Second paragraph of third chapter:And yet even a born and bred Londoner, such as Douglas Archer, could walk down Curzon Street and, with eyes half-closed, see little or no change from the previous year. The Soldatenkino sign outside the Curzon cinema was small and discreet, and only if you tried to enter the Mirabelle restaurant did a top-hatted ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:Apart from the slight pain in my hands I have rarely felt so well and tranquil and at ease in my body as I did that morning when I first began to speculate about where I was. It was not by any means my first day of consciousness. I knew that I had been in that bright and airy room, with its scent of flowers ( Read more... )

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:( long )

Having left years between reading the first two books of the Small Change trilogy, which are separated in time by just weeks, I then find on reading the third a few weeks after finishing the second that it is set almost a decade into Walton's alternate timeline where Britain settled with Hitler in 1940 and moved sharply towards fascism. Now the two ( Read more... )

It is over three years since I read Farthing, the first of the Small Change trilogy, which is really too long an interval. Although Ha'Penny works extremely well as a standalone book, I was aware that for the characters the events of Farthing were only a couple of weeks ago, so much fresher for them than for me. But even so, I was riveted by this ( Read more... )

This is very far from being a typical PKD novel, yet it was the only one to win a Hugo award, in 1963. The other nominees were The Sword of Aldones, by Marion Zimmer Bradley; A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke; Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper; and Sylva, by Jean Bruller. The only one of these I have read is the Clarke, which is good solid stuff ( Read more... )

4) Farthing, by Jo Walton / paperskyI almost literally couldn't put this down. Walton's setting is an alternate 1948, where Britain made peace with Germany in 1941 after Rudolf Hess's mission; and her viewpoint characters are a young aristocratic woman married to a Jew, and a homosexual Scotland Yard detective investigating a murder, as Britain slides into ( Read more... )

6) [Doctor Who] Timewyrm: Exodus, by Terrance Dicks ( Read more... )

7) The Separation by Christopher Priest - excellent stuff, dopplegangers, altered timelines and the second world war, as if Philip K Dick had been English and sober.

Website - 120 predictions of the election results now - whew!