Below you'll find a list of all posts from January, 2016
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850–94) was born in a dank and cold Edinburgh, but travelled greatly in search of less brutal weather, finally to pass away in the temperate climes of Samoa. For today’s reader his reputation as a writer of adventure fiction is well established but as a poet, essayist, travel writer and masterful short story writer his range was …
Philip K. Dick. Just his name conjures excitement and imagination. There are so many books and short stories to choose from his extensive, brilliant output, but this The Galactic Pot-Healer is the one I remember with great fondness from a particularly creative period in my life when I painted, wrote, played in my first bands, and earned enough money to …
Poul Anderson is a seriously under-rated sf writer. If you want aliens, spaceships, intergalactic adventures, then he’s your man. He wrote a great deal of fantasy (including a pretty decent Conan the Rebel story in 1980), having been born in 1926 just as the Golden Age of pulp magazines began to influence a generations of school kids. He wrote dozens …
Gaiman’s American Gods is a modern wonder of the world. Somehow it manages to straddle the chaos of the everyday, with the power and mystery of the ancients, stirring the gods of America’s various constituent populations, with the all-powerful, glittering, idols of today. A modern moral story it’s a beast of a ride, and one of my absolute favourite books. …