Personal Best
Gary offers up his own (well-informed) listicle of influential Science Fiction
Review: Recursion, by Tony Ballantyne
Ballantyne’s plotting is stunningly impressive, the story unfolding with clarity, precision and a powerful imaginative vision
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.
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.
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…
Interview (Part 2): Nina Allan On Her Debut Novel, The Race
Welcome to the second part of an extensive interview with, Nina Allan who over the last decade has established herself as one of the UK’s most imaginative and compelling writers. This time we discuss some of the more the specifically science fictional aspects of her debut novel, The Race, as well as maps, Hastings, the best vampire film in years, fracking, politics, the planet, language, communication and much more.
Interview (Part 1): Nina Allan On Her Debut Novel, The Race
Over the last decade Nina Allan has established herself as one of the UK’s most imaginative and compelling writers. In this extensive two part interview she talks to Gary Dalkin for Amazing Stories about a wide range of subjects, including her debut novel, The Race.
Scide Splitters: The Lunatics of Terra by John Sladek
Daleks is and anagram for Sladek. This seemingly random bit of word play has everything and nothing to do with Scide Splitters’ review of John Sladek’s short story collection.
Award Winners: Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
Nova Swing (2006) won both the Arthur C. Clarke and the Philip K. Dick Awards and was nominated for the Campbell and British Fantasy Awards. Gary Dalkin looks back at this true space oddity.
Award Winners: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
One night a few years from now the stars go out …almost from when it was first published Robert Charles Wilson’s Hugo Award-winning Spin remains one of the finest hard SF novels of the new millennium.
Book Review: The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
A look at Christopher Priest’s novel, The Adjacent, from a first-time Priest reader.
Review – The Moon King by Neil Williamson
The Moon King Review: Ultimately The Moon King is a fairytale for adults, which requires you to accept it for what it is. It is also that rare thing, a modern fantasy novel with a beginning, a middle, an end and a purpose.
Self-publishing Competitions: Leave Your Elves At Home
The enormous media interest in self-publishing has been fired by the breakthrough success of Wool by Hugh Howey, so SF is leading the way in this field. It’s strange therefore to hear the Guardian’s flamboyant Books section editor Claire Armistead warning that “It’s all too easy to dismiss the self-publishing sector as a wilderness of elves, sex and high-school romcoms”.
Marketing As A Metafictional Tool: Harnessing the Power of Misdirection
Deliberate misdirection is a writer’s tool that also deserves a place in the marketer’s toolkit. Here’s how writers can colonize the search page, where the reading experience ought to start.
Christopher Priest – The Adjacent Interview: Part 2
This is the second part of an interview with Christopher Priest, one of the leading authors in any genre. You can read Part 1 here. Priest’s first published story was ‘The Run’, in 1966. His first novel, Indoctrinaire, was […]
TIME MACHINE: Past Popular Posts
Like the Omega 13 Device – but Better! Travel back in time up to seven days, not a paltry 13 seconds. Why, 13 seconds doesn’t give you a chance to do much of anything beyond […]
Christopher Priest – The Adjacent Interview: Part 1
Christopher Priest is one of the leading authors in any genre. His first published story was ‘The Run’, in 1966. His first novel, Indoctrinaire, was published in 1970. His second, Fugue for a Darkening Island, […]
Crossroads: The Cores of Literary Fiction and Speculative Fiction
The relationship between speculative fiction and mainstream literary fiction is complicated by decades of group identity dynamics, mutual ignorance, and overbroad critical generalizations about both genres. However, if we try to put our long-held attitudes […]
The Mirror of Our Dreams
There is a curious phenomenon not exclusive to science fiction fandom, it is prevalent in pop music worship and other places, by which those afflicted feel a need to establish rivalries. The Star Wars fan […]
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