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, […]
[HEY FOLKS, 3 months on this post is suddenly getting a lot of hits from all sorts of countries, I’d be happy if you could briefly let me know why! Many thanks] “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 […]
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 […]
For Good Friday. To anyone inclined to think, in a happy wafty muddly way, that nature is God, nature replies: have a cup of pus, Mystic Boy. Unapologetic by Francis Spufford p104 Mr Spufford made me spit my coffee. Well done.
