So my grumpy review of James Smythe’s The Echo is now online at Arcfinity. I’m not normally bothered by the science being wrong in fantastic fiction if it makes the story better – that’s normally true when the author has made a deliberate choice to warp or twist reality. What bothered me by this book (and […]
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 […]
The thing that I like best about Chris Beckett’s short stories in general, and this new collection, The Peacock Cloak, in particular is the rage that is bubbling under the surface and that occasionally erupts from the page. Not all the stories grip you by the throat, “Atomic Truth”, the first in this collection, is […]
I did not like David Brin’s Existence. It is a book so distressingly unpleasant that it left me wondering – and this is no exaggeration – whether I had had enough of the whole of science fiction. I suppose you might say it caused something of an Existential crisis. Boiled down to its basics, Brin’s […]
Last night my Twitter feed filled, briefly, with closely cropped images of protestors in V for Vendetta/Guy Fawkes masks making some noise outside the Houses of Parliament and comments criticising the BBC for not covering what was, obviously, an epoch-making event[ref]Of course the BBC did cover the demonstration – but this was considered insufficient[/ref]. I […]
Adam Roberts has written a (typically) interesting blog post about the division between the “Booker culture” that favours formally complex and “clever, clever” writing and the popular arts that have set “the parameters of the Great Human Revolution of 1950-2020”. You need to read his post to get the full force of his argument but, […]
I’m a strong supporter of Labour’s links with trade unions and the work of unions in general. I’ve worked for two different unions (more than ten years, in total) and the first thing I do in a new workplace is dig out the details of the recognised trade union – not always an easy job […]
My review of Marcel Theroux’s new novel, Strange Bodies, is online now at Arcfinity. When this arrived in the post I realised that I had actually read Theroux’s previous novel – the Clarke Award nominated Far North – but had absolutely no recollection of what it was about. I spotted it on the shelf, reread […]
My review of Simon Morden’s The Curve of the Earth is now online at Arcfinity. I quite enjoyed the first three novels, but this was a bit disappointing – though I’m still hoping the later volumes could bring a return to form and I still want to find out what Morden has in store for Samuil […]
So with Solaris Rising 2 being released tomorrow, the people at Solaris asked the anthology’s authors (you can read my effort, “The First Dance”, in those pages along with some stories that are really, really good) to write something about our favourite short stories. I couldn’t pick one. So instead I talked a bit about […]