words and images
The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.
Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.
A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.
Continue reading “Magical London – Gaiman, Stross and Aaronovitch”
This is a collection of mini-reviews of science fiction and fantasy books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length (often because I couldn’t find time).
The collection began as a string of comments to an identically-titled post on Green Path, one which drifted away from its environmental theme and into general SF. It is structured like a blog, with the most recent additions at the top; dates given are the dates reviews were added.
• Anthropocene Rag • Zen Cho • Every Version of You • The Scar • Babel • The Year of the Jackpot • Children of Memory • Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits • Reconstruction • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida • The Anomaly • Flyaway • From Here On, Monsters
Alex Irvine’s Anthropocene Rag (2020) is a roadtrip, somewhat in the manner of Spinrad’s People’s Police, through territory explored by Cory Doctorow, William Gibson and Greg Egan among others.
Consciousness is emerging in an artificial intelligence which has so much nano-tech at its disposal that it can casually make anything it likes. But it doesn’t understand itself or its own motivations. What could possibly go wrong?
(31.12.24)
Zen Cho was born and raised in Malaysia and now lives in England. Her first fiction appeared in 2015 and she has been collecting awards ever since, so she is definitely a writer to watch. Here are two of her recent books.
One of the lovely things about the first few weeks after Christmas, at least in my corner of the world, is having lots of new books to read. This year was a little different, however, because I found myself with an odd pair of books, loving both of them but unable to read either of them straight through.
The yellow one is nonfiction. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist working on loop quantum gravity. The fact that a physicist could publish a book – any book – with such a title attracted me to him, and to it, immediately.
There Are Places turned out to be a collection of his newspaper articles, three to six pages each, on science, history, philosophy, religion and politics. Every single one was a pleasure to read – calm, lucid and enlightening – but I couldn’t read the book straight through. Continue reading “Garner and Rovelli”
A friend passed this very old, battered copy of Magic and Mystery in Tibet my way amongst others she was discarding recently. I found it fascinating as an historical artifact and impressive in an intrepid-traveller kind of way.
The author, Alexandra David-Neel, was part of the early Western engagement with Asian religion, along with the theosophists (whom she knew well).