Second paragraph of third chapter:I screamed and buried my face in my hands; but I could still see the light of the enhanced sun, leaking even through the flesh of my fingers, and blazing from the nickel and brass of the Time Machine.
This is a sequel to The Time Machine, authorised as such by the H.G. Wells estate. (I've had more dealings with the ( Read more... )

Baxter is best known for his SF writing, but here he turns his hand to history of science, specifically James Hutton, the Scottish eighteenth-century intellectual who boldly stated that the earth must be much older than the date of 4004 BC given by Archbishop Ussher the previous century ( Read more... )

Like, I guess, a lot of people I was intrigued by the announcement four years ago that Pratchett and Baxter, two authors whose styles are not exactly next adjacent to each other, were to collaborate on a series of books set after the pathways between universes have been discovered; and now anyone with a problem can just run away to a parallel world ( Read more... )

I'm not quite sure why I got this, given my low opinion of the editor's fiction andnon-fiction; I certainly bought it before last year's debate about the tainted Solaris brand, and without looking inside the front cover where the dismal gender ratio (one female author out of 18) might have put me off ( Read more... )

Two years ago I was at the DiscWorld Convention in Birmingham, and was drawn for a place in a kaffeeklatsch with Stephen Baxter, who had just begun his Long Earth collaboration with Terry Pratchett, but whose work I have known and (often but not always) enjoyed for many years. I suppose I can summarise my feelings about Baxter's writing by saying ( Read more... )

I'm really bad at getting to short stories - my middle-aged presbyopia makes reading magazines difficult, so I tend to catch up on this year's short fiction by reading next year's Hugo nominees (and occasionally Year's Best anthologies). This is a set of ten short stories from PS Publishing's PostScripts magazine sent to BSFA members three years ( Read more... )

I managed to get to most of three days of the Discworld Convention in Birmingham last weekend; it was great fun as I expected. The headline for me was that Terry Pratchett himself is looking and sounding very well. I saw him speak at the opening ceremony on Friday and the "Man in the Hat" interview on Saturday, and my friend D won the draw to meet ( 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... )

This came out in 2005, the year of the Glasgow Worldcon, and I guess that because I felt I had thoroughly chewed over that year's short fiction in the Hugo process I didn't urgently need to read this. That was wrong: Dozois has as ever pulled together an excellent set of stories, full of variety of approach and length. As noted below, I had read ( Read more... )

7) The Infinity Doctors, by Lance Parkin

( alternate Gallifrey )