I have been known to overthink, however I wonder if Alastair Reynolds has presented us with some Philip K Dick easter eggs in his fun-filled Halcyon Years. I am not spoiling anything that the blurb does not give away in saying we start with a well-worn SF trope of a generation ship travelling between the […]
TIL that Andromeda Spaceways magazine, formerly known as Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, is no more. After 25 years, Andromeda Spaceways magazine will be grounding our fleet with issue 100, due December 2025. We want to thank all our passengers over the years (and really, what is time when you’ve passed through as many black holes […]
Philip K Dick is dead, alas, so it is possible that the world we live in is not his dream. Then again I have read Ubik. And also, it would be impolite to cast PKD as the Demiurge. The again, Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn, but I have never associated PKD with HPL, so […]
Dear Reader, It has been a while between posts, and this is delayed news, but I have been busy moving house – you may have noticed the world had stopped, this was the reason. On the story front, and what other front is there here, my “The golden age of science fiction” has recently been […]
qntm is seriously good. I had There Is No Antimemetics Division on my Kindle for ages, I can’t remember now where I found the recommendation, but I had some notion in my head that it was this thing, so I did not read it, and then I did and it turned out to be this […]
I’ve had to pack up my library for reasons, so downstairs I have nearly 70 x 40 litre cartons of books accumulated over 50 years. I don’t have TBR piles, I have TBR book cases. I wonder if there are enough years left to read them, plus all the others out there that I don’t […]
I don’t think this piece by Tony Milligan in The Conversation regarding Fermi’s paradox, Cixin Liu’s 3 Body Problem, and the universe being a dark forest where everyone hides, is quite right. I have no difficulty with people finding problems with the book. I did not enjoy it, and so did not go on to […]
“An adult is in charge,” I thought while reading ‘The Separation’ by Christopher Priest. On the news of his recent death, I moved a few of his novels towards the top of my unread pile, and ‘The Separation’ was the first that I hit. On starting, I wondered why I had not read it earlier […]
My latest publication, My Wonder Book of Snails and Slugs, is available for your free reading pleasure (?) in the new edition of Penumbric. I think of it as a sometimes melancholy, sometimes sinister tale of love, loss and survival, and also of snails, a sea of slugs, a sea monster, bat faced cardigan monkeys […]
JG Ballard died in 2009 on April 19 (I am a tad late to say ‘OTD’). I read his “The Voices of Time” in a paperback collection edited by Damien Knight, 100 Years of Science Fiction. (I was very happy to buy those two volumes, by the way, in the mid-70s, with part of the […]
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