Personal Best
Gary offers up his own (well-informed) listicle of influential Science Fiction
London Fields – Director’s Cut Review
An advance viewing of the director’s cut redeems the earlier fifth lowest gross in US release version of this on-the-edge-of-the-apocalypse film
Review: The Teardrop Method, by Simon Avery
It is a story about … the transmutation of the darkest personal grief into art, and about the coming to terms with the inevitability of death.
Review: Cottingley by Alison Littlewood
Cottingley is a treat and another triumph for one of the best writers of dark fiction around, Alison Littlewood.
Professor Rachel Armstrong Joins Improbable Botany
Professor Rachel Armstrong joins the Improbable Botany team!
Improbable Interviews – Cherith Baldry
An interview with Cherith Baldry, one of the contributors to the anthology Improbable Botany.
Improbable Interviews – Adam Roberts
I have recently edited a new anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories about fantastical flora. The book, Improbable Botany, features authors who between them have won the Arthur C Clarke, British Science Fiction Association, John W. Campbell Memorial, Philip K. Dick, Nebula and Prometheus Awards, and been nominated for many more. The writers are: […]
Improbable Interviews – Ken MacLeod
Ken Macleod interviewed about his contribution to Improbable Botany
Review: Recursion, by Tony Ballantyne
Ballantyne’s plotting is stunningly impressive, the story unfolding with clarity, precision and a powerful imaginative vision
Review: Beautiful Intelligence, by Stephen Palmer
Beautiful Intelligence is a bracingly imaginative novel. By choosing to operate within a realistic, post-crash, dystopian cyberpunkish framework Stephen Palmer has written his most accessible and commercial work to-date.
Review: Exultant, by Stephen Baxter
Exultant is The Dam Busters in space, or Star Wars stripped of its mythopoetic resonances and bolstered by hard physics.
James Horner – Obituary
Film composer James Horner has died in a plane crash.
Review: The Baby Merchant, by Kit Reed
The Baby Merchant, an expertly crafted psychological crime drama with a modicum of science fiction, a book which reads with the page-turning magnetism of Stephen King, Thomas Harris or Michael Crichton.
Review: Naomi’s Room & The Silence of Ghosts, by Jonathan Aycliffe
What keeps someone in a haunted house once the scary stuff starts to happen?
Review: Crash, by Guy Haley
Who wouldn’t be discombobulated, finding oneself expelled from suspended animation amid the remains of a starship scattered across an alien world?
Review – Intrusion, by Ken MacLeod
Intrusion is a novel, published in 2012, by Scotland’s preeminent writer of serious hard SF. It was nominated for both of the UK’s top science fiction awards, the British Science Fiction Association Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Interview: Electric Cinema – Andrew David Barker
The Electric is a ghost story steeped in the love of movies, with shades of vintage Bradbury and King. It is quiet an achievement.
Review – Living Next-Door To The God Of Love, by Justina Robson
Living Next-Door To The God Of Love is a hard book to write about without giving away its manifold secrets, and to do so would be to do the novel a disservice, for the greatest pleasure it holds is in the gradual uncovering of the extraordinarily detailed and original fictional universe Justina Robson has created.
Review – Cowboy Angels, by Paul McAuley
The Real is a parallel world in which the Second World War never happened, where Alan Turing emigrated to America in the 1950’s and laid the foundations for the development of Turing Gates. By 1968 the CIG was beginning to use the Gates to secretly explore parallel worlds. … There is a lot of plot in Cowboy Angels. There is also a lot of Bourne-movie style action. McAuley builds the suspense well and the set-pieces are effectively conceived.
Review – Sanity and the Lady by Brian Aldiss
Aldiss has written the most comfortable, middle-class, middle-of-the-road, whimsical, genteel catastrophe imaginable. I can only in all fairness conclude that was all along his intention.
Review – The Heretic Land, by Tim Lebbon
Tim Lebbon’s 2012 novel The Heretic Land is something of an endangered species in modern publishing; a self-contained, complete unto itself secondary world fantasy novel.
Review – Eifelheim, by Michael Flynn
Eifelheim fashions a meeting-place between two alien worldviews, medieval Christian theology and cutting edge physics, without doing disservice to either. Nominated for the Hugo Award in 1987.
2014: A Reading Odyssey – Part 2
Gary Dalkin completes his survey of the books he read in 2014
2014: A Reading Odyssey – Part 1
a short recap of my 2014 in books. Where I reviewed a book for Amazing Stories I have provided a link to that review, and in one case to a related interview. So here, in chronological order, are the first 21 books I read in 2014.
The Interstellar Soundtrack Album Debacle
A look at the various controversies surrounding the release of the soundtrack album for Hans Zimmer’s score to Interstellar
Underwhelmed By Interstellar
don’t much care about the superhero films. I don’t expect much from them, and was only disappointed by The Dark Knight Rises in that it wasn’t as good as The Dark Knight. But Interstellar is disappointing in a very different way.
Is Interstellar Too Loud?
I have read repeated complaints that Interstellar is too loud. Which makes as much sense as complaining that a record is too loud.
Review: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Bone Clocks consists of six linked novellas chronicling the life of one woman, Holly Sykes, from rebellious teenager in 1984, to grandmother in 2043. Each novella is narrated in the first person present tense, but only the opening and closing sections are see directly through Holly’s eyes. In the other four sections she is a character in someone else’s story. It is a strong framework on which to build a novel. Unfortunately Holly is not herself a particularly interesting person
Review: Another War by Simon Morden
Another War is an early novella, published in the UK by Telos Publishing in 2005, by the British writer Simon Morden, who has since come to prominence with the Philip K. Dick Award-winning Metrozone series. It is a fast-paced horror story paying homage to HP Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Quatermass, and even UNIT from Doctor Who.
Review: Marcher by Chris Beckett (2014 Newcon Press edition)
Marcher is Chris Beckett’s second novel, now making its UK debut in a significantly revised edition from Newcon Press. When his first novel to be published in the UK, Dark Eden (2012), won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Chris Beckett seemed to many to have come out of nowhere. In-fact the author had been steadily publishing short stories since the beginning of the 1990s and his first book, The Turing Test (2008 – Elastic Press), had won the Edgehill Prize, the UK’s only national award for single-author short story collections…