Let me start that I really enjoyed Stephen Baxter’s Flood. It’s a ripping yarn, well told by an author who, it seems to me, has reached a new level with his writing. I think Flood might be in the top five of my favourite Baxter novels. It is one of his most accomplshed.

Posted June 29, 2009 Comments(0)

Call me an idiot – you won’t be the first – but it wasn’t until half way through China Mieville’s The City and The City that I realised I’d grown up in Beszel/Ul Qoma.

Posted June 27, 2009 Comments(1)

If there were no other reason to like No Heroics the fact that it was the first attempt by ITV2 to produce an original comedy show would be enough to rouse a cheer. But, thankfully, it also turned out to be a rather good .

Situation comedies are tricky things and often the struggle to establish themselves in their first season as writers, audiences and performers come to terms with the format, relationships and voice of the show. Some sitcoms spring perfectly formed from their creators’ brains – Fawlty Towers, The Office, The Thick of It – but others struggle to be born before hitting their full stride – Blackadder, Only Fools and Horses, Men Behaving Badly.

So the fact that the first season of No Heroics stands up pretty well to a second viewing is a considerable success. Read more »

Posted June 2, 2009 Comments(0)

There is no point mincing my words. As a work of fiction, Bernard Beckett’s Genesis is a bit of a disaster. While there are interesting philosophical points raised, Beckett has made the fundamental mistake of forgetting that the first task of a novelist is to engage and entertain. If instruction is the author’s goal – and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that aim – then it should emerge from the plot and characters. Genesis is too didactic. Beckett is too determined to teach us a lesson – even to the point that the story is told through the framing device of a viva voce examination.

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Posted June 2, 2009 Comments(0)

Before starting this review I want to congratulate artist Chris Moore and the (uncredited) designer at Penguin responsible for the cover of this book. It was a brave design choice to park the title and author’s name on the little spaceship in the bottom left hand corner of the cover, but the masses of negative space created, and the minimalist feeling it lends the cover, immediately creates the feeling that this book is a classy artefact and delivers an image of smallness and isolation that is wholly apt.  Very nice. Read more »

Posted May 29, 2009 Comments(1)

On one level there can have been few television series to debut in recent years that have been quite so utterly ridiculous as Fringe. It would be easy to dismiss the entire thing as a subpar X-Files rip-off, with unorthodox FBI agents pursuing increasingly unlikely – not to say downright ridiculous – Forteana across America while some huge conspiracy appears to unwind around them, which may or may not involve aliens, invasion and alternate realities. Read more »

Posted May 28, 2009 Comments(0)

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.

And stories about drugs are almost invariably tedious. When their not moralising at the reader in one way or another (”Drugs are bad! Stay away!” “Drugs are great! Free your mind!”) they’re descending into the self-indulgent ramblings of writers who’ve taken drugs and mistaken the chemical induced ramblings for genuine insights.

So Lucius Shephard’s novella – “Dog Eared Paperback of My Life” – which is the longest story in Other Earths, the short story collection edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake had two strikes against it before I even started reading it. Read more »

Posted May 26, 2009 Comments(1)

I’ve just finished reading Chris Beckett’s Marcher which takes some of his best short stories (”The Welfare Man”, “The Welfare Man Resigns” and, perhaps obviously, “Marcher” amongst others) and winds them into a novel set in a shared world where the drug slip is allowing people to “shift” between alternate worlds and people are trying to deal with the consequences for themselves and the world around them. Read more »

Posted May 24, 2009 Comments(0)

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.

Simply it’s the story of two petty conmen and adventurers, Zelikman a pale, blonde Frank armed with an incongruously long thin sword (it’s referred to early on as “bodkin” but it sounds like a modern épée) and Amram, an aging, muscular African wielding a rune-laden Viking axe, who become caught up in courtly machinations in the triple-crowned court of Khazaria – north of the Black Sea. Read more »

Posted January 13, 2008 Comments(3)

A while ago, just after I finished Old Man’s War, I threatened to come back to the blog and give a scathing account of why John Scalzi’s fantastically entertaining space opera was the single most wrongheaded book I had ever read. It was, I was going to tell you, a filthy piece of right-wing shittism of the kind that I thought even the sci-fi reactionaries had left behind. I was going to set Mr Scalzi straight on a few things, I can tell you.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. The very clever Niall Harrison from Torque Control had the good grace to stop me making an even bigger arse of myself than usual by pointing me in the direction of Nicholas Whyte (who, god bless him) took a bullet for the rest of us and got there first.

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Posted November 1, 2007 Comments(6)