BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Anubis Gates (1983) Declare (2000) Three Days to Never (2006) My first reading of Tim Powers' classic The Anubis Gates was to enjoy a 'suspension of disbelief' romp through a quasi-steam punk literary time travel fantasy with Egyptian mythological themes. A second reading made me understand better why Powers can be frustrating as well as worth reading. The secret to Powers is (as he has articulated in an interview on his working methods) extremely dense plotting in advance of actual writing in which events that happen in one part of a book are flagged up indirectly in others. Everything is supposed to hang together logically and in detail by the end but this can be very demanding on the reader and possibly a little self-indulgent on the part of the author. One does not always have time to work out for oneself whether everything really does hang together but a second reading (with the basic story already loaded into the brain) permits the reader to

A Colder War (2000) The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1) (2004) The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files #2) (2006)   Halting State (Halting State #1) (2007)   Charles Stross   Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity #1) (2006)   Justina Robson   The Devil You Know (Felix Castor, #1) (2006) Vicious Circle (Felix Castor #2) (2006) Dead Men's Boots (Felix Castor #3) (2007)  God Save The Queen (Graphic Novel: The Sandman Presents #32) (2008) Thicker Than Water (Felix Castor #4) (2009) The Naming of the Beasts (Felix Castor #5) (2009)  Mike Carey   The Execution Channel (2007) Ken Macleod  The Red Men (2008) Matthew De Abaitua  The Bastion Prosecutor (Kalahari #2) (2009) A. J Marshall The mid-2000s were quite a good period for British popular fantasy-horror-science fiction genre writing. These books should not be neglected simply because time passes. What is curious is how a sex demon appears in two of them (and elven eroticism in a third) which is either coincidence in the ca

Nearly all the books below are so light a read that they could be blown away with just a breath of desert wind. The exception is Robert Harris' Fatherland which is very good indeed.  I have added a review of his well above average historical crime drama Pompeii but the bulk of these books are conspiracy thrillers that fed simultaneously off post-9/11 paranoia about the Middle East or the barely taboo chance to disrespect organised religion and/or an interest in cashing in on the Da Vinci Code (published in 2003). Two of Dan Brown's own follow-up books are included below. Fatherland (1991) Robert Harris Deservedly a thriller classic which postulates an alternative universe in which the Nazis won. Almost certainly in any 'Top 100' thriller list, somewhere alongside Len Deighton's much earlier SS-GB.      Knights of the Blood (Knights of the Blood, #1) (1993) Scott MacMillan and Katherine Kurtz This is cliched - Nazi vampires meet quasi-Templar vampires

The Eternal Champion (1962-1970)    Elric of Melnibone (1962-1972) Behold the Man (1969) Gloriana (1978) The War Hound and the World's Pain (Von Bek, #1) (1981) The War Amongst the Angels (Second Ether, #3) (1996) T he Vengeance Of Rome (Between the Wars, #4) (1999)     Michael Moorcock is one of the most prolific, influential and often hard-to-categorise fantasy writers in our literary history. As you might expect, his oeuvre can be variable in quality. However, these six examples (of which there could be many others) will give a flavour of his fertile and often anarchic talent. Although he abandoned Britain in the 1990s, there is often still something quintessentially English (in literary terms) about his world view while allowing a free flow of cosmopolitan influences from American fantasy writing and European culture. It is hard to tell when and where Moorcocks's Eternal Champion archetype emerges. That is wholly fitting given the nature of his multiverse. There