Sometimes, I read a short story and find that, for whatever reason, I can’t put together any proper thoughts on it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the story is at fault, just that I didn’t manage to connect with it. And there’s no problem with this — unless I’ve undertaken to write something about the piece in question. That’s the situation I find myself in now.

‘Chimbwi’ is the story of Jason Johns, a physicist who has left behind a Europe devastated by environmental change, and travelled to Africa, because Zambia is the global centre of advances in physics. I don’t know what I think about this story, and I feel it would be unfair to make any kind of evaluative comment; so this post is here, for the sake of completeness, to record that I’ve read ‘Chimbwi’, and I apologise for not blogging about it properly.

This story appears in issue 227 of Interzone. Read all my blog posts about that issue here.