This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third section (Tony Lee's reminiscences): You see, all my childhood I wanted to be a Time Lord. I wanted to travel in time and space and fight Daleks and the Master and do all that cool stuff I saw the Doctor doing every week. Doctor Who was much better than Star Trek, or Star Wars - an argument that caused much dissension in ( Read more... )

I grabbed the chance of a half-day during a work visit to London last week to go to Oxford and see the Tolkien exhibition in the Bodleian (strictly speaking the Weston building). It runs until the end of September, and it is free, though you would be well advised to book ahead. I am only going to hit on the highlights here; Robin Reid, who is ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third section ("The Lure of the Wyrm"):At its base it was a mere score of yards across. Then it rose through clinging cloud, curving gracefully outward like an upturned trumpet until it was truncated by a plateau fully a quarter of a mile across. There was a tiny forest up there, its greenery cascading over the lip. There were ( Read more... )

This had somehow passed me by - a pastiche of Dickens by Pratchett, with no sfnal elements at all as far as I can tell, introducing us to the Dodger and his elderly Jewish friend as heroes rather than villains, caught up in an international political plot which involves a beautiful foreign princess, Charles Dickens, Sweeney Todd, Benjamin Disraeli ( Read more... )

The last Terry Pratchett novel, written in the full knowledge that it would be; death and its consequences are a major part of the book (with a much spoilered plot development near the beginning setting the tone). But another large part of the plot centres around the battle between Faerie and technology, the essential conflict between magic and ( Read more... )

A collection of pterry's non-fiction articles (all of them? most? some?) between a single set of covers. There are some very interesting pieces. His reflections on the writing process, and how writing became his career despite academic discouragement, are very interesting. He refers several times to the influence on the young Pratchett of Roy Lewis ( Read more... )

Though of course it doesn't make it any easier ( Read more... )

Like, I guess, a lot of people I was intrigued by the announcement four years ago that Pratchett and Baxter, two authors whose styles are not exactly next adjacent to each other, were to collaborate on a series of books set after the pathways between universes have been discovered; and now anyone with a problem can just run away to a parallel world ( Read more... )

Back in November, the day after Doctor Who's 50th birthday, a lot of people were pointing out that it was the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Colour of Magic, on 24 November 1983. As I've been noting elsewhere, there's nothing like that sort of statement to make you feel old. But here we are - thirty years on, knowing that his own time ( Read more... )