A New Adventure novel featuring the Seventh Doctor with Roz, Chris and Benny as companions, landing on a planet where there are various human colonists in distress and conflicting AIs trying to restore the status quo, of which the key AI is called SLEEPY. Unfortunately the AI characters, though not physically anthropomorphic, rather pushed my "I ( Read more... )

I rated the previous volume in this series last in my Hugo voting last year, as did the voters, despite it being the only nominee that was made available to all as part of the Hugo voters package. This year all five nominees are available, though I'd already bought hard copies of the three that have been published in dead-tree format, and I am ( Read more... )

It's ten years this month since Big Finish put the first of their audio Doctor Who plays on sale. I have just about caught up with the complete range (though not quite with all the spinoffs) and am mulling a big Big Finish post to explain it all to those of you (probably at least 90%) who haven't listened to any BF plays. Meanwhile these are the ( Read more... )

This being the quickest category to read, there are already a number of summaries of the entire ballot out there - Matt Hilliard, Ian Sales, Abigail Nussbaum, Steven Klotz, Rich Horton and Coderyder. There is considerable consensus about which is the best story on the list; there is universal consensus about the worst. My preferences, in reverse ( Read more... )

Latest in my set of Hugo nominees for this year (and Anathem is sitting accusingly on the bookshelf, while I've ordered the paperback of Zoe's Tale for when it comes out later this month). Lots of good stuff here, with the setting a solar system where the robots have taken over after the extinction of humanity, and our narrator a sexbot designed to ( Read more... )

An unexceptional sf adventure involving space pirates and anthropomorphic robots. This must have been one of the first Tenth Doctor books - his character seems very Nine-ish in places. Also he is rather too eager to kill off the baddies.

( Read more... )

Just to record briefly that I watched a couple more films in the last few days of last year, both of which bring moisture to the eye at appropriate moments.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - had seen this when it first came out, and loved it then; now it does seem a bit long, but the great moments - Tereza's frenzied love-making to Tomas, the ( Read more... )

20) Sunrise Alley

( meh )

It's only a short week in Brussels, and I somehow didn't make it to the gym, but I got through another two Eighth Doctor audios on the commute, the second and third of the Big Finish series with Paul McGann and India Fisher playing his companion Charley Pollard.

( The Sword of Orion: boring Cyberman rubbish )

My Christmas present (well, one of them) from my wife was the DVD release of The Robots of Death, and we just sat down and watched it yesterday after lunch (after watching the other single DVD I got, the 1995 Les Miserables concert - my Christmas haul of DVDs also included the first two seasons of the West Wing, which I have somehow managed to miss ( Read more... )