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…

Read More

The Geek Test: What’s Your Score?

I believe people of all types should be able to join in geek events and have fun whether they’re sufficiently geek credentialed or not, but I wondered how one might one go about quantitatively evaluating “geekiness”

Read More

Low Intensity – 1 – Jim Aikin

This will be an occasional series about good writers who either haven’t produced very much book-length speculative fiction, or are, in my opinion, under-appreciated. Jim Aikin is something of a mix of the two categories. […]

Read More
The Peacock Cloak

The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett has been publishing short stories since 1990. His debut novel was The Holy Machine, followed by Marcher, and last year, Dark Eden, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the Best SF […]

Read More

How American Airlines Helped Me Gafiate

Gafiate, for those whose Fannish Lexicon isn’t handy, is Fan Speak for the act of ‘Getting Away From It All’.  Leaving Fandom.  Putting conventions and fanzines and crazy projects and far-flung friends behind you.  It […]

Read More