly.)
- some entertaining anecdotes about loopholes in Scientology (sin is a terrestrial issue, therefore it doesn't count if you're in a plane. I feel a Dr Seuss poem coming on).
- all claims of magical experience are valid and reasonable as long as you accept that they are happening in the mind, rather than in objective 'reality' where science can see them.
- on religion: the etymology is rooted in 'bound together by a belief'; thus, he's quite content to be (probably) the sole worshipper of Glycon (a human-headed snake, probably operated by Alexander of Abnotichus a.k.a. Alexander the False Prophet). "I know it was a puppet," said Moore. "I'm eccentric, not stupid."
- Mr Moore has fabulous shoes.

2012/06: The Magician King -- Lev Grossman

The Magician King -- Lev Grossman

"...I understand the appeal this sort of thing has for you, quests and King Arthur and all that. But that’s you. No offense, but it always seemed a bit like boy stuff to me. Sweaty and strenuous and just not very elegant, if you see what I mean. I didn’t need to be called to feel special, I felt special enough already. I’m clever, rich, and good-looking. I was perfectly happy where I was, deliquescing, atom by atom, amid a riot of luxury."
"Nicely put," Quentin said. Eliot must have mounted this set piece before.

The perils of the Kindle: when you read a book by an author you've never encountered before, and finish it craving more (NOW PLS), you can buy their other work instantly, no matter where you are or what time it is. I'm not quite why, having purchased The Magician King minutes after finishing The Magicians, it took me a month to actually read it. Desire to immerse myself and read from (virtual) cover to (virtual) cover? Fear of disappointment?
( non-spoilery review, though spoilery for 'The Magicians' )