One of the few good things about growing up in the 80s was the horror, be it in movies or a political reality that meant instant death after a four-minute warning. The emotion also underpinned spy fiction at the time in print and other media; Ian Bannen’s terrified expression when he is cornered at the […]
The first ‘Diamond Roads’ novel is a story of two sisters: Charity (the blonde on the left) and Ursula (on the right). They are sisters, although Charity is adopted and does not know who she is; instead, she lives her life vicariously via the outrageous ‘People’s Princess’ Ursula, who is the celebrity face of the […]
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 […]
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