Artefact of time. 5 April 2021 A few years ago, I had some time to kill in Huddersfield and decided to check for any interesting books in the Oxfam shop. I'd never seen a copy of Granta before nor hunted one down, presuming my intelligence was below its target readership and assumed my pretentiousness lay elsewhere. (Spoiler: despite ongoing questions regarding my intelligence, it didn't.) But here it was, an issue dedicated to the best young American writers. It included a short story by Karan Mahajan called The Anthology. I'd previously read his second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, and the queasy, uncertain feelings it gave me were reason enough to make me a fan. The Anthology brought out a similarly uneasy reaction in me, as it's another dark story, one about the aftermath of a bombing and it begins in Delhi in 2000 at a literary event. It's a world away from video games, but Mahajan's focus on politics and world-building felt relevant to the spaces where games often find themselves these days. Mahajan's work reminds me of Donna Tartt's theory of "density and speed" as being central to her work, something she emphasised during the release of The Goldfinch. "You're building a big, heavy article but you want it to go fast. You want the readers' experience of it to be fast. And you want there to be detail in it."