This book is precisely what it says on the tin, with a first chapter taking the genre to 1900, a second taking it to 1950, and then individual chapters for each subsequent decade, with two extra chapters for a) J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and b) Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett, the whole text weighing in at less than 220 pages ( ( Read more... )

...but I know what I like.

Actually, I'm often not really sure what I like, especially in the visual arts, where many years of experience have demonstrated to me that I just don't really care enough about good graphic design to be particularly good at it. But the BSFA challenges me to cast a vote on the nominees for its award for best artwork, so ( Read more... )

Well, it is a pretty easy decision in the end: my vote for Best Novel in the BSFA awards goes to Lavinia, by Ursula Le Guin. (Second: The City & The City, by China Miéville; third: Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts; fourth: Ark, by Stephen Baxter.)

Pretty much everyone knows the basic outlines of the Odyssey and the Iliad; I believe that the ( Read more... )

While waiting for my copy of Ursula Le Guin's Lavinia to arrive, I worked my way through the short fiction nominated for this year's BSFA awards. (I have been a BSFA member since the 2005 Worldcon, and am now kicking myself for not doing this in previous years.) I list the six stories below, in my reverse order of preference. NB that the two I ( Read more... )

I rather gave up on Miéville after not really grokking his Iron Council, but I think I have changed my mind again. The City & The City is set in the peculiar circumstances of Besźel and Ul Qoma, two cities in an unidentified part of Eastern Europe, which spatially overlap but whose inhabitants have been socially conditioned to "unsee" each other ( ( Read more... )

This is the second book in a series; its predecessor, Flood, which I haven't read, saw the near-future Earth threatened by catastrophically rising sea levels, and Ark follows the story of a group of young survivors sent to colonise a distant planet in order to continue the human race. I will look out for Flood but didn't especially feel the lack of ( Read more... )

For the last couple of years I feel I have been rather neglecting the latest sf, so I decided to start catching up by getting through the shortlist for this year's BSFA award. Yellow Blue Tibia carries the subtitle Konstantin Skvorecky's memoir of the alien invasion of 1986, and is about a Soviet science fiction writer who becomes entangled in a ( Read more... )