Or “In a Chinese Room, not far from the loo” I have been a little unwell. Nothing serious, a stomach bug that my four-year-old daughter shrugged off without so much as a backward glance to check whether there was any puke in her curly locks (there was, we found it later) but which put dad […]
When I first picked up Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction in 1995 I hadn’t been reading much science fiction for a while but I had just picked up Red Mars, which had gone a long way to reigniting my interest and I was looking for more. I don’t know what attracted me to MacLeod’s book […]
I’ve just finished reading Ascent, the newish novel by Jed Mercurio. It’s the story of Yefgenii Yeremin an orphan of Stalingrad and “the great patriotic war against fascism”. Yefgenii is blessed with a talent for mathematics and engineering and supremely acute eyesight. This combination of skills take him into the VVF, the Soviet air force […]
I’ve said before that, for a genre that so often finds its writers dealing with big political ideas, relatively few science fiction authors demonstrate any sense that they have a clue about how politics really works. This leads to things like the sci-fi revolution and improbable conspiracies (sci-fi governments are good at keeping secrets, real […]
Sometimes reading throws up odd sychronicities – and my experience of reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both sf (alt-history) and the crime thriller in one book) came shortly after I’d finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country for Old Men (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both […]
This is a book that, for me, ended up being more than the sum of its parts. There was quite a lot here that I found disappointing, at first, but as McDonald interleaves the three different plot threads across three different worlds/times I found myself being drawn by the story and worrying less about the […]
I finished reading Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It’s a wonderful book – a straightforward action-adventure story in the very old style but lifted way into the stratosphere by Chabon’s mastery of language.
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 […]