My aspiration for ‘Diamond Roads’ was this: Helen Fielding and Syliva Plath join forces to write a science fiction thriller about Lara Croft What do you think? In the meantime, here are some pictures of these three great women looking suitably like Charity Freestone:
The stabbing of a 16-year-old boy on a London estate quickly accumulates a grim spectrum of opportunities for the characters in Charles Harris’s darkly humorous broadside of a thriller. The boy’s surname is one of many ironies; nothing here is transparent, with printed media the focus of the author’s contempt. Such a view is understandable; […]
The British Science Fiction Association listed the first of these stories, ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ as one of the top ten genre novellas. It’s certainly worthy of the accolade, as the story redefines the fantasy genre with an extraordinary milieu and a dark, wholly human twist. This dragon is not the usual […]
Ella Chappell pic on Instagram Mansfield in Space With Fungus Some genre writers can’t avoid putting a robot or an alien into the narrative; Malcolm Devlin goes back and takes them out, leaving interesting scars. The resulting uncertainty is one of the few pointers towards a story being weird fiction, a sub-genre that takes pride […]
Yes, yes I know it’s not a new release – I was three when it came out. But it was Roger Moore’s first outing as James Bond and now Sir Roger has died I find myself drawn to this movie more than his others, even ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, my default favourite of his […]
The cloaking device used by the titular spaceship to sneak into alien territory feels like a metaphor for the characters in Ian Whates’s bracing space opera. Most of these people have ulterior motives, with the motives of one so ulterior she doesn’t even know them herself. Such duality seems to be a survival mechanism in […]
Cheese is strange, isn’t it? We fiddle with a cow, let what comes out go mouldy, then eat the result. Tastes great of course, but still. Anna Smith Spark, who is a quarter Chinese, made this point to put the business about Chinese people eating dogs into perspective. She is one of those writers with […]
