The essay on Borges, “Games with Infinity”, was written in the early 1970s, when Martin was in his twenties. Martin was one of the first Australian writers to discover and trace the work of writers like Borges, Calvino, and Cortázar, as their books first began to appear in Australia. The magical realm of the blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges lay at the centre of that map. For him the gap between Astounding Science Fiction magazine and The Name of the Rose was simply the breadth of the genre. As Martin Duwell notes, he was “a superb reviewer, marshalling erudition not to smother the books he reviewed but to illuminate them’.Īlong with poetry and chess, speculative fiction was one of Martin’s passions. Everything he had ever read was available at a moment’s notice, and he had read more widely than most people. His wide reading and extraordinary memory made him a natural. He reviewed books on topics ranging from chess to surfing, from Bob Dylan to the Hell’s Angels, from witchcraft to science fiction, and he wrote for a wide range of publications and occasions. On and off for many years, and most energetically in the mid-1970s, Martin Johnston made his living as a “man of letters”, writing poetry because he loved it, and writing essays and book reviews because he had to pay the rent.
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