I’ve never avoided cracks in the pavements. I stroll with insouciance (but appropriate care, I’m not stupid) beneath ladders. I don’t check my horoscopes. I’ve never even sacrificed a small animal in the hope that its freshly spewed innards would provide some an insight into the future. I have never been superstitious. Never, that is, […]
The last time the Labour Party lost its place as the “natural party of government” at the end of the Wilson/Callaghan era in the late 1970s, the party descended into internal chaos and a state of open warfare existed between three poles in the party – the left and right of the Party hated each […]
So it’s that time of year again, the deadline for nominations to the BSFA Awards is fast approaching (midnight on 13 January, if you haven’t done your duty yet) so it’s time to think about what I’d like to see on the shortlist. You can see what others have nominated here. NOVELS As usual lots […]
So Diane Abbot got involved in a conversation about race relations in the UK and said something overly simplistic and stupid in a Tweet: “white people love playing “divide and rule”. We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism”. Cue Twitterstorm and screeds of outraged commentary from the right and a ridiculous over-reaction from a Labour […]
This review was published in Vector 268 The Hammer by KJ Parker In most fantasy novels Gignomai met’Oc – the Loki-ish third son of a great aristocratic clan – would be the novel’s shadowy villain. He steals from his family and skives off from his duties, he lies and cheats and he plots the destruction […]
My story, “Proper Little Soldier” was published a while ago by Ian Whates in his book Conflicts, which has recently been reviewed at the Pornokitsch website. This is what they said about my efforts… Martin McGrath’s “Proper Little Soldiers” follows a young woman and her friends as they prowl a post-invasion landscape, fleeing their alien […]
So I was going to look back at the books I’d read last year, but everyone does that and why the hell would you be interested anyway? Instead, here’s a list of some of the books I’m looking forward to reading during 2012… any suggestions about what I might be missing are welcome.
So 2011 has been and gone. For no apparent reason I thought I’d share with you the list of new films I’ve watched over the last year and some brief comments about each of them. Apart from the films listed here, I’ve also watched an awful lot of Soviet sf thanks to the BFI’s Kosmos […]
I’m going to spend some of this review taking issue with elements of Adam Roberts’ new novel, By Light Alone, so I think I should start off by staying up front that I thought this was both a thought-provoking and immensely enjoyable book. Indeed one of the reasons I’m going to spend so much time […]
I don’t normally do this on blog posts, but since it kind of links in with the piece I posted last week on reviews (and because Eskragh is going to be republished by Dark Fiction Magazine at some point in the relatively near future) I thought I’d post these quite different reviews of my story […]