Does anyone need another reworking of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? It’s not like there’s ever going to be a re-imagining of the story that’s more balls-to-the-wall than Apocalypse Now, so what more needs to be said.
Every night, at 10:30, Abigail’s father closes the front door, climbs into his rusty Toyota and drives away. Every night, before he goes, he strokes his daughter’s hair, reminds her not to open to door to anyone else and kisses her on the forehead. It is dangerous to go out after dark.
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 […]
There’s piece on today’s Guardian theatre blog by Andrew Haydon that starts interestingly, wondering why science ficiton – which can make an impact in cinema, television and, of course, literature – isn’t embraced more by the theatre. He goes on to list a number of previous theatre sf productions – including Mark Ravenhill’s The Cut – and […]
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 […]
Well, if nothing else it’s nice to see that I’ve made it to the top of someone’s list about something. Scott Edelman is upset by my review of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet at The Fix. Thanks to Niall at Torque Control for bringing this to my attention… I think.
As I’m sure most of the sf fans reading this blog will know, Arthur C Clarke died today. In one sense the death of a 90 year old man who’d not been well for a very long time shouldn’t come as a shock – and yet I’m surprised and saddened.
I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (lauded as a masterpiece pretty much everywhere, except here). I think Asher is far too harsh on The Road – at the very least it is a beautiful exercise in sparse writing that creates a genuinely uncomfortable sense of dread in many passages. His complaint about crimes […]
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 […]