Last night I finished Living Next-Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson. I enjoyed much of it, but found it kind of frustrating and annoying, in ways that were hard to define. The main one, though, was that some things were insufficiently explained.
Now, as SF readers we are used to jumping [...]
The new Iain Banks book, Transition, is a science fiction novel. This is despite the fact that it is not published as by Iain M Banks.
And I don’t mean the slightly-ambiguous, could-be-a-dream-or-somebody’s-madness-if-you-don’t-want-to-suspend-your-disbelief sort of thing you get in The Bridge Or Walking On Glass, either. This is out-and-out SF, no queries or [...]
If you had asked me a few months ago whether I had read this I’d have said yes. I thought that I had read most, if not all, of Wilson’s books that are in linked to the Illuminatus trilogy. But I’d have been wrong.
This one features James Joyce and Albert Einstein drinking in [...]
Above all, this took me a loooong time to finish. Even when I was reading it steadily and thought I would just carry straight on through, it was slow going.
It’s not that hated it; or even that I didn’t like it. Nor, indeed. was the prose hard or complex. It just didn’t [...]
This has been the third year in which I have read a volume of The Baroque Cycle over the summer. I loved the first, despite its dip after the first book. The second was slower – in fact suffering from classic middle-volume longeurs. I thoroughly enjoyed them both, though.
This third volume is [...]
Cayce Pollard has a strange kind of allergy: certain brands make her ill.
Or at least, their logos do; seeing the Michelin Man, for instance, sets her off in a particularly bad way. She has a corresponding – and possibly linked – talent, which is that she can reliably tell whether a new logo, for [...]
Ellis’s Spider Jerusalem is a journalist, based on Hunter S Thompson. At the start he is living in seclusion in a cabin in the mountains, but contractual difficulties drive him back to the city for the first time in five years. Shit happens, and he writes about it.
This volume comprises the first three [...]
Mr Handler operating under his own name, here, rather than his Snicket nom de plume. As such, this is a novel for adults, rather than children.
Though in fact, is it even a novel at all? It is in fact more of series of short stories, or even vignettes. They are linked, or [...]
I came upon these when I was digging out some old comics for my son. These are not for eleven-year-olds, but I realised I hadn’t read them in years, and I thought I’d see how they had aged (plus, I remembered next to nothing about the story).
The story is not bad, but not that [...]
Posted out of sequence, for reasons unknown even to me.
Writing about this novel is kind of embarassing for me, because I had the chance to make it better than it is, and I, er, blew it because I read too slowly.
See, I was on quite a large list of people who saw a draft version [...]