Just a note to say that I had a piece up last weekend at Black Gate, looking at Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon. I quite honestly enjoyed the book more than I thought I would; it was very much like an excellent minor work by Philip K. Dick.

I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate, looking at Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus. I note at the start that the book was in the running for a sf prize before the publishers pulled it, wanting to avoid Rushdie being branded (in both sense of the word) as a science fiction writer. Brian […]

I’ve been sluggish about updating my posts at Black Gate, but then, due in part to illness and in part to other work, I’ve been slow in putting them up, too. At any rate, here are three: about Minister Faust’s The Alchemists of Kush, about Marie Corelli and her Heliobas quasi-trilogy, and about Peter Milligan […]

Two more posts up at Black Gate over this past weekend, as I caught up from missing a post the week before. I looked at M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books, and at Naomi Mitchison’s The Land the Ravens Found.

It has been far too long since I’ve had a post here, so let’s do something about that. Here’s a look back at what I’ve been writing about at Black Gate over the past two months. To start with, I looked at Brian Catling’s excellent, unconventional book The Vorrh. Then I wrote a piece on […]

I’ve been forgetting to link to my posts over at Black Gate, so let’s do a bit of catch-up now.  Just before Christmas I put up a post about Ursula Vernon’s Hugo-winning webcomic Digger. Then I followed that with some thoughts on Sean Howe’s interesting, if flawed, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. And the most […]

A little while ago I taught an intro college-level course to film and storytelling. That involved me reading a fair bit about film, and so developing a list of movies I wanted to watch. One that I never got around to at the time was a film called Häxan, a silent Swedish film about witchcraft. […]

Just a quick note today to observe that I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate, in which I look at Michael Moorcock’s stories of Dorian Hawkmoon. I always have mixed feelings about Moorcock. He’s written some fine books, like Gloriana and Mother London, and some solid fantasy adventure books. But I always have […]

I just put up a new post at Black Gate, a look at Ursula Pflug’s intriguing collection After the Fires. I liked it quite a bit. And two things came out of writing the piece. First, I noted that one of Pflug’s stories was first printed in an anthology called Album Zutique, a reference to […]