Fans like me had wanted a Wonder Woman movie for years, but despite the character’s popularity the false narrative that a female-led superhero movie would fail to attract moviegoers kept her off the big screen. Fortunately, the success of The Hunger Games led DC/Warner to shoehorn Wonder Woman into Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, […]
Emma Newman is one of our most consistently intriguing, original and compelling storytellers. Able to switch from Regency fantasy (the Split Words novels) and Hugo Award-winning genre comedy (the Tea & Jeopardy podcast) to the otherworldly beauty of her first SF novel ‘Planetfall’; she now turns detective in a book I didn’t expect, […]
In this extraordinary first novel, the British Empire attempts to exert its commercial and cultural influence into the Faelands, also known as Arcadia, with predictably disastrous results. Narrated by Catherine Helstone, sister of missionary Laon, the story at first channels and then pretty much becomes a sublimation of Romantic ideals as the siblings attempt to […]
This is a densely-written novel, whose rhythmic narrative is as much of an accomplishment as the convincing world-building; the latter detailed with such invention you forget it’s not, in fact real. Links to our realm – stupid attitudes towards refugees, the desperate politics of smaller countries who want to go their own way without some […]
If Aliette de Bodard and Anne Leckie joined forces to write their version of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ set in a space war imagined by Iain M Banks it might end up a bit like ‘Ninefox Gambit’. For all that, the novel is entirely original, with a sonorous, almost detached rhythm that makes it uniquely […]
This book is so good I bought it twice, once as an ebook and once as a paperback for a gift. Yes, it’s one of those novels you end up buying for other people. The set-up is disarmingly simple: in a world reshaped by an ancient nuclear war, people only give birth to twins. One […]
Acclaimed author Anne Charnock joined me for the Facebook launch of my latest SF thriller novel ‘The Outer Spheres’ on 8 December 2016. Anne is one of my favourite authors and there are links to her work at the end of this piece. We covered so much good stuff about writing, adaptation and performance […]
I met Cassandra Khaw at one of Unsung Stories’ splendid spoken word nights, where she was one of the writers reading their short works aloud. I was struck by the beauty of the language in the story, its unique imagery an the romanticism of its fantastical central relationship. She read this story just before the […]
Because a Super Relaxed Reality Club just wouldn’t work I was apprehensive about attending because I have a tendency to be tense. Would I be allowed in? And if I was, would there be enforced massage from a large troll of indeterminate gender wearing too much make-up and a Minion onesie? Or is that just, […]
Like Led Zeppelin albums, Unsung Stories’ spoken word evenings are individually numbered, adding to the unique sense of each. Tonight’s intersection of fact and fantasy was the observation by regular MC George Sandison that today was Diana Wynne Jones’s birthday. Jones, who was at Oxford when CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were lecturing there, is […]
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