Mars, the Moon and Other Planets

James Machin is a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a writer, researcher, editor, and archivist specialising in Gothic, weird, and fantastic literature of the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. James is also the cataloguer for Ex Carta.

He is the author of Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (Palgrave, 2018) and editor of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Stark Munro Letters for Edinburgh University Press (2024), where he is also Technical Editor for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

James’ recent editorial work includes The Strange Stories of John Buchan for British Library Publishing (2025). He is a member of the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has taught at Birkbeck, University of London, the Royal College of Art, and the University of Bedfordshire.

His work often explores archives, imagined geographies, lost worlds, strange landscapes, and the material culture of fiction. A lifelong role-playing game enthusiast, he runs long-standing campaigns in Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons.