Category Archives: Fiction

Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels

Posted on May 4, 2017 by

My first encounter with Greg Bear’s fiction was the superb Moving Mars, at a time when I was reading everything I could find about the planet Mars. Queen of Angels, though set mainly on Earth, is considered to be part … Continue reading →

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Forty Signs of Rain

Posted on April 27, 2017 by

Having tackled the environmental politics of Mars and Antarctica, Kim Stanley Robinson took on the challenge of global warming. Forty Signs of Rain is the first instalment of a trilogy and should not be judged as a stand-alone novel. Most of it … Continue reading →

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The Light of Eden

Posted on April 21, 2017 by

Do you remember, if you’re old enough, the beautiful painted illustrations on the covers of fantasy and science fantasy novels in the 1980s? Each would depict a scene capturing both a moment in the story and the essence of the … Continue reading →

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Utopia without Fascism

Posted on March 27, 2017 by

The 1000-page bulk of Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia had sat intimidatingly on the shelf since I acquired it. Only in the period of forced leisure after an operation did I get round to reading it. Long hours in bed gave … Continue reading →

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Forbidden Ecstasy

Posted on March 11, 2017 by

You know that feeling of discovering an author you’ve never read before who really hits your buttons, so you want to seek out everything they wrote? It doesn’t happen to me as much as it used to, my taste having … Continue reading →

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Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest

Posted on January 6, 2017 by

I first heard about Jean Hegland’s novel Into the Forest in an Interzone review by David Pringle in 1998, two years after the book was published. Hegland is a West Coast author and Pringle positioned her novel in a subgenre … Continue reading →

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Considering Speculative Fiction – by Alastair McNaught

Posted on December 14, 2016 by

In his review (for Vector) of the The Water Knife by Paul Bacigalupi, Anthony Nanson expressed the concern that speculative fiction dealing with the threats pose… Source: Considering speculative fiction

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