If you are going to build an enormously destructive weapon, then please follow the rules laid out in The Mouse That Roared. Make it warble alarmingly when it moves, place an alarm clock inside it to scare people and make it small enough to throw around a papier-mâché dungeon.
Adventure! Mysterious lands! Dinosaurs! Huge, impressive beards! The Lost World might be nearly 80 years old, but this movie has it all. It even has Arthur Conan Doyle. And he’s typing!
This is an unusual issue of Albedo One as the Irish magazine devotes the majority of its space to the six stories shortlisted for the inaugural Aeon Prize – a short-fiction competition organised by the people behind Albedo One and awarded at last year’s Worldcon in Glasgow.
For a reader who hasn’t been down these paths in a long time the first question was whether the strange odour in the air when opening the pages of the latest issue of Analog (Vol. CXXVII, no. 11 – November 2007) was the whiff of nostalgia or the tang of formaldehyde?
Facts are good! Facts are great! No, facts are fantastic! Aren’t they? Facts are what fans really want. With facts you can reduce everything down into neat categories that can be wrapped in laminated plastic and store for eternity. Take the thing you love, eviscerate it and pin it down so that it can never […]
It’s only fair to Lilith Saintcrow that I begin this review by admitting that I fall well outside the target demographic for Working for the Devil. This novel’s tale of spunky women battling/shagging demons is targeted precisely at a post-Buffy market from which I am excluded by gender, disposition and, probably, age. Even allowing for […]
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.