My kingdom for a comic strip

The always interesting Book Slut has a really good article about reading comic strips in newspapers, something that too many people do not have the pleasure of doing. On my paperround, I used to read the Hagar strips one of the red tops and when I was in Israel with my dad, I read the [...]

Back to the 70s - David Devereux’s Hunter’s Moon

Hunter’s Moon is perhaps one of the most appalling books that I have read this year and the real annoyance was that I had been looking forward to it. I have a sweet spot for the anti-hero magician type wandering around the place, like John Constantine and Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels but this came [...]

Getting old gracefully? - Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth

I’ve just read Old Twentieth by Joe Haldeman which is an interesting read. In the future, death has pretty much been banished but what replaces it?
Whilst travelling through space, Jacob, a virtual reality engineer, is involved with an emergent AI which effects its presence through the scenarios of the twentieth century. In the philosophical discussions [...]

The language of genre

Oxford University Press are not a publisher that one expects in the sf field (apart from the fine fantasy and sf anthologies) but the recently published Brave New Words is an odd book. Its a dictionary of science fiction terms with their derivations put together by an ex-Locus editor with an introduction by Gene Wolfe.
It [...]

To Infinity and beyond…

Solaris have published the Infinity Plus anthology, a bind up of the two PS publishing collections, and its another gem.
I’m not going to go into detail in to each story as it has been a while since I read them but this a worthwhile snapshot of some great writers from Stephen Baxter and Michael Moorcock [...]