Publisher: BANTAM DOUBLEDAY DELL Publication date: 02/06/2024 Pages: 432 ISBN: 9781984820709 Author: Robert Jackson Bennett The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett is a typical Sherlock Holmes / John Watson type mystery. Typical that is […]
After a delay, Steve finally finishes his review of Volume 1 of Anthony Boucher’s Treasury of Great Science Fiction from 1959. Surprisingly, most of these 60-plus-year-old stories still hold up!
Steve gets really retro this week, with a review of the 1937 movie King Solomon’s Mines. Does he dig up diamonds or dirt? Read and find out!
An interview with Cherith Baldry, one of the contributors to the anthology Improbable Botany.
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, […]
Is it old? Is it new? Is it even SF/F? Steve examines the ever-popular Saint series by Leslie Charteris.
Scide Splitters reviews a story collection by one of science fiction and fantasy’s most prolific authors of short form humorous fiction.
Steve considers two of John Shirley’s different genres: Fantasy Detective and Western!
Niles Golan is an ex-pat Brit in Hollywood. Never grown-up, he narrates his life with an internal monologue transforming his everyday inadequacies into triumphs. Niles is his own fictional creation: to himself, a genius novelist […]
The Fictional Man, published by UK imprint Solaris, is based on an impossible conceit, one of those high concept movie-friendly ideas where one aspect of reality is altered from our world but things continue just the same. Absurd, but depending on how well it’s done we buy into it for the duration. Here it is generally very well done. Al Ewing is a breathtakingly clever writer and his conceit is that human cloning was perfected decades ago but then outlawed because everyone is entitled to their own unique identity.
The conversation got me thinking about heroes and what characteristics are expected of a hero from generation to generation.
The combination of visual simplicity and effective story telling awakened my sense of wonder and exposed me to new ideas which widened my understanding of life and reality.
This post is about powerful images and the way that they can become stuck in the public consciousness.
Earlier I wrote about what Damon Knight characterized as “a sense of wonder” that emerges at times in a science fiction story, or as in the case of this blog entry, in a movie. I […]
Adam Gaffen for Amazing Stories: Welcome! It seems appropriate that there’s a science fiction author who is a rocket scientist; how did one lead to the other? Stephanie Osborne: Thank you! And thank you for […]
Crime and punishment. Both words are synonymous with genre fiction. Whether it is the flashy superhero racing to stop the next crisis or the “I’m too old for this shit” beat cop who stumbles upon a global […]
As Harry Turtledove, the master of alternate history, said in the introduction to The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, even historical memoirs can sometimes be so far from the truth they can be […]
I don’t intend here to eulogize Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) but to discuss some of the contributions he made to the areas of Horror, Science Fiction and Detective Fiction. Poe was born in Boston in […]
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