September 2011
9 posts
Old friends, old haunts...
Shit, I haven’t seen Hope and Mags in forever, and I haven’t been back to Hoppers in years!
Love And Rockets is a comic I used to read back in the 80s. It had been around for nearly 5 years when I started, and as this book anthologises the first 5 years of Jaime Hernandez’s contribution (the other half of the title being written/ drawn by his brother Beto), the last few pages...
Conflict | oliver-arditi I just uploaded a track...
John Peel - The Olivetti Chronicles
Like many other people, listeners to his music programs, or to Home Truths on Radio 4, I loved John Peel in the way that I love members of my family. It was something of a moving experience to read these words, so unmistakeably in his voice that I could almost hear him speaking, some seven years after the calamity of his death. Of course there are other champions for truly creative and unusual...
Keep 'em coming Iain!
Good old Iain Banks, he’s has that perfect combination of layered maturity and frothing insanity that you find in a 30 year old Laphroaig. He’s really hit his stride with these Culture novels, with enough depth and complexity of imagination below the surface of his narratives to make his societies seem to live.
He is also the funniest SF writer I’ve come across, excluding those...
A fascinating survey
So far, I’ve thought about science fiction as a relatively entertainment focussed reader (i.e. a fan), and in a relatively mechanical way, as an aspiring maker of it. This is not to say that I’ve seen it with an uncritical eye: I have made many, frequently unfavourable, value judgements of works of SF, but whatever theories and assumptions about the ideal form of the genre underly...
What's been happening in Writingland...
Well, it’s been a while since I posted a proper update, and equally, a long time since I generated much prose. After our week’s holiday at the end of July, I found it hard to get back into either writing fiction, or writing about music, and I got somewhat distracted by a compulsion to read every word of George R.R. Martin’s ‘Song Of Ice And Fire’ series, which has...
Finally, a 43 year old franchise yields a good SF...
I had low expectations of this movie, mainly because of the disastrous Tim Burton Planet Of The Apes (2001). Most SF movies, even when they’re good films, are terrible SF (e.g. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine), but I was surprised to encounter a relatively coherent and plausible extrapolation from a not so far fetched set of premises. And let’s face it, the most peculiar set of premises...
