To all the people who read Liz Bourke's review on Strange Horizons of Michael J Sullivan's Theft Of Swords, and didn't like the review because:

a) historians should not review epic fantasy
b) "intellectuals" should not review epic fantasy
c) women should not review epic fantasy
d) a negative review will upset the author
e) a negative review will ( Read more... )

First, see this review of Michael J Sullivan's Theft Of Swords on Strange Horizons. See its long comment thread. This post is not aimed at Liz Bourke, who has written an excellent review of what is plainly a bad book. This post is for some of the commenters on that thread, who clearly don't understand what a review is for, or how a book is reviewed ( Read more... )

A new meme. Cool. This one is the Nobel Prize for Literature winners meme. I took this list from Larry's OF Blog of the Fallen. You know the rules: bold if you've read anything by the author, italicize if it's on the TBR.

2011 Tomas Tranströmer
2010 Mario Vargas Llosa
2009 Herta Müller
2008 Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2007 Doris Lessing
2006 Orhan Pamuk
( Read more... )

This is the final post detailing the books I read and the films I watched during 2011. I don't think I'll bother doing these in 2012 as I suspect I'm stretching myself a bit thin with them. They're also a bit long, which probably puts some people off reading them. Perhaps I'll just blog about individual books or films I consider worthy of ( Read more... )

I decided last month that 2012's reading challenge would be world fiction, and particularly fiction from countries whose literature I had not read before. I asked for, and received, a number of suggested titles. Some I already had on my wants list; one or two I even have on the TBR pile. Using those suggestions, and one or two titles I had my eye ( Read more... )

In 2011, I had six stories published, and published one of my own on this blog. That makes it a slightly better year than 2010. The stories were:

- 'Barker' in BFS Journal: New Horizons, January 2011
- 'Disambiguation' on the Alt Hist website, May 2011
- 'The Contributors' on It Doesn't Have To Be Right..., July 2011
- 'Words Beyond the Veil' in ( Read more... )

Christmas is over for another year, and life can now return to what passes for normal. Once again, I was in Denmark for the festivities, but this year it was wet and windy rather than the usual deep snow. There was a lot of eating involved, and a lot of walking. The day after Boxing Day, we went to see David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon ( Read more... )

It's nearly the end of 2011, so imagine a 2012 that might have looked a bit like this...

Homes


( Read more... )

This year is almost over, but what will the new year bring? I already have more than a dozen titles from 2012 on my wish list. They are (in alphabetical order by surname of author):

• Stonemouth, Iain Banks
• Dark Eden, Chris Beckett
• alt.human, Keith Brooke
• Black Opera, Mary Gentle
• The Thousand Emperors, Gary Gibson - the sequel to Final Days

Well, okay, it's a bad pun for a title. But look here. It's a very complimentary review by the Pornokitsch cabal of 'A Light in the Darkness', my story in Alt Hist 3. It's fascinating seeing what others pull out of your stories - whether you consciously put it in there or not.

Having said that, I agree with everything the review says, and I salute ( Read more... )