Shadows of the Apt

Or TFW you can't come up with a clever blog title (1). I have not done bloggery as I should, owing to other stuff to have been doing (25% through The Hawk and the (some other animal) as I write) and so a number of separate posts on stuff I've stumbled over and liked are going to be Frankensteined the crap […]

I have actually been sitting on a post for a while — basically my usual Clarkes shortlist writeup, except it now feels super weird to post it, even though it amounts to little more than a "these books are awesome do go read." So… no idea if that will ever get posted. But they are all awesome […]

So I feel I've been putting in the hours on my inhuman characters, what with the protagonists of Children of Time and this year's release of Spiderlight from Tor UK, as well as more human examples like the insect-kinden, or the shapeshifters of The Tiger and the Wolf. I first got into SF for the aliens. When I was a kid I would […]

In celebration of a certain film, and because this is a time of year to be POSITIVE damnit, I am going to push my goodwill and seasonal cheer to the limit and set out TEN THINGS I liked about the Star Wars prequels. There will be spoilers for the prequels, but it's not like that didn't happen the moment […]

The dread condition known as "being a parent and having two jobs" continues to cramp my film watching style. Although there weren't that many films I desperately wanted to see that I didn't get a chance to. Perhaps "The Lobster". Although I I may have misunderstood what it's about. Certainly the scene with the giant lobster destroying Chicago didn't seem […]

Very tempted to call this one "Too Many Cooks" but that would be entirely unjust. This follows my earlier post going over the first half of Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series which, for ease of reference, can be found here. We've seen so far a fantasy series with buried Old-tech elements, and […]

Literature has lost one of its greats today. Not just genre literature, but literature as a whole — a household name and a man of a profoundly complex canon presented wrapped in two often underrated fields: speculative fiction and comedy. It is probably a small thing, on the grand scale, but my most personal tribute would be to say that […]

Cheap at half the price. Yes, I've been a bit slow on the ol' blogging, from a certain point of view (1). From another point of view, I've been blogging like crazy, just in a Lovecraftian way that's been going on superimposed over the reality you know, and yet entirely invisible to feeble mortal eyes. Specifically, guest posts […]

Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness are a weird and wild ride. A couple are well regarded, most are obscure, and I think the series took a general sales nose-dive in its second half. They were written between 1986 and 1992, so immediately after both the Belgariad and the first Shannara trilogy had just wrapped up, and […]

It's that time of year again. I'm currently busy dealing with a number of Secret Projects, which I hope I will be able to spill the beans on soonish, but right now, here's a fairly bare bones list of Things I Am Doing this year. As one of them's in a fortnight, I figured I needed to boost this out fast. 24^th January — […]