Posted in Simon Haynes, tagged Hal Spacejock, Simon Haynes on May 31, 2008 | No Comments »
A few days ago, W.A. author Simon Haynes released his first “Hal Spacejock” novel as a free e-book. You can download it here:
http://spacejock.com.au/Hal1Download.html
You can also check out reviews of all four Spacejock novels right here on my blog.
Posted in David Mitchell, tagged cloud atlas, david mitchell on May 29, 2008 | No Comments »
I could scarcely have been more enthusiastic about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas upon picking it up, nor can I remember being so enthusiastic about a newly discovered author. After reading Mitchell’s more recent Black Swan Green, I was eager to seek out his earlier books, and Cloud Atlas didn’t disappoint. To say I was impressed [...]
Posted in Andrew McGahan, Book Reviews, Vogel Award winners, tagged andrew mcgahan, praise, Vogel Award Winner on May 20, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Praise is a fairly famous novel and I’ve been meaning to read it for years, since someone recommended it to me in 2000 or 2001. I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting-some kind of gritty realistic novel about being on the dole-but Praise exceeded those expectations and bewildered me at the same time. The [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Vogel Award winners, tagged Julienne van Loon, Road Story, Vogel Award Winner on May 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The first thing to be said about Julienne van Loon’s Road Story is that it’s short. At 150 first pages of generously spaced print, this is a slight novel, one that took me about two hours to read. This is not to say that it wasn’t worth reading, however. Road Story is about an eighteen [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged TAG Hungerford Award Winner, Vogel Award Winner on May 16, 2008 | No Comments »
Ah, poverty. It’s times like these that I must resort to the dreaded ‘l’ word - library. It’s not that I dislike libraries per se, but that I love to collect (read: hoard) books, and thus don’t like giving them back. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, I have borrowed the following [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged m. john harrison, climbers on May 15, 2008 | No Comments »
Let me try to explain why I think M. John Harrison’s “Climbers” is one of the greatest novels of the last twenty years. Harrison has had a strange career: from science fiction to mainstream and back again; and he transformed himself from a bad writer into an outstanding one. After writing some run of the [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged hunter's run, dozois on May 13, 2008 | No Comments »
*This review is chock full of spoilers. You have been warned.*
Collaborative SF novels aren’t all that common, and novels by three authors are virtually unheard of. At first glance, this seems like an unlikely triumvirate: Dozois, the famous editor; Martin, the successful fantasy author; and Abraham, the newcomer. But at at the heart of [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, David Mitchell, tagged black swan green, david mitchell on May 12, 2008 | No Comments »
Part of the joy of books, for me, is in the hunt. Discovering new authors, tracking down their books in secondhand bookstores or publisher’s discard piles, reading reviews of their work on the net - all of this is almost as fun as actually reading. As I’m a poor teacher, I can rarely afford to [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Other Book Reviews, tagged simak, ring around the sun on May 5, 2008 | No Comments »
Clifford Simak is a name that few people these days have heard, whether they profess to be readers of SF or not. This is sad. I know about Simak because I’ve spent a lot of time studying the history of the genre. Briefly, Simak was an American writer of gentle, pastoral SF (if that sounds [...]
Posted in Book Reviews, Fremantle Press, Simon Haynes, tagged Hal Spacejock, No Free Lunch, Simon Haynes on May 1, 2008 | No Comments »
“Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch” is the fourth installment in Simon Haynes’ series, and it’s another strong showing for Hal, Clunk and co. For the uninitiated, Hal Spacejock is an interstellar freight trader running cargo to and fro, but he rarely has enough credits for a nice meal, or a change of clothes for that [...]
