Warren Rochelle’s second novel, Harvest of Changelings, is about a group of outcast children with magical powers. Faced with terrible challenges, they band together and find solace and strength in each other. It’s a wonderful mix of Lord of the Rings, fairy lore, and coming of age story.
The novel posits a reality in [...]
With films like Inside Man, The Departed and Zodiac all performing well in the last few months, the crime movie appears to be undergoing something of a renaissance. One element of that comeback is a return to the kind of smart, thoughtful crime films that flourished in the seventies. American Gangster follows that trend, not only on the obvious level that it’s set in the seventies, but with its grim urbanity, its muted colour palette, and its attempts to say something intelligent and to reach outside the specific sphere of crime and punishment to make wider social and political points.
Blade Runner is one of the greatest films of the last century, and perhaps the greatest science-fiction movie of all time. Writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples rifled through Philip K Dick’s magnificent, subversive novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, tacked on a dose of the emerging cyberpunk ethos and layered it all in a sheen of Chandler and Hammett. Then director Scott, having cut his sci-fi teeth in style with Alien, took those varied allusions and ran with them, creating in one fell swoop a new aesthetic of the future…
Burning Chrome, a collection bringing together short works originally published between 1977 and 1986, has aged badly in places - because it relies heavily on technology and in many ways technology has already outstripped Gibson’s vision - but even with that caveat, it’s still amazingly fresh and vibrant stuff.
The original novella followed Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit biologist assigned as one of a party of four earthmen to the planet of Lithia, with the mission of deciding whether it can be usefully exploited by Earth. At the start of the story, Ruiz-Sanchez is thrown into turmoil by the realisation that Lithia is uncannily like the biblical Eden, with its dominant species living free of crime, violence or even any notion of sin.
It’s a work of two halves, and the first isn’t particularly great. It follows the arrival of a mysterious stranger in the small English village of Iping, the reaction of growing suspicion towards him, and finally his unveiling as - you guessed it - an invisible man.
David reviews The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, a Gollancz SF Masterworks novel.
Having previously only read Slaughterhouse 5 and Breakfast of Champions, I couldn’t help but wonder where the science-fiction label sometimes thrown at Vonnegut had come from. Granted there were nods to sci-fi in both books, but that was it, and I figured it was the usual case of a lazy industry trying to pigeon-hole someone who was too damn good to be slotted into any easy category. In retrospect, I was probably right. Vonnegut’s work, even as early as his second published novel, was unique. But now that I have read The Sirens of Titan, the classification makes a little more sense. It is science-fiction enough, at least, for Gollancz to justifiably stick it under their SF Masterworks banner–though if by Vonnegut’s standards it is straight genre fiction, it is still primarily and unquestionably Vonnegut.
Jeremiah reviews Triangulation: End of Time, an anthology edited by First Draft Theater’s very own Pete Butler.
Triangulation: End of Time is the latest entry in a series of annual anthologies put out by PARSEC, “Pittsburgh’s premier science fiction organization.” Each of the stories somehow touches on the theme “End of Time,” but wide-ranging and far-reaching is the name of the game here. In typical speculative fiction fashion, the anthology’s twenty stories cover territory ranging from the wild west to the far future to even more exotic locales, some of which exist outside of time itself.
Dave reviews Flowers for Algernon.
If you haven’t read Flowers for Algernon, you probably have a rough idea of what it’s about, or at least have heard of it. I remember it being on my recommended reading list at school, and there was little else on there that could be classified as science fiction. Not only did Keyes win both the Hugo and Nebula in the same year for the novel, but, like Vonnegut and a very few others, he had the double-edged good fortune of transcending the genre in which he wrote, and plunging into the murky depths of “serious literature.”
Jess read The Satanic Verses by Salmon Rushdie.
It helps to have a little background in Islam when reading The Satanic Verses, but unfortunately, I didn’t. The Internet can do wonders, though, and I managed to fill in the largest gaps in my education relatively quickly. It turns out the Satanic Verses in question are ones that assert Muhammad once acknowledged the existence and power of three pagan goddesses but later changed his mind, claiming to have been tricked by the devil. Aside from dealing with that sensitive subject, there are a whole slew of other aspects that many Muslims found offensive, such as calling Abraham a bastard and having a set of prostitutes named after Muhammad’s twelve wives.