Questions and Answers, 21 June 2020

Here are Stephen's answers to the less important questions that the world has been asking this week. Feel free to supply your own answers in the comments.

Which videogame character would you most like to be your friend/partner in real life? – David Murray

They all get into too much bother. I like a quiet life. So I'll say Socrates: it felt like such a privilege to meet him in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and to then take part in a Socratic dialogue with him… Wow! One of my favourite ever videogame moments.

What I tend to do is put my actual partner in every videogame I can. She was my pilot in Elite, my lieutenant in Dynasty Warriors, my trooper in X-Com, and my avatar in everything that let me customise my character: Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Saint's Row, Far Cry 5, etc. Better to spend 50 hours watching my wife on screen than 50 hours watching myself.

What is the best book you ever read for school? – Francesca Niewiadomski

Les Mains Sales by Jean-Paul Sartre. Led to me doing a French degree so I could read more of the same. A mistake, perhaps, since I never got the hang of speaking it.

What's the least "date" movie you've seen on a date? – Film4

The Silence of the Lambs. And for some reason I thought it was a good moment to say "I love you". It was not. I was a silly little boy. She dumped me soon after and that was a good thing for both of us.

Talk to us, this is a safe space… which TV show would you give a different ending? – Amazon Prime Video UK

Battlestar Galactica. It began as a tough show about real people in an impossible situation and ended with a load of spiritual blather. And Quatermass. Don't kill him off, please. Make some more stories.

What's new in your reading life this week? – Reading Glasses Facebook group

Only Imagine, by Kathleen Stock, a book of literary philosophy based on the idea that a fictional text is a series of instructions to the reader as to what we should imagine. Hard to get my head around but thought-provoking. It's a bit like being on the monkey bars in a park: I grasp one thing, then swing around for a bit, then grasp another bit and try to connect it to the previous bit I thought I understood. D.F. Lewis is also reading it.

I've also been reading The Hair Carpet Weavers by Andreas Eschbach, a mosaic novel/book of short stories in the new Penguin Classics sf series. Plus of course stories for our next issue!