This week I read Strange Divisions & Alien Territories: The Sub-genres of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) edited by Keith Brookes. It’s a collection of essays that, the blurb on the back says: explores the sub-genres of science fiction from the perspective of a range of top SF authors, combining a critical viewpoint with exploration […]
Hugo is a beautifully made film with a big heart. Every frame is overflowing with the director, Martin Scorcese’s, obvious love and enthusiasm for the medium in which he has immersed himself during his career. Every part of the film fits together as neatly and as intricately as the clockwork mechanisms that feature so frequently […]
One of the things that I’ve got back into thanks to the purchase of a tablet is regularly reading comics bought via Comixology. Having got the taste electronically, I’ve also started to pick up a number collected editions and graphic novels. So I thought I might start off putting together a monthly review of the […]
Superficially, the opening passages of Kill List could be taken as the introduction to another Brit-made gangster movie. The central characters, Jay and Gal are guns for hire – mercenaries who do very dirty work. They’ve got a history together, including a visit to Kiev eight months before that, it is suggested, went very wrong. […]
Science fiction doesn’t often do politics. There’s no shortage of sf writers willing to explore ideology or, more frequently, shove their personal ideology down a reader’s throat in the crudest way imaginable, but engagement with the real way that societies make policy decisions is not often the focus of interest[i]. However, Jason Heller’s debut novel, […]
There is, when you think about it, a surprisingly long list of very good films about boxing. Consider just the biopics: Raging Bull (the story of Jake LaMotta); Somebody Up There Likes Me (Rocky Marciano); The Hurricane (Rubin Carter); Gentleman Jim (Jim Corbett); Cinderella Man (James J Braddock); and The Fighter (Micky Ward). On top […]
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 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 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 […]
There is no point mincing my words. As a work of fiction, Bernard Beckett’s Genesis is a bit of a disaster. While there are interesting philosophical points raised, Beckett has made the fundamental mistake of forgetting that the first task of a novelist is to engage and entertain. If instruction is the author’s goal – […]