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, and unravelled seven [...]
Another old Moore from the 2000 AD days. I’ve read it before, as three separate volumes, but I totally didn’t remember anything about Book 3, in which Halo joins the army. Well, the Space Marines, or whatever you want to call them. It’s a great story about an ordinary young woman in a very un-ordinary [...]
This is a strange one. Moore (Alan) has,as I understand it, started up his own line of comics, called ‘America’s Best Comics’. A strange name, too, for a guy living in Northampton, but hey, maybe it helps them to sell in Peoria (wherever that is). Tom Strong is a kind of Doc Savage/Tom Swift figure. […]
Ah, how we love the paranoid fantasies of our Phil. As does Hollywood, considering how many of his works have been made into films. Not much chance of that ever happening to this one, mind you (though they’ve done A Scanner Darkly now, so you never can tell). This is kind of a prequel or […]
I finally get to read Vellum, then. I’d been waiting for the paperback for a while, as I said back in Book Notes 7. I’ve pre-ordered the sequel, Ink, in hardback, though, which should be recommendation enough. We are, once again, in the territory of myths walking the Earth. This time they are angels and […]
This is a very, very strange book. It’s strange in the spacefaring future it describes, but it’s probably even stranger linguistically. I used to read John Clute’s book reviews in “Interzone“:http://www.ttapress.com/IZ.html, years ago, when he reviewed there regularly1, so linguistic strangeness was exactly what I expected when I picked this up. What I mean by [...]
This is a reissue in the Fantasy Masterworks series, of all – or nearly all – of Harrison’s ‘Viriconium’ stories. Four of the collected works are novels (though short ones) and the rest short stories. I had read only one of them before, the last-written and last presented here: ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ [...]
More graphical stuff from the library. Quadrophenia with hover-bikes and -scooters. It’s beautifully drawn, and well-enough told, but really, why? There is literally no other technological change. Oh, there might be differences in the materials of the clothes, of the contents of the pills: but the look is pure 1965 - or 1965-as-remade-in-1979. I really […]
The local library is proving a great source of graphic fiction at the moment. Another early-early Moore, one of which I had heard, but had definitely not read. It is Moore’s interpretation of a theme that was then very common, the alien lost on Earth. It wears its debt to ET quite openly: one of […]
I found this in the local library, having never heard of it before. It is a relatively recently-published (2000) collection containing some of his short fiction, some essays, and some interviews he did with people as diverse as Isaac Asimov and Woody Allen. The title is, of course, a reference to his famous novel The […]
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