Now Playing - The Sound of Bread
Currently I’m listening to this 2006 re-release of the classic 1977 collection, which features 20 classic tracks, including “Make It With You”, “Baby I’m A Want You”, “Everything I Own”, “Guitar Man”, and “If”, all among my favourite ballads. One of the best easy listening albums out there. You’ve [...]
Berlin is one of the classics of modern comics, and is on a par with the “greats” of the medium, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus. If you want to impress someone who is not a fan of comics (or positively derogatory about them), you don’t hand them Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman or Superman. These people will [...]
Okay, now for a change, and putting on my other (professional) hat as an historian (I majored in history at university and finally graduated as a history teacher) rather than an SF fan, I’d like to recommend this really fascinating book that I’ve recently gotten my grubby hands on. It covers an area in recent [...]
Now Reading - Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds
Just bought a very nice collection of SF stories by leading British/Welsh “hard” SF author Alastair Reynolds. A signed 1st edition hardcover of Galactic North, a collection of stories set in his Revelation Space universe. I’ve been a fan of Alastair’s SF going right back to “Spirey and [...]
One day a guy who works at the local comics shop (hi Chris!) made a comment that left me completely dumbfounded. He stated that he didn’t like SF. He didn’t like to read it, or to watch it, either on TV or at the movies.
After I’d picked my jaw up from the floor, I managed [...]
I’m just sitting back, having a late-night cup of tea, and browsing the Ceefax pages on TV (Ceefax is the teletext service of the UK’s BBC TV), and I’ve come across a fascinating page.
Apparently the fossilized remains of a giant bird-like dinosaur have been recently uncovered in the Inner Mongolia region of China. This guy [...]
The first of my Favourite SF Authors postings, and who better than the author who started it all for me, the man dubbed the “father of science fiction”, H.G. Wells.
The first time I saw George Pal film adaption of The Time Machine on television was probably the point in my life where I can definitely [...]
Now Reading - “SF of the 30s”, edited by Damon Knight
This is a gem of an anthology, for which SF great Damon Knight mines a few of the forgotten gems from the science fiction “pulps” of the 1930s. For someone like myself, who is a huge fan of finding good old SF stories that I [...]
Now Playing - “Frontiers” by Journey
I’m a big music fan. Always have been. My obsession with music is the only thing that comes close to my love of science fiction. I’ve been a DJ for more than twenty-five years (more like twenty-seven or twenty-eight), and I have amassed an enormous collection of music that’s a [...]
When is a short story not a “short story”?
Surely everything that isn’t a “novel” is a “short story”, isn’t it? What’s all this “novella” and “novelette” business, then? And what the heck is a “short-short” story? For newcomers to reading SF, the terminology and categorization of short fiction can be a bit confusing.
Well, technically you [...]
