April 2012
12 posts
Mind blowing fantasy
I haven’t re-read The Adventures of Luther Arkwright since I first read it in my late teens. It blew my mind then (as I was reading eastern philosophy and taking a lot of drugs), and it blew my mind again, for different reasons.
The first thing is the introduction (strangely enough), in which the éminence grise of British SF, the great Michael Moorcock, sets out an extremely cogent and...
Born again history…
I ordered this up and devoured it in very short order when I started to get clear on where my world design is going, culturally. Late medieval/ early modern seems to be my bag, and I’ve always been pleased and informed by the contents of these Very Short Introductions (apparently OUP has about a bazillion and twelve of them in print now). This small but potent package was no...
Bad on metal, good on jungle.
I originally came across this book in a bookshop, at a time when I was doing a lot of thinking about the concept of genre in popular music; I was quite excited, assuming that it was either a discussion of genre as an idea, or a broad survey of the role of genre in popular music. It is in fact, it turns out, an introductory work on popular music for an undergraduate audience, that breaks the field...
Sailing, finance and live music
It seems that all weeks are busy weeks, but this one at least has involved less time in Libraryland and more time in Writingland. This week I managed to write and post three (!) music reviews, including one live review, which I discovered was nearly a year after my previous gig write-up. I had previously found writing about live music a bit too time consuming and stressful, what with trying to...
Nothing happens… it's exciting!
Fortress Of Owls is the third book in CJ Cherryh’s Fortress Series. I’ve been liking the series a lot, because Cherryh invests most of her creative energies in imagining what it would be like to live under the conditions she postulates. The tale is told from the inside; in the previous book, I recall feeling a bit frustrated with the amount of time spent on the characters’...
Busy week…
It’s been a busy week, filled up with extra shifts at the library, so I’ve not made rapid progress in my various writerly activities, but I managed to get some short album reviews written, and reminded myself that less is frequently more, as I’ve heard back from all the artists involved, and received some very positive feedback regarding the extent to which I understood their...
Poner el Campo en la Sombra…
Amor y Cohetes is a compilation of material from the first run of Love & Rockets that wasn’t part of either the ‘Locas’ or ‘Palomar’ storylines. As far as memory serves, everything else from those early magazines is in here. It’s been an absolute gas rediscovering it all, and in the case of the last few stories, reading it for the first time.
There’s...
A Russian doll of a book
My latest read, finished in bed this morning, has been David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. It’s been sitting around in the house for months (or probably over a year), and when I actually picked it up, none of us had the first idea where it had come from or who it belonged to. Which is a curious echo of the way texts hand off to each other within the novel…
The book is a Russian doll of...
Truth is stranger than fiction is stranger than...
There are too many strands in history for anyone to hold onto them all, or for any single human loom to weave a useful cloth from them; fortunately I retain just about enough perspective to remember that I’m not writing history per se, but trying to build myself a set of tools that I can use to give the impression of history, within the context of narrative fiction. So while it might be tempting...
A thoroughly imagined scenario
Amazon were having a Kindle sale; I had a browse and was mildly intrigued by this series of books that insert dragons into a Napoleonic War setting. I don’t follow trends in fantasy fiction so I had no clue whether they were a big success, or what to expect, but I bought the first three in the series as they were £1 each (I think). It’s taken me several months to get around to reading...
