The BSFA’s Vector Review of 2017 was delivered today, which includes a piece I wrote on the bit of genre reading that stuck in my mind most clearly in the past year. I chose a few panels from a crossover comic book. The piece got a bit mangled in the production process (some repeated text […]
The High Ground by Melinda Snodgrass (Titan Books, 2016) When I was a child I loved the breakfast cereal Ready Brek – instant porridge whose television advertisements used to feature a young boy protected from the winter elements by a warm glow of healthy goodness. I would eat Ready Brek for breakfast, supper and, basically, […]
The overwhelming sensation left at the end of Tricia Sullivan’s strange, awkward, new novel is of things straining and stretching and struggling to be free. This is true of the characters, all of whom seem to be constantly pushing against something literal and/or metaphorical, but also true of the book itself – it feels as […]
Why would an author write a story in which the main characters are bees? One reason might be simply that bees are interesting little creatures – fascinatingly social, successful, widespread and apocryphally busy – and we are intimately familiar with them. Their hives and lives offer the writer useful opportunities for allegory and metaphor. Or, […]
Gemsigns and Binary by Stephanie Saulter (Jo Fletcher Books, 2013 & 2014) (Originally published in Vector 278) I can cut a long story short in reviewing Stephanie Saulter’s first two novels, Gemsigns and Binary (collectively part of the slightly clumsily named (R)Evolution series), by saying that I recommend them highly. Like most early-career authors, there […]
Noir and La Femme edited by Ian Whates (Newcon Press, 2014) (originally published in Vector 277) Ian Whates, through Newcon Press and the Solaris Rising series, has established himself as a key editor in UK short fiction and I, like a number of authors, have reason to be grateful for his generosity. But it is […]
So, I wrote this review a long time ago but I’ve never been happy with it and I tried to rework it and get it to say what I wanted but its never quite worked the way I saw it in my head. The tl:dr version is that while I broadly agree with the criticisms that […]
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 […]
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 […]