Posted in Writers of interest, tagged james tiptree jr. on February 28, 2008 | No Comments »
It occurred to me last night that all the writers I’ve written about on this blog so far are men! Here I am, a so-called egalitarian thinker, but 90% of my favourite authors are male. I wonder why this is? One of my favourite female authors, Alice Sheldon, used to be a man. Erm, kinda. [...]
Posted in Writers of interest, tagged malzberg on February 27, 2008 | No Comments »
Philip K. Dick is famous these days. So are William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard. But there are plenty of other writers who have produced work of a similar calibre - perhaps not as consistently or for so long a period - work that is well worth reading. One of these writers is [...]
Posted in Other Book Reviews, tagged PKD, WSB on February 25, 2008 | No Comments »
…and all of them are biographies. I only really read biographies of writers, probably because I have writerly ambitions myself, but I will occasionally read music biographies as well. The three bios I just read were:
I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrere
Cursed [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Philip K. Dick, tagged Philip K. Dick, PKD, ubik on February 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Ubik, written in 1966 and published in 1969, is widely regarded as one of PKD’s best novels. But if you were to read the first 70 pages or so, it would be hard to imagine why. More on this later. At the time of Ubik’s composition, PKD was living with Nancy Hackett, who would soon [...]
Posted in Philip K. Dick, tagged Philip K. Dick, PKD, subterranean press, ubik on February 23, 2008 | 4 Comments »
The obsession with all things PKD led me to obtain around 50 books by or about the great man. This includes around 40 novels, 6 story collections and a couple of miscellaneous items: a biography, a book of interviews, a book of essays, and a book containing selections from PKD’s ‘Exegesis.’ Anyway, there are around [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Philip K. Dick, tagged Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick, PKD on February 17, 2008 | No Comments »
Martian Time-Slip, first published in 1964, is widely regarded as one of PKD’s top-tier novels, although most people probably don’t think of it quite as highly as I do. I will explain why this is so. Martian Time-Slip was re-released in 1999 as part of Orion’s SF Masterworks series, when I was 18 years old. [...]
Posted in Writers of interest, tagged Beijing Coma, Ma Jian on February 17, 2008 | No Comments »
While I procrastinate about producing essays on my favourite ten novels, I thought I’d start a series of short pieces about some writers you might not have read or even heard about. These are writers who I consider, for one reason or another, to be less famous than they deserve to be. The first such [...]
Posted in The Kingdom of Four Rivers, tagged TAG Hungerford Award, The Kingdom of Four Rivers on February 16, 2008 | No Comments »
My novel “The Kingdom of Four Rivers” (henceforth KoFR) is a work of science fiction, but for the most part it doesn’t look much like a work of SF. I don’t want to give too much away at the moment, as this is an unpublished novel. KoFR is set several hundred years in the future, [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, tagged JGB, MJH, My Fiction, PKD, WSB on February 16, 2008 | No Comments »
To give you an idea of which writers and novels I am most interested in, I hereby present a list of my favourite ten novels in the world. They are ordered alphabetically, not by preference. I intend to write detailed reviews or essays on at least some of these books over the next few weeks. [...]
Posted in The Kingdom of Four Rivers, tagged guy on February 16, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Well might you ask. I’m a ‘young’ (26) writer living in Northam, Western Australia. I also teach high school English. I’ve recently completed work on my first novel, “The Kingdom of Four Rivers,” which might be described as a work of science fiction. I am hoping to get it published. I thought I might write [...]
