Oh dear Lord, now that I’ve typed his name up there, I feel like I will be expected to write a literary essay, coupled with genre pop culture street cred, and we all know that isn’t going to happen. ‘Chronic City’ was the first novel of his I read. What was this and why hadn’t […]
Yesterday reading the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald, I came across Fiona Capp’s short review of “Strange Situation” by Bethany Saltman, which includes: “I wish I could be just like you,” Bethan Saltman’s pre-school daughter said to her one day. The chuffed mother asked her why. The reply came like a blow: “Because then I could […]
I’ve bought and read a few of Tor’s novellas, but though I might look, to use the parlance of my youth, a bit scabby, I feel I’m not quite getting my money’s worth, in that I am paying almost what I would for a longer novel, for something I can read in an afternoon. For […]
I really really really like Blindsight by Peter Watts, and its sequel (or “sidequel”) Echopraxia, or Firefall #1 & #2, or however they are described. And I enjoyed his earlier books, which I came to later, Starfish and it sequel, Maelstrom (and thought Maelstrom is not a sidequel, I thought that S & M bore […]
When he heard the cracking before the lights had even been doused — a noise he would later realize was the sound of small facial bones breaking — when he looked up and saw the man’s face turning into someone else’s, the boy stopped paying attention to the stuffed horse he had been pulling hair […]
If only the boy could talk. He had a tongue in his head: Joe had checked. What horrors had silenced it? The usual, probably. Not that I am counting or anything, but my 20th published story, Mid-life Crisis, is now live and available for your free reading pleasure at Chrome Baby magazine. When do we first […]
I guess ‘Zoltan – Hound of Dracula’ and ‘The Amazing Dobermans’ may have been on my mind when I entitled this story that has nothing to do with vampires or circus dogs or killer dogs, though there are dogs within it. It was published in Sci.Phi under the more sedate but possibly equally misleading title, […]
“And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.” On Writing by Stephen King I still have that in a frame somewhere, but in these days of working from […]
The liminality of those places of parting, those dingy back rooms and midnight industrial areas! Something travelled through, passing from gap to gap … . It is not a tiger. It is not just appetite and the transfer of energy from one creature to another. It is not an alien maw descending from the ceiling […]
The Goodies represent to me a chunk of my late childhood, early adolescence. We came across it accidentally and laughed all the way through (I think it was the episode with the giant kitten: Kitten Kong, broadcast as a special on Channel 2 / ABC, so it was after 1972), and we were delighted a […]
