An anthology of authentic and realistic hard science fiction
Due 2012
I appear to have done something very foolish. I was sort of toying with the idea, but I didn’t really intend to do it. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t got enough on my plate already. So I’ve no idea what possessed me to sign up for Nanowrimo this year. But I did. Well, [...]
Filed under: nanowrimo 2011, science fiction, writing | 2 Comments »
Time for yet another in my ongoing series on retro-futures. The past, they say, is another country and they do things differently there. But the future we’ve come to inhabit is every bit as different as the one the past imagined into existence. And not necessarily for the better. We never had utopia within our [...]
Filed under: jetpunk | Leave a Comment »
David Hebblethwaite has just done this on his blog, and I read his blog, so I guess I’ll have a go at it. Again. Because we’ve all done this before. But so what: it’s about books. Books are good, and reading them is even better. The only thing better than reading that you can do [...]
Filed under: books, meme | Tagged: dg compton, jayge carr, ninni holmqvist, robert goddard, tricia sullivan | 2 Comments »
We all like our genre labels, even if we argue over their provenance – literary genre, marketing category, or whatever it is we are pointing at. But people have a natural tendency to categorise things, to seek out patterns, in order to make things more manageable. It helps no one to insist that there is [...]
Filed under: fantasy, science fiction, writing | 13 Comments »
Book meme! Here are the 25 titles chosen for 2012′s World Book Night. Do the usual: bold for read, italics for owned by unread. And, given the multimedia nature of our cultural landscape, asterisk those with film or television adaptations you have seen. *Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen The Player of Games by Iain [...]
Filed under: books, meme | 3 Comments »
It has been a good month for the book collection and a bad month for the TBR: both have grown larger. As follows… Some charity shop finds to start: Maureen Kincaid Speller has been singing the praises of Alan Garner for decades, though my only exposure to him has been the children’s classic fantasies The [...]
Filed under: book haul, books | Tagged: alan bean, alan garner, blake and mortimer, charles palliser, chesley bonestell, dg compton, gareth l powell, ian fleming, ian watson, jacques tardi, jed mercurio, john glenn, john shirley, kameron hurley, patrik ourednik, paul scott, stephen baxter, tricia sullivan, valerian and laureline | 3 Comments »
If I’ve had trouble reading the books for my challenge in their proper months, it’s not because reading them is proving a, er, challenge. On the contrary, it’s because I’ve made a change in my reading patterns which makes the books I chose for the challenge less of a conscious or deliberate act of selection [...]
Filed under: 2011 reading challenge, book review, melissa scott, science fiction, women in sf | 8 Comments »
It’s been just under a month since the last one of these, and that one proved to be a somewhat humungous post. So I thought I’d try for a more bite-sized installment this month. Sort of. Anyway, you know the drill: the books wot I have read, the films wot I have watched. Comments thereon. [...]
Filed under: books, films, readings & watchings 2011 | Tagged: alan moore, ann halam, emir kusturica, françois ozon, francis spufford, george alec effinger, jacques tardi, leigh brackett, len deighton, lisa goldstein, margaret atwood, philip kerr, sebastian faulks, shakespeare, stephen baxter, tobe hooper | 4 Comments »
It’s not been an especially good year for genre awards. The Hugo results were announced in August to a wave of apathy. The Hugo for Best Novel went to Connie Willis’ Blackout / All Clear, a book which seems to possess only a handful of fans but a much larger number who consider it to [...]
Filed under: 2011 british fantasy award, 2011 hugo award | 4 Comments »
… or like it’s Fantasycon 2011, although there were times when I did wonder what century we were in. Not, I hasten to add, because of the convention itself, but because of the Royal Albion Hotel. The journey down to Brighton proved a lot less painful than I’d expected. I disembarked from one train at [...]
Filed under: conventions | 2 Comments »
