Category: Blog reviews

  • GENRE HIGHLIGHT OF 2017 – OCCUPY AVENGERS #8

    The BSFA’s Vector Review of 2017 was delivered today, which includes a piece I wrote on the bit of genre reading that stuck in my mind most clearly in the past year. I chose a few panels from a crossover comic book. The piece got a bit mangled in the production process (some repeated text […]

    Read More

  • REVIEW: THE HIGH GROUND BY MELINDA SNODGRASS

    The High Ground by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan Books, 2016) When I was a child I loved the breakfast cereal Ready Brek – instant porridge whose television advertisements used to feature a young boy protected from the winter elements by a warm glow of healthy goodness. I would eat Ready Brek for breakfast, supper and, basically, […]

    Read More

  • ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BSFA NOMINATION DEADLINE…

    Okay, so, if I wanted this to be any use to anyone I’d have done it weeks ago, but I didn’t and there was always just one more book to try and squeeze in… And if I wanted this to be remotely interesting to anyone, I’d probably have written a long explanation as to why […]

    Read More

  • FILM REVIEW: IRON SKY – FALLING FOR FASCISM

    The best joke in the Finnish Nazis-on-the-moon movie Iron Sky is, ironically, also the one that best demonstrates the film’s weaknesses. Idealistic Nazi teacher, Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), shows her young class a sharply edited (ten minutes long) version of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and, as the Jewish barber disguised as Hynkel dances with the […]

    Read More

  • REVIEW: STINA LEICHT’S THE FEY AND THE FALLEN (OR “POOR OULD IRELAND, AGAIN”)

    I want to start this post by saying plainly that I believe that it is possible for writers to create important and insightful work about cultures to which they do not belong. There is a somewhat crude (but, it seems to me, increasingly common) form of postcolonial criticism – often proceeding from a partial, or […]

    Read More

  • FRIDAY’S WORDS OF WISDOM: BEYOND OUTRAGE BY ROBERT REICH

    Robert Reich has been banging on about the risks to advanced economies of increasing levels of inequality for longer than most.  The Work of Nations (published in 1991 and the book that got him headhunted by Bill Clinton’s campaign and, eventually, appointed as US Secretary of Labor) set out pretty accurately how the “global” economy […]

    Read More

  • REVIEW: DARK EDEN BY CHRIS BECKETT

    Chris Beckett’s third novel, Dark Eden, is a complex thing. It draws, as the title suggests, on the ur-biblical theme of the fall from innocence but it is also the story of an isolated human community culturally (and physically) devolving. It belongs to a sfnal tradition that has its roots in works like Lord of […]

    Read More

  • REVIEW: DARK LIES THE ISLAND BY KEVIN BARRY

    REVIEW: DARK LIES THE ISLAND BY KEVIN BARRY

    Dark Lies the Island (Jonathan Cape, 2012) is Kevin Barry’s second collection of short stories, following There are Little Kingdoms (2007) and his spectacular first novel, City of Bohane (2011). Given the long and rich history of Irish writers exploiting the short form, from the roots of the Irish oral storytelling tradition through the unavoidable […]

    Read More

  • REVIEW: CITY OF BOHANE BY KEVIN BARRY

    This piece was written as part of the BSFA’s Vector Reviewers’ Poll for 2011. Vector reviewers get to nominate their five favourite books of the previous year. In 2011 my five were: Silver Wind, Nina Allan (Eibonvale Press) City of Bohane, Kevin Barry (Jonathan Cape) The Islanders, Christopher Priest  (Gollancz) By Light Alone, Adam Roberts […]

    Read More

  • FRIDAY’S WORDS OF WISDOM: POLITICS AND THE EMOTIONS

    FRIDAY’S WORDS OF WISDOM: POLITICS AND THE EMOTIONS

    In their introduction to Politics and the Emotions (Continuum, 2012)  Simon Thompson and Paul Hoggett point out that models based on the unwavering rationality of the individual have dominated the social sciences for much of the last century. Like sociology and economics, political studies “eschewed considerations of the emotions. It was assumed that political subjects […]

    Read More