Articles by: Richard King

Author Biography:

Richard King is a writer based in Fremantle. His new book, Here Be Monsters: Is Technology Reducing Our Humanity?(Monash University Publishing), was published in 2023.

‘The First Cry of a Newborn World’: The Trinity Test at 75

The bright young things of Silicon Valley, with their dreams of direct democracy on Mars and digital immortality, are often difficult to take seriously. But their hubris is only the gaudy version of a broader cultural and political belief in the power of science and technology to edit, alter and override the very stuff from which our world is made—in other words, to ‘play God’.

End of an Era?, by Scott Ludlam, Raewyn Connell, Judith Brett and Amy McQuire

Reflections on the Coalition's mode of government as 18 May—and a possible change—draws nearer

Informit: Illiberal liberalism

The last six years of Coalition govern ment have been a period of unprecedented chaos and malignity. If the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years were The Killing Season, then the Abbott- Turnbull-Morrison years are/were The Hunger Games: a rolling spectacle of bizarre ordeals, frenzied bouts of fratricide, and cruelty raised to the level of art. Towards the end-for surely we are approaching the end-one almost expected to see the faces of toppled and departing politicians projected onto the…

Informit: When the facts change [Book Review]

Review(s) of: On borrowed time, by Robert Manne, (Black Inc., 2018).

Informit: Dead centre

In the five months since Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister of Australia, one concept more than any other has dominated the political discussion: the concept of the 'centre ground'. In the mainstream press especially, the notion that politics has a 'centre' and that Turnbull has to move towards it in order to win the next election (and that he is better equipped to do so than his erratic predecessor) has attained the status of an…