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 […]
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 […]
So busy with stuff I hadn’t noticed that the table of contents for Solaris Rising 2 had been announced. I’m chuffed to be in this book alongside a list of very fine writers. I’m only slightly worried that I’m the one whose been stuck in to make everyone else look good. Still, it’s a very […]
So I was putting together my nominations for the BSFA Awards and it kind of morphed into a wider longer look back at the things I read and enjoyed in 2012. Of course everyone else has already done this and no one really cares, but here’s my list. Nominations in bold are for stuff I […]
Things have been quiet here for a few weeks and are likely to remain so for a while longer – apologies. However, I’d just like to draw your attention to the appearance of my story “Eskragh” in issue 12 (titled Night Legends) of Dark Fiction Magazine.Thanks to the editors for selecting it and transforming it […]
The best joke in the Finnish Nazis-on-the-moon movie Iron Sky is, ironically, also the one that best demonstrates the film’s weaknesses. Idealistic Nazi teacher, Renate Richter (Julia Dietze), shows her young class a sharply edited (ten minutes long) version of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and, as the Jewish barber disguised as Hynkel dances with the […]
Chris Beckett’s third novel, Dark Eden, is a complex thing. It draws, as the title suggests, on the ur-biblical theme of the fall from innocence but it is also the story of an isolated human community culturally (and physically) devolving. It belongs to a sfnal tradition that has its roots in works like Lord of […]
So, I did a recording of my story Eskragh for a friend, and then I thought about putting it up here. And then I didn’t. But since this seems to be an unofficial Irish-themed week on the blog and since I haven’t done this sort of thing before – what the hell. This isn’t the […]