Scarlett Thomas: Why I was wrong about children’s fiction.
I do see that she has come to realise that 'children's books: not the easy option',from trying to write one, because have we not, my dearios, seen an awful lot of celebs who think any fule can can write a kiddybook?
But, might we not also see in that article that she seems also to be coming ( Read more... )

(Actually weather seems to have quietened down a bit, at least temporarily.)

The Last Time the World was Simple. I am sure I have oftimes commented about this: though I think there is this whole issue of seeing elsewhere or elsewhen as Simpler, when in fact it is/was complicated in different ways. Also on the tendency to think there has never been ( Read more... )

Currently reading a novel about a nurse who trains at the (Not) London Hospital in the East End of London, sometime during the interwar period. I.e., the same hospital that featured in the TV docudrama Casualty 1907.

About which I fulminated that they might have the medical details spot on, but the social ambience was RONG, RONG, RONG, far too ( Read more... )

Have been thinking, inspired by recent discussions, about the idea that if some remedy is good/desirable/applicable in some particular situation, it must be an absolute good to be widely applied.

Cf people who demand antibiotics for their colds and flu, which, being virus diseases, are not responsive to antibiotics. This may even cause problems ( Read more... )

Have just finished a fantasy novel which was pretty much okay except I hated the last few paragraphs, in which our protag wonders whether they Did The Right Thing in preventing the encroachments of The Other World into our consensus reality and had the world lost magicalness somehow thereby.

And okay, they do wonder if it is age and grumpiness and ( Read more... )

Via one of my academic listservs today (not the one on which brangling and brouhaha are the current order of the day), review of Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Shamanism and Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010).

According to the reviewer, the author is making a case that Isobel Gowdie was not merely being falsely ( Read more... )

It may be the circles I run in, but I would not describe the only Elizabethan occultist/sorcerer/magus/alchemist of whom most people have ever heard as 'a barely known 16th-century free-thinker'.

This may come from reading several too many novels in which Dr John Dee featured as a character and wondering 'why don't they think outside that box for ( Read more... )

I note, across the flist, that someone has been claiming that science fiction and fantasy are entirely different kettles of fish/horses of different colours and that it is only due to a mere historical accident of publishing that they get shelved together and considered anything like the same thing. Because science fiction is all about Ye Real Hard ( Read more... )

Doctor prescribed crosses to beat black magic, tribunal told:
The patient, Mrs K, attended the Westside Contraceptive Clinic in Westminster, London, for a contraceptive injection after complaining of pain and bleeding. But the panel was told that Dr Pratt claimed to have special powers and gave her stones and crosses to protect her. She allegedly ( Read more... )

Though mostly generally about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the central theme.

Just one tiny point re the film: I don't recall that there was a scene in the book on the river with ice-floes breaking up. Question: has this been an irresistible coup de theatre/movie ever since Eliza crossed the river to freedom by this means in Uncle Tom's ( Read more... )