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BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Fiction Book and Podcast Reviews by Tim Pendry

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Tim Pendry

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Tracking Michael Moorcock Through Part of His Multiverse

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

Thomas Ligotti and Twenty First Century Nihilism

Nethescurial/The Mystics of Muelenberg from Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991) My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002) Teatro Grottesco (2006) The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (2011) This review is essentially about the later Ligotti of the current century. We hope to return to the earlier Ligotti in a later review but we can set the scene with just two stories from his second major collection Grimscribe: His Lives and Works (1991). Nethescurial , for example, appears to be a very obvious homage to Lovecraft almost to the point of pastiche in terms of structure and mood although it is clearly very much a Ligotti production. It is as if Ligotti decided to see how he could take as many Lovecraftian tropes about ancient cultic lore and the dark occult, refine them to their basics and come up with a definitive layered narrative oozing unease rather than outright horror. Ligotti is at his best not in trying to present something visceral, disgusting or terrible but in presenting som

Popular British Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy At The Beginning of the Twenty First Century

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

Tim Powers - Time Travel and Lovecraftian Espionage

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

Weird Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy Podcasts ... and a Political Satire

The Deep Vault (2016) Life After/The Message (2016) The Blood Drawn Chronicles (2016-2018) The Switchboard (2017) The London Necropolis Railway (2018) The Echo Protocol (2019) Arca-45672 (2019) Confessions from the Nocturne Nebula (2019) The Deep Vault is rollicking dystopian science fiction. A band of youngsters escaping some unknown apocalypse find themselves navigating a bunker that appears to include a government project that breeds monsters and has two squabbling competing computer systems as well as a mad scientist. This is the excuse for some gruesome body horror as well as a move through levels that will be familiar to any games player. It is dark but fun stuff, the darkness alleviated by the mildly comic and satirical treatment of the leading characters. Life After and its sequel The Message adopt a method that is usually tiresome and has become hackneyed already in the fictional podcast space - the dependence of narrative on the detritus of technology (usuall

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Horror12
Fantasy7
Lovecraftian7
Science Fiction7
Stephen King4
American Literature3
Comics3
Dark Fantasy3
Evil3
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H. P. Lovecraft3
Literature3
Magick3
Weird Fiction3
American Culture2
British Horror2
Christian Culture2
Conspiracy Thriller2
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Cosmic Horror2
Crime2
Cthulhu Mythos2
Culture2
Demons2
Dystopian Science Fiction2
Erotic Illustration2
Eroticism2
European Literature2
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First Sci Fi Novels2
French Literature2
Henry Miller2
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Neil Gaiman2
Occult Literature2
Podcasts2
Popular Fiction2
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Pornography2
Religion2
Sexuality2
Thomas Ligotti2
Thriller2
Vampires2
Young Adult2
Adventure Novel1
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American Masculinity1
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Anarchism1
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Anthologies1
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Apocalypse1
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August Derleth1
Batman1
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British Empire1
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Buddhism1
Buffy1
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Captain Britain1
Charles Stross1
Children's Podcasts1
China Mieville1
Chris Kuzneski1
Clowns1
Cold War1
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Culture Wars1
DC Comics1
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Dan Simmons1
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Edwardian Literature1
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