Originally posted on M.E. Kinkade:
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro My rating: 2 of 5 stars I’m starting to think any book under the genre of “literary fiction” has to meet one of three definitions: 1) Has a plot that is mostly some kind of allegory but when you get down to…
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 […]
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 in being almost impossible to […]
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 […]
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 […]
In ‘The Outer Spheres’, Charity Freestone is aided by characters who were previously antagonists. One is a special forces operative called 23, who becomes Charity’s heavily armed fairy godmother. The protean 23 is never encountered in person; Charity doesn’t even find out what she looks like. Instead, 23 appears as a giant cannon, a warship […]
Wound right up The horror underlying much of Jason Arnopp’s fiction often feels rooted in remorse. Invariably, his miserable, thwarted but very identifiable characters have made some dreadful decision and are awaiting the dire consequences. It’s that hinterland between realisation and outcome that gives the narratives their particularly febrile atmosphere, a bit like the moment […]
The unfortunate subject of politics Advances in real world technology and medicine add detail to the understanding of the human mind. However, has society ignored the need to develop individuals and given them technology instead? It could be why people are so willing to give control up to technology, for example in the many instances […]
Life in Sci-Fi 