Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

As a teenager, I read a lot of genre fiction – but, perhaps more importantly, I read a lot of bad genre fiction. Not only: I loved the likes of Lord of the Rings or the iconic novels of Arthur C. Clarke (mind you, his prose wasn’t always brilliant and his characters often paper-thin, but the ideas were fascinating), but I’d read whatever I could find at the library that had spaceships and aliens, or dungeons and dragons. I think that, even at the time, I was aware that much of what I read in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi was generic and derivative at best, pulp designed to be mass-produced and sold to kids like me who wanted their reading matter to transport them to other worlds. But, hey, those books did transport me to other worlds, even if those worlds seemed a lot like Middle-Earth or a galaxy far, far away, just with the serial numbers scratched off.