Stephen King stopped being a “writer” decades ago. These days Stephen King is a giant, steamrollering, cash-making machine that trawls across the landscape of our ecologically over-burdened planet raking off a vast slice of humanity’s combined wealth before one day – just as the final sliver of rainforest is gasps its last – Stephen King […]
David Gunn’s debut novel, Death’s Head, isn’t going to win prizes for originality. Its galaxy-spanning setting, cast of stock characters, and plot that has a super-powered hero planet-hopping to save damsels in distress and prop up tottering empires, rehashes every trope in the military sf armoury.
Do you want to know how smart Adam Roberts is? His latest novel, Land of the Headless takes its name from a story you don’t know by a writer you’ve never heard of, whose lasting claim to a footnote in history is mostly that he went to school with Pushkin, someone you’ve probably never read. […]
There is something huge out there in the dark. Something vast and terrible and relentless that will not let you escape. It demands your attention. It wants you to worship it. Yes Dan Simmons’ new book is so huge it’s scary.
The temptations of self-publishing are obvious. Every aspiring writer looks at the dross that sometimes makes it through the professional filter – in books and magazines – and thinks to themselves: if they publish his shit, why won’t they publish mine? Self-publishing offers the hope of getting your work “out there,” bypassing the established professionals’ […]
There’s something about being faced with a volume whose cover proclaims in large and luridly pink lettering that it contains 5 Great Novels by Philip K Dick – a book five centimetres thick (that’s two inches in old money), cumbersome and gaudy – that makes you wonder whether anyone in the publishing industry ever reads […]
Gradisil is a novel of undeniable ambition. Adam Roberts has constructed a cast of complex, difficult characters and worked them into a dense plot that curls and twists itself around a set of intricate and challenging ideas. From one angle it is a novel about politics, from another it is a generational novel about a […]
On page 41 of Beautiful Monsters, David McIntee’s book on the Alien and Predator franchises, the author claims that Ridley Scott’s Alien is not a science fiction movie because: “Science fiction is about humanity, and how it might develop under other, usually future circumstances. It asks, will we be better or worse?”
In the introduction to The Pocket Essential Science Fiction Films, John Costello mentions one of my favourite books about sf films, Bill Warren’s Keep Watching The Skies. I have shelves full of film encyclopaedias that have been rendered more-or-less redundant by the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), but Warren’s book is one I return to often.
Television drama rarely specialises in big ideas. Amongst the comfortably circumscribed crises that litter soaps, medical dramas and police procedurals there is little room for questions about religion, identity or politics.