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Winners and losers
I’m writing this on the Sunday afternoon before the AFC Championship Game. The Kansas City Chiefs play the Buffalo Bills in about 9 hours; the winner of that match-up will go on to the Superbowl. This is very exciting, especially for fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills.
Sports are fascinating because they are an exercise in competing narratives. Ultimately, this is down to talent and luck and bodies crashing into one another on a field somewhere in the Midwest. But around this singular event is a maelstrom of narratives. We want this event to signify something; to be part of a larger story. The media and the fans create narratives of how this should go - what this particular game means in the bigger picture. The thing itself is a part of a vast, swirling narrative-historical context that is, quite often, completely disassociated from people slamming against one another on a muddy field.
The narratives are amazing. If you’re a Bills fan, there are a thousand reasons the Bills should win. There are arcs of the season, of careers, of players, of a team; of a geography or culture or region - all that add up to a narrative of why the Bills should (or will) win. Josh Allen deserves it. Damar Hamlin deserves it. The rivalry deserves it. The Bills deserve it.
If you’re a Chiefs fan, there are a thousand reasons the Chiefs should win. There are arcs of the season, of careers, of players, of a team; of a geography or culture or region - all that add up to a narrative of why the Chiefs should (or will) win. Patrick Mahomes deserves it. DeAndre Hopkins deserves it. The rivalry deserves it. The Chiefs deserve it.
There’s a human need to make connections between unrelated events; to turn singularities into sequences into stories. The media plays into this: stories are more interesting than facts and figures. We don’t want to. random people, we want protagonists.
And, of course, there’s the personal narrative. I deserve this because… I lost my job. I wore my lucky jersey. My wife left me. I just got married. My uncle has been a fan for 75 years and has never seen them win. My aunt has just now become a fan, and has never seen them lose. Over 50 million people will watch this game, and every one of them has a narrative excuse why one team or the other should win. A superstition, a jinx, a streak, a hope. We make the connections between ourselves and these distant random events, involving total strangers in far-away places. Not just because there’s a human need to create stories from scratch, but to put ourselves into them. We can’t stand to sit on the sidelines, even if the actual sidelines are 4,341 miles away.
And here’s the flip side: half of these narratives are wrong. One team will lose, despite the vast stack of (utterly fabricated) reasons that they shouldn’t. I wish and hope and pray and need my team to win, and have every narrative reason that they should. But somewhere out there, other folks have every reason as well. Every story is a matter of perspective. Sports aren’t just a lesson in narrative, they’re a lesson in perspective as well. If only we learned it.
what I’m reading (online)
I’m not much of a gig-goer (or even a music-listener! I know! I’m a psychopath!) but I am a nerd for creative industry reports, especially in the post-Covid-and-Gen-Z-we-are-all-figuring-out-what-fun-is-anymore sense. The annual report of the Music Venues Trust looks into some of these trends. There are 810 music venues in Britain (a slight decline, but a slighter decline than previous year, which is a sign of hope?), a third of which are not-for-profit. Virtually all these venues also play other roles in the community - food and beverage providers, but also as galleries, theatres, or other social spaces. In fact, the number of non-music events (comedy, theatre, etc) grew, perhaps to cover the steep decline in big ticket musicians doing national tours. Draw your own conclusions, I suppose - but something in there about both the fragmentation of taste and of use-spaces.
I am, however, a big baseball cap guy. They’re an expressive accessory, an affordable collectible, and, they make a nice quest as you try to get every. single. Kansas City. sports. team. Like every other niche cultural anything in 2025, the terminology has become baffling, so I’ll confess I found this piece useful.
Andrew Griffin lands, I think, the best (although undoubtedly not last) word on the tech/politics mash-up hellscape in the US right now. It is - as always - frustratingly unlinkable (subscribe to Indy/Tech here), but well worth reading. Forgive the longer extract, but you don’t want to miss it:
Many… tech executives… seem to have forgotten this simple truth: that the world doesn't primarily think of them as thought leaders, or politicians, or anything like that, but instead as people in charge of companies that make things to sell to people. In many cases, they seem to have entirely lost interest in making things that people want to buy, and entirely forgotten that is their supposed purpose.
Mark Zuckerberg's most recent product interventions are to announce that Meta platforms will allow new kinds of hate speech and give up on fact checking. Elon Musk's leadership of Twitter has really just been about promoting his own posts on the platform, and using that to pick fights with politicians and people around the world. While Sundar Pichai's Google might have deftly stayed away from political fallout, it's recent updates have been around AI and integrating it with the search experience, and it's not clear whether anyone actually asked for that. Jeff Bezos stood on stage alongside the others but is not even actually in charge of Amazon anymore.
The mixing of media and politics with technology was always going to be alluring to those at the top of those companies. It is, no doubt, more fun getting to pretend to be a celebrity or politician than it is getting stuck into coding, hardware design and sprints. But those members of the new tech elite who are so desperate to take their place on the world stage ought to remember how they got there: they gave us things we liked, once.
A weirdly nice segue to cyberpunk. The Shelf Talkers interview I did last year on everyone’s favourite genre-for-contemplating-the-hellscape has now resurfaced on YouTube, in case you missed it. This was a really enjoyable (and, as always, wide-ranging…) session about cyberpunk, as hosted by Los Angeles’ lovely Village Well bookshop.
One more - and also with an LA connection: I contributed a ‘2024 top ten’ list to the Sci-fi Short Story Club’s round-up. They’re a great reading group hosted by the LA Public Library. Not all my personal picks were SF/F, or even books (Rivals FTW!), but the whole document is full of fun, eclectic suggestions.
To round that up: the Binc Foundation are currently matching donations to help bookshops recover from the (ongoing) wildfire disaster.
what I’m reading (offline)
Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword (2024) is so good. So, so good.

Callum is a gifted young knight from a remote part of the British Isles. After a childhood of neglect and abuse, he finds himself to be a natural warrior. In search of meaning and purpose, he heads to the shining heart of civilisation, to study from - and join with - his greatest heroes: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Except, by the time Callum arrives at Camelot: Arthur is dead. Camelot is empty and the Knights have all fallen or scattered to the winds. Merlin has been betrayed and buried. There is no longer a King, and possibly not even a country.
Callum unites with the - pardon the pun - table scraps. The knights that, for some reason or another, weren’t there for the climactic battle. Left to their own devices, they try to devise some sort of plan to maintain the (now crumbling) peace that Arthur had built.
The story takes place in the shadow of legend, as our heroes (and they are truly heroes) work in full awareness of their own inferiority. What Arthur did was impossible and incredible, and now, they need to recreate it. Callum et al’s quest is punctuated by flashbacks, as we learn the origins of the remaining Knights. They each - despite being the ‘dregs’ of the table - are absolutely incredible: triumphs of spirit and will against incredible adversity.
I’m being deliberately light-touch with the detail here, but, again, this is an incredible book. It has big cosmic fights, a nasty battle, some duels that made me want to cheer out loud. It has a heart-warming romance and a few tragic ones. There’s banter and a sprinkling of snark. History happens. The villains (the real villains) are as horrifying as the heroes are inspiring. The ending is deeply satisfying and thematically perfect. It is, without even getting into everything else, a genuinely great epic fantasy standalone - already that rarest of beasts.
And then there is the everything else. I am a sucker for an Arthurian retelling: I think it is a platform for great stories about tragedy, romance, virtue, questing, brotherhood, chivalry, etc. They’re even fun for ‘monster of the week’ episodes. It is great stuff. I’ve written about this before, but ‘Arthur’ has become more and more of a delocalised myth as time has gone by. In my review of the recent anthology Sword Stone Table, it struck me, for example, that none of the authors were British. And although all the stories were about Arthurian characters, none of them were about Britain. There’s something powerfully attractive about Arthurian myth, permitting it to be universalised.
What Grossman (also not British!) does is ground Arthur back in Britain. He is reconnected with the land, its culture, its history and its people. I love this. I think Arthur is the closest thing we have to a ‘national myth’ (despite, yes, being baked from French sources), and Grossman follows in the tradition of Mary Stewart by showing how critically important these legends are to the British. Grossman also proves how Arthur is more than just an ‘origin story’: he’s an aspiration and an ideal. And what The Bright Sword does is update that to add new dimensions of inclusivity, to make the quest for righteousness more flexible. Something that’s no longer rigid and inflexible, but a belief that - whatever the odds - good is possible, and we can all help achieve it.
Highly recommended. In case you missed the subtext: I liked this book.
I used to be very fond of and interested in worldbuilding techniques, and I would bone up on how to do it, read all the science fictional things about how to create fantastically interesting worlds. But as I’ve grown older, I tend to paint from the shoulder more. I want to do something illustrative, something that doesn’t burden people with long genealogies of the elvish language.
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