I’ve written introductions to two books:
Temple Antiquities: The Templar Papers II, ed. Oddvar Olsen. Axis Mundi Books, 2010.
The Lost Teachings of the Cathars, by Andrew Phillip Smith. London: Watkins, 2015.

Through the Mirror: Reflections on the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
Edited by Gunnlaugur A. Jónsson and Thorkell Á. Óttarsson. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006.

My contribution to this book of essays on Tarkovsky was ‘Live in the House and the House Will Stand: Autobiography in Tarkovsky’. Much of this essay was used in my book Andrei Tarkovsky. This version has a couple of paragraphs extra.

Music for Another World: Strange Fiction
Edited by Mark Harding. Edinburgh: Mutation Press, 2010.

This collection of short SF stories has music as a unifying theme. My contribution, ‘Deep Field’, was inspired by Michael Chabon’s comment about how short stories should have plot and shouldn’t be just Carveresque studies of change in people’s lives. (I love Raymond Carver’s work, I should add.) But I decided to take Michael Chabon at his word and cranked out a tale of gonzo Manichaeans on a spaceship. As you do. As for music, I couldn’t decide between Beethoven’s 9th, and Bruckner’s 8th, so I stuck them both in. Other music crept in, principally early Pink Floyd (another of my enthusiasms). Being a sort of Hunter S. Thompson meets Tank Girl meets the Nag Hammadi library, it’s thoroughly gnostic in its outlook. Also contains a homage to David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus. So, quite a lot to get into one short story. Lots of plot. Some critics didn’t like this, but I will just refer them to Michael Chabon, who knows more about these things than I do.

Rocket Science
Edited by Ian Sales. Edinburgh: Mutation Press, 2012.

A collection of fiction and non-fiction about space travel. The book is a mixture of hard SF and non-fiction. My piece, ‘Dreaming at Baikonur’, I suppose doesn’t even qualify as science fiction, dealing as it does with the true story of Sergei Korolev. Korolev was the chief engineer of the Soviet space programme, a remarkable man who went through hell – as did many Russians during the Purges – but came out of the Gulag still obsessed by rockets and space flight. Between 1957-1966, the Russians ran rings round the Americans: first spacecraft, first man in space, first woman in space, first space walk, etc, etc. (And let’s not forget Laika, Belka and Strelka, the space dogs.) They would probably have beaten Neil and Buzz to the moon, had Korolev not died unexpectedly after a routine operation (for piles, it is said – ouch), in January 1966. My story was inspired by the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s momentous achievement – circling the earth in a spacecraft described as ‘a tin can strapped to a bomb’. He was lucky to come back. But come back he did. And none of that would have been possible without Sergei Korolev, one of the unsung heroes of space exploration.

Two essays on David Lindsay, published in The Gnostic:

Issue 5, 2012:
‘Sham World, Sublime Light: Gnosticism in the Works of David Lindsay’. This is adapted from the section on Lindsay in The Gnostics: The First Christian Heretics. (2nd edition only – I meant to include Lindsay in the first edition, but forgot. Yes, really.)

Issue 6, 2015:
‘Better Than Soaking: Landscape, Place and the Body in the Work of David Lindsay (or, David Lindsay and the Perils of Walking’) One of the reasons I wrote the ‘Sham World, Sublime Light’ essay on Lindsay, was that I had promised Andrew Phillip Smith, The Gnostic’s redoubtable editor, a piece on Lindsay and ‘the gnosticism of the body’. This was circa 2010. Time passed. I didn’t start the piece. In the end, out of desperation, I offered to cobble something together from The Gnostics as a stop-gap measure. That appeared in issue 5. Then Andrew didn’t bring out another issue for three years, which was a huge help, as I was badly behind schedule with just about everything, and also bogged down in a new book by this time. In 2015, I finally got round to writing the piece I had promised Andrew in 2010, which appeared in issue 6 as ‘Better Than Soaking’. It not only included a few things about bodies, but also place and the ever-present motif of walking, which recurs in much of Lindsay’s work. Solvitur ambulando.

Other Voices of Gnosticism (2016)
Edited by Miguel Conner. Aeon Byte Publishing.
A radio interview I did a few years ago, for Miguel Conner’s excellent gnostic radio station, Aeon Byte, finally appears in print. It’s an in-depth discussion of all things Cathar.

The Bill Douglas Trilogy. British Film Institute. 2010.

I contributed an essay on the star of the Trilogy, Stephen Archibald. This was also used – translated into French – for the Trilogie DVD issued by the excellent UFO Distribution.

Bill’s Trilogy – I always think of them as three films, rather than one – are among the landmarks of British, and world cinema. I can say with all honesty that these films changed my life. Cinema really, really, does not get any better than this. I’ve never come across a filmmaker who can convey such a believable word through showing so little. And of conveying such a devastating emotional impact.

The scenes between Jamie and Helmut in My Childhood are heartbreaking. Bill has stripped everything away until all that remains is pure emotion. And the ending of My Way Home absolutely stunned me. Indeed, the entire film was an ordeal, a descent into muteness and pain, and then that final sequence culminating in the shot of the orchard in bloom. I had to watch the film every day for a week. This was filmmaking that had the physical power of Ted Hughes’s poetry.

Bill Douglas, of course, did get better, with his later film Comrades, which I would have to count as being up there with Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice for life-changing experiences in the cinema. But I’ll write about that later.

Ivan’s Childhood. Artificial Eye, 2015.
An extract from my book on Tarkovsky was used in the booklet of the 2015 DVD/Blu Ray issues of Tarkovsky’s films. If you’re buying the Artificial Eye DVDs of Tarkovsky, please be aware that they have issued the films three times, to my knowledge. The first iteration (thicker cases) had extra features, whereas the first reissues don’t. The second reissues – these Blu-Rays – have the extras restored. Perhaps the best of them is Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which was shot on the set of The Sacrifice.

The Phenomenon of Andrei Tarkovsky Moscow, 2014.
2013 Tarkovsky conference proceedings. My paper, ‘Eastern Aesthetics in Tarkovsky’ looks at the role of Zen, Taoism, Confucianism and Chinese painting and poetry in Tarkovsky’s films. The original version – in English – can be found on Academia.edu.