Category Archives: books

The Last of the 2006 “Book Notes” Posts

Nearly halfway through the year and I haven’t finished posting last year’s Book Notes? Shocking. Oh well, here are the last few in one bunch.
26: The Terminal Zone, by Andrew J Wilson
My friend Andrew wrote this play back in 1993 or so, and produced it at the Edinburgh Fringe. It has now [...]

Book Notes 25: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross

Charlie shows that he can write heroic fantasy as well as everything else. Except, of course, it isn’t really fantasy. When your hero discovers she can switch at will (or “world walk”) between the “real” world (present-day America) and an alternative world (geographically similar, inhabited, but never had industrialisation) then what you [...]

Straight to Elgin Avenue

So I ordered the new Banksie from Amazon, and to get free delivery, of course, I had to order one or two other things, to bring the price up to the threshold. I tend to have a number of things queued up to buy when the time is right, so I selected some things [...]

The Steep Approach to Literary Acceptance

A couple of articles (Times, Indy) on Banksie’s new novel refer to it being five years since his last one. Err, no: The Algebraist came out in 2004 (which is longer ago than I thought, but still less than three years).
Oh, wait, no, of course: that wasn’t a novel; that was just sci-fi.
Bah!
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Book Notes 24: Variable Star, by Robert A Heinlein and Spider Robinson

These are still the 2006 Book Notes. I’ll finish them soon, honest.
Heinlein used to be my absolute favourite author. Indeed, he is in large part responsible for me developing a lifelong love of science fiction. And I’m also very fond of Spider Robinson. So when I found out that this existed, [...]

A Deadline Crash, and a Reading

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to write a Doctor Who short story. It was for a competition that Big Finish, publisher of DW books and CDs, were running. Alas, the closing date was the 31st of January, which is now past, and I didn’t finish it (does that make it [...]

Book Notes 23: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson

So I finally start The Baroque Cycle; or you might say, I finally finish the first volume. I started reading this at a campsite in France while on holiday: that was back at the end of August. I finished it on the 9th of November. As I said not so long ago, [...]

Dead Zen Master1

Robert Anton Wilson has died. I read the Illuminatus! trilogy while I was in university, and have re-read it several times since then, as well as reading a lot of his other books. No-one could spin a conspiracy theory like RAW, or debunk one so convincingly. Plus he told a great tale, [...]

Book Notes 22: The Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman and Yoshika Amano

A retelling of a Japanese folk tale, this. A monk lives alone in a very minor and secluded temple. He falls in love with a fox, who has taken the form of a woman at the time. and who tries to get him to leave the temple with her. When he [...]

Book Notes 21: The Sandman Midnight Theatre, by Neil Gaiman and others

A collection of some of Neil’s shorter comics work. All fine and dandy, but far from essential. The most interesting one for me was a Swamp Thing story for which they had reunited the old art team (‘old’ in the sense of, from the days when Alan Moore was writing it) of Steve Bissette [...]