100 Top SF & Fantasy Books, These fantastic Worlds, Arthur C Clarke

100 Top SF & F Books. The Songs of Distant Earth. Arthur C Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke demands to be taken seriously. His fiction operates on the grand scale, employing meticulous scientific knowledge to create a series of “what ifs?” based on plausible technological, psychological or ecological events. Sometimes he offers too much detail, and forgets about the storytelling part of his fiction – I re-read the RAMA series recently, and struggled with its …

Jekyll and Hyde. Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson: Master of Victorian Gothic

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 …