Fault Lines
Fault Lines is a series of short, boundary‑testing essays that go looking for the places where our worlds no longer quite add up — in landscapes, in cities, in science, in everyday life, and in the stories we tell about truth itself. Each book begins from something very specific: a stretch of collapsing coast and its dissenting histories, a 'gap' in cause and effect, an astrolabe dredged from Lyme Bay, or the quiet breakdown of contemporary society. From there it follows the fault outward, tracing how local cracks in experience open onto deep time, politics, cosmology, and the changing ways we organise knowledge, power and care.
These are not manuals or manifestos. They are guides, field notes and thought‑experiments, written by people who stay with trouble rather than smoothing it over — dissenters, walkers, Forteans, cultural geologists, anatomists of culture. Across the series, they invite readers to treat 'gaps', 'unconformities' and epistemic fractures not as anomalies to be ignored but as starting points for re‑imagining how we inhabit time, place, one another, and the fragile practices by which we decide what is real.
These are not manuals or manifestos. They are guides, field notes and thought‑experiments, written by people who stay with trouble rather than smoothing it over — dissenters, walkers, Forteans, cultural geologists, anatomists of culture. Across the series, they invite readers to treat 'gaps', 'unconformities' and epistemic fractures not as anomalies to be ignored but as starting points for re‑imagining how we inhabit time, place, one another, and the fragile practices by which we decide what is real.
A Guide to the Unconformity is a walking essay through a stretch of collapsing Jurassic coast where geology, dissent and empire lie uneasily on top of one another. Following landslips, fossil beds and vanished paths around Lyme Regis, Horatio Morpurgo shows how an 'unconformity' in the rock becomes a symbol of the breaks in our own stories: between religious nonconformity and plantation wealth, between local stewardship and extractive politics, between deep time and the short attention span of modern states.
This is not nature writing in pastoral mode but a patient, often disquieting act of attention to a place that keeps refusing to stay put. Fossil hunters, reserve wardens, dissenting congregations and lost museums all appear as witnesses to a landscape where repair is only possible once the cracks are properly seen. In tracing these layered fractures, Morpurgo invites readers to cultivate a 'geological consciousness' that can hold together precision and loving kindness, and to ask what kinds of dissent are needed now along coasts where the ground — literal and historical — is still on the move.
This is not nature writing in pastoral mode but a patient, often disquieting act of attention to a place that keeps refusing to stay put. Fossil hunters, reserve wardens, dissenting congregations and lost museums all appear as witnesses to a landscape where repair is only possible once the cracks are properly seen. In tracing these layered fractures, Morpurgo invites readers to cultivate a 'geological consciousness' that can hold together precision and loving kindness, and to ask what kinds of dissent are needed now along coasts where the ground — literal and historical — is still on the move.
Mind the Gaps is a playful, unsettling meditation on why the world never quite adds up – and why that is a gift rather than a flaw.
Drawing on Charles Fort, quantum physics, Dark City, Situationism and everyday life, Phil Smith argues that anomaly is not the exception but the rule: all data is gappy, all systems edit out what they cannot use, and our craving for smooth explanations is itself a kind of blindness.
Instead of shoring up grand theories, Smith invites the reader into a craft of 'gap‑minding': learning to notice glitches, coincidences, wild talents and awkward details as openings to new ways of acting and caring. In place of ideology or method, he offers an ethics assembled one dilemma at a time, an imagination that starts from not‑knowing, and a set of lifebuoys for anyone who suspects that the most interesting things are happening where the maps fall silent.
Drawing on Charles Fort, quantum physics, Dark City, Situationism and everyday life, Phil Smith argues that anomaly is not the exception but the rule: all data is gappy, all systems edit out what they cannot use, and our craving for smooth explanations is itself a kind of blindness.
Instead of shoring up grand theories, Smith invites the reader into a craft of 'gap‑minding': learning to notice glitches, coincidences, wild talents and awkward details as openings to new ways of acting and caring. In place of ideology or method, he offers an ethics assembled one dilemma at a time, an imagination that starts from not‑knowing, and a set of lifebuoys for anyone who suspects that the most interesting things are happening where the maps fall silent.
