BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

The Sandman: The Dream Country (Volume 3) (1990) American Gods (2001) Interworld (2007) - With Michael Reaves Neil Gaiman The Dream Country is third volume of the acclaimed The Sandman series but is stand-alone. This edition also contains the original script for the first of its four stories, Calliope, which might be of interest to students of illustration. Much of The Dream Country has been translated to film very effectively as part of a Sandman TV series shown on Netflix. If we are to be honest here, Neil Gaiman was engaged in a project to bring Tales from the Cryp t up the literary and artistic food chain. There is no doubt that he succeeds admirably in his task, aided by a series of excellent illustrators, but the stories, with the exception of his re-thinking of the origins of Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream', are not complex - poetic and suggestive perhaps but not complex. The first story, Calliop e, tells of a writer's abuse of an incar

Divine Endurance (1984) Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant (2008) Gwyneth Jones One of the themes of my reviews is the 'first novel' especially in genre fiction. Sometimes these show remarkable ability. Sometimes they demonstrate immaturity. Sometimes the immaturity lasts for several early novels (as in the case of Grahame Greene) before the genius breaks through with practice and experience. Gwyneth Jones is an interesting science fiction/fantasy cross-over writer (where what appears to be fantastic is grounded in future science). We can compare here an early with a mature work separated by a near quarter of century. In fact, Divine Endurance was something of a disappointment even allowing for it being a first attempt largely because it was self-indulgent experimentalism in high science fantasy by someone who was clearly intellectually way ahead of the bulk of genre writers but who missed the point about narrative - out there is a reader who must comprehend. In her

The Penguin Book of Horror Stories (1984)   Editor: J. A . Cuddon   Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction (2001) Editor: Al Sarrantonio   The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels (2007) Editor:  Gardner Dozois The Penguin Book of Horror Stories has some gems and a certain breadth but it suffers from a weak almost nerdy academic introduction filled with fact but weak on interpretation. It is a Wikipedia article before its time. The definition of horror is very wide. The brutal realism of Prosper Merimee's primitive and vengeful Mateo Falcone (a story that disturbed me as a child and disturbs me today) sits alongside a pulp tale of derring-do (the oft-anthologised Leiningen Versus The Ants ) and a sardonic and satirical horror tale like Robert Graves' Earth to Earth . But yet there is little true cosmic horror - no H P Lovecraft or Arthur Machen. What are the best stories in an average collection? Apart from decent works by Hogg, Merimee (see above), Poe, H

The Voice in the Night (Short Story, 1907) The House on the Borderland (1908) William Hope Hodgson's much-anthologised The Voice in the Night is a n early (1907) example of eco-horror. It tells the tale of a mysterious natural life form in the South Pacific which has the ability to absorb all life around it including any human beings who come into contact with it. It is a fine tale set in the sea-going environment that so often inspired Hodgson. It should also be regarded as science fiction since there is nothing supernatural in the cause of the distress of the couple who come alongside the narrator's ship. I originally discovered William Hope Hodgson initially as the author of one of the better stories in Cuddon's Penguin Book of Horror Stories . The Derelict (1912) is also an atmospheric tale of sea-going monstrosity. He was also the author of the pulp series Carnacki the Ghost Finder . Hodgson is an oddity and The House on the Borderland is an odd story. It fal

I came to this with great expectations because it is written by a 'literary figure', albeit that it is an early work (1987) and only the first in a series of 11 science fiction 'culture novels'. Those expectations were too high but it has to be said that Iain M. Banks (aka Iain Banks) writes infinitely better on a technical level than the vast majority of science fiction writers. There are moments where his talent for precise description make the novel almost filmic. There are also times where an intelligent writer's sensibility comes through. He makes you think about the types of psychological adaptations our species might make to the world of the space opera. His aliens are not so unbelievable in terms of thought processes either. And yet, and yet ... the sensibility is a hybrid between the intelligent and the adolescent. Long bone-crunching battle scenes might have come off Playstation 3 if it had been invented (one stifles the occasional yawn) while

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

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