Everyone wants a reputation, with the possible exception of people who already have one. It's probably somewhat gauche to start off a review on this tack--books should after all be discussed on their own terms, not on the terms of their predecessors--but David Mitchell's reputation can't be avoided. It's hard to imagine anyone, except perhaps deaf ( Read more... )

About a quarter of the way into Ali Smith's lively tale of a disrupted family holiday and its aftermath, we learn exactly what it is that the mother, Eve Smart, does for a living. She writes 'autobiotruefictinterviews', books that take ordinary people who died young and tell their story as though they had lived on. They are marketed as Genuine ( Read more... )

2004 was always going to be a hard act to follow: among other books, last year we got Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, River of Gods, Cloud Atlas and Air. Even taking that into account, however, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that 2005 was a thoroughly unexceptional year, even slightly disappointing, for sf. That's not to say that ( Read more... )

Because of the circumstances under which it was initially recommended to me, I very nearly never read this book. That would have been a shame. And in the end, to be perfectly honest, one of the reasons I read it at all was simply so that I would be able to say that I had. Moreover, I was more than half-minded not to write about it, based on the ( Read more... )

Early in 2005, in one of those literary world teacup-storms, Ali Smith and Toby Litt were castigated for saying, in the introduction to a collection they'd jointly edited, that "On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug ( Read more... )

I think I am jealous of anyone who was reading science fiction before 1976. [1]

I'm jealous because I wish I could have read the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever without a legend leaning over my shoulder. It would have meant I could have read most of them twice: once before knowing that James Tiptree Jnr was Alice Sheldon, and once after. As ( Read more... )

It’s a truism that in the science fiction community the borders between fan and writer and critic and editor are relatively fluid. And so, curious about the borders, and about the roles I'm probably not going to play, I found myself reading Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, an unusual, amiable little writing manual masquerading as a memoir. Or possibly ( Read more... )

A little over two years ago, a brilliant short story by Kevin Brockmeier, called 'The Brief History of the Dead', appeared in the New Yorker. The story is at once a tour of the city of the dead and a dramatisation of how we give life to those we remember. Both the layout of the city and its population are in flux over time. They live as shadows, ( Read more... )

My travel reading over the past week has been Hal Duncan's debut novel, Vellum. It's a book which has been attracting a fairly significant amount of attention in the sf world, and it's also getting a big marketing push from Pan Macmillan (the proof copies, from a limited run of 600, are things of beauty). You can read a very short extract here, and ( Read more... )

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's latest novel, is another one of those mainstream-writers-does-sf books. Not dissimilar in structure to Cloud Atlas, it's made of three stories: one set in 1850, one in the present or very near future, and one in about 2150. The same three characters--or at least the same three souls--crop up in each: Catherine, a ( Read more... )