Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel is a book that lives in the fog. A frontispiece tells us that we are in England, in the 1990s, but--despite the fact that it's clear from early on that this is not the timeline we know, it is instead one where human cloning technology was developed and widely adopted fairly soon after the second world war--we could ( Read more... )

In the Guardian earlier this week, Dina Rabinovich argued that we are living through a golden age for children's literature; that the form is dominant at an artistic level, if perhaps (Harry Potter excepted from this) not at a commercial level. Barry Cunningham, the man who signed JK Rowling to Bloomsbury, points out that:There is a catch though, ( Read more... )

As with China Mieville, Richard Morgan is a new author to me. The difference is that I've been meaning to get around to reading Mieville, but more-or-less actively avoiding Morgan. None of the reviews of Altered Carbon or Broken Angels made those books sound at all like my thing. Market Forces may or may not be of a piece with those books; I found ( Read more... )

On the train home this afternoon I finished Iron Council: China Mieville's fourth novel, his third set in Bas-Lag, his second set in New Crobuzon, and the first of his that I've read. In Iron Council, revolution comes to Mieville's city-state.

I haven't decided how I feel about it yet; it hasn't had time to settle in my mind. But I think I think ( Read more... )

Why yes, I do feel a little self-conscious posting reviews after the discussions of the past few days. How did you guess?

( the blue girl by charles de lint )

I have not been reading as much as I'd like recently. Still:

( neuromancer by william gibson )

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Making Book is a collection of highly entertaining essays by editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden (whose blog is very good, but frustratingly lacks a full-text RSS feed). They date from the eighties and early nineties. Most are autobiographical anecdotes (e.g. 'God and I', in which Our Heroine is excommunicated by the Mormons), but there are also a couple ( Read more... )

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