Seond paragraph of third section: “That, Mr. Pond, is no ordinary milk-float. That float has been rendered spaceworthy! As you said, what we are lacking in space travel today is a viable means of propulsion, and even then we are limited by the speed of light. But there is one substance which can travel faster than light -boiling milk, when it ( Read more... )

Over on Twitter, Neil Gaiman says:

The idea that I've outsold Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert just broke my brain. (Also I don’t believe it.) http://thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-updated-sff-all-time-sales-list.html/a>
- Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) March 14, 2015
The page he links to puts him at #17 for all time, with 40+ million sales; ( Read more... )

One of Gaiman's excellent shorter pieces, with a boy who doesn't quite understand what's going on in the world around him, partly because it's incomprehensible adult stuff and partly because it's scary monsters from another dimension threatening to destroy the world. I felt he was drawing from a deeper well here than in, say, Coraline or The ( Read more... )

This was the last of the monthly Doctor Who ebooks produced this year, sending off the Eleventh Doctor in style with a short story by Neil Gaiman. This brings Amy and the Doctor to what seems at first a normal house with a normal little girl, and then the world starts to change in unexpectedly horrible ways - there are shades of Coraline and of a ( Read more... )

Odd meant the tip of a blade, and it was a lucky name.
A short YA book by Neil Gaiman, in which the young boy hero with a disability saves the Æsir from the frost giants. Very nice illustrations by Mark Buckingham (I thought I spotted the resemblance to Fables. The story is lucidly told, and perhaps a bit of a homage to Diana Wynne Jones' lovely ( Read more... )

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Apropos of nothing in particular, in "August" from vol 6 of Sandman, the disguised emperor tells his story to a dwarf.


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   Varney took a step back: a mistake. There was a knife at his temple, the point of the blade next to his eye ( Read more... )

When the Hugo nominations were announced on Saturday night, I was not terribly surprised that I had already seen the majority of the shortlist in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category. ( my votes: 6) Remedial Chaos Theory, 5) The Drink Tank acceptance speech, 4) No Award, 3) A Good Man Goes To War, 2) The Girl Who Waited, 1) The Doctor's Wife )

More in-depth analysis of the story of how The Lord of the Rings was written. We start at Helm's Deep, and follow through the end of Book III and Book IV (ie most of The Two Towers and then all of Book V (first half of The Return of the King). Tolkien's biggest problem was getting the chronology to work between four separated groups of protagonists ( Read more... )