Category Archives: Everything

Deep Ocean Things

  By

the_ocean_at_the_end_of_the_laneTHE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE

Neil Gaiman ISBN 10: 1472200314

One of the reasons that Neil Gaiman is a very interesting writer is the way in which he mixes the mundane and the preternatural. When dredging through the mundane for stories, we all tend to go back to our own lives to pick over. And for this reason I suspect, there are Neil Gaiman stories that look semi-autobiographical on the surface. A couple of the short stories in Smoke and Mirrors give off that illusion. I say illusion because I suspect that stories that seem to (maybe) be about someone who was maybe Neil Gaiman (maybe) in an earlier time of life are no more deeply autobiographical than any story is autobiographical. And all stories are a bit autobiographical. They cannot help but be anything else.

Continue reading

No comments

Arrakis [pt.2]

  By

dune

DUNE

Herbert, Frank (New English Library, ISBN 978-0450011849)

For Sophie, physical necessity, by itself, didn’t fix the moment when the future must arrive. Time marched rubato, stretching and bending to the individual rhythms of the players. As long as you stuck to the spirit of the arrangement, Time would turn a blind eye to a few extra minutes here or there.

To those with a pragmatic turn of mind, the view must’ve seemed an unmitigated failure. You found Sophie forever running late, out of petrol and waiting on her next paycheque to make the phone work again. Repossession agents chivvied her in flocks while friends she’d failed to meet crammed her answering machine with irate messages. Continue reading

An Examination Of Causal Vindictivecy

  By

the_casual_vacancyTHE CASUAL VACANCY

J.K. Rowling ISBN 978-1-4087-0420-2

Alright. Yes. Vindictiveness would be standard English, but I wanted to play on The Casual Vacancy, and so I used a -cy ending instead.

But more to the point, vindictiveness is also the standard in J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy, her first post-Potter book. This is a very grim, very interesting, very powerful and somewhat disconcerting book. I’ve read some reviewers complain that The Casual Vacancy – being as it is a very adult book about serious and troubling things – is difficult to read because it is written in a style not much different from the style of the Harry Potter books. I’ve read other reviewers complain that without the wonderment of the Potter universe what’s left behind is a grimy world without much redemption. I’ve also read a lot of reviews that sort of flailed around, accusing the prose of being workmanlike or of being overwritten or they accuse the story of being melodramatic or too dull or something, anything to justify a negative feeling about the book. Continue reading

Five Rather Wonderful Audiostories

  By

escape_pod_podcast

Possibly you listen to podcast fiction and audioboks. Possibly you don’t. Either way, you should definitely listen to the following five pieces. Three are from Escape Pod and two are from Podcastle, which reflects my own personal listening habits, but also reflects how the SFF crowd were early adopters of online audio formats for fiction. Because free SFF audio stories have been online for some years now, there is quite a bit of good Science Fiction and Fantasy to pick from. Unfortunately, mystery, crime , romance and lit fic are taking a while to catch up, but if you wanted to create a short-format fiction podcast in one of those genres it’s worth being are that there certainly isn’t much competition to deal with at the moment. Continue reading

One Comment

Arrakis [pt.1]

  By

dune

DUNE

Herbert, Frank (New English Library, ISBN 978-0450011849)

Sophie kept a boyfriend named Alan – the same way that one might keep a housecat or a gerbil. Alan belonged to that shadowy class of persons who somehow leave no discernable impression in your thoughts. You would’ve found him listed in the credits as ‘fireman #3’ or ‘guest at party’.

 

 

He had a genial temperament; he’d amble out to see you when you arrived and make small talk. He just appeared underwritten. When you looked up from a conversation, you’d find him standing in the background fiddling with something, as if his actor didn’t have any lines and needed to full up the time pretending to do something. His presence left so scant an impression that to this day I can remember only two facts about him: he owned a video camera and slept heavily. Continue reading

On Melbourne

  By

Melbourne

The following was read aloud at the 20th anniversary of Glass Wings online held at the Wheeler Centre on Friday 14th March 2014.

When I first moved to Melbourne I had only just broken up with Dublin. The break-up had been a long time coming, but of course it was still painful. When it did end I couldn’t say that she was as upset about it as I was. I couldn’t honestly say that she even noticed. That’s how cities are. She might be your one and only, but you are just one of her millions. Continue reading

One Comment

Murder Most Musically Foul

  By

murder_and_mendelssohn

MURDER AND MENDELSSOHN

Kerry Greenwood  ISBN978-1-74237-956-2

It’s murder most musically foul in Kerry Greenwood’s latest novel, Murder and Mendelssohn. Phryne Fisher, the stylish private detective with nerves of steel, keeps her trusty pearl-handled pistol strapped to her silk garter as she investigates not one but two villains plotting to harm those she holds dear.

As with all twenty books in this series, it is the year 1929. Whilst times are changing, the world is still conservative; people know their place and a respectable reputation is everything. Fortunately the rich, titled and beautiful Phryne Fisher makes her own rules, and society gracefully acquiesces to her will whether she is dancing in her undergarments, piloting an aeroplane or apprehending villains. Continue reading

No comments

Plants

  By

PLANTS
mrblo

I grow plants in pots out front of the apartment. Sonia tells me that the neighbours believe I’ve decided to grow marijuana there; right out there in plain view. According to Sonia, the neighbours identify the third or so of the pots in which nothing has yet germinated as the nascent marijuana plants soon to deliver policemen and dishonour to their neighbourhood.

I look like the sort of guy who might grow marijuana, but should I resent as an insult the implication that I could prove so simpleminded as to grow it in plain view, right out on the porch in front of my apartment?

No comments

Boosterism [pt.1]

  By

babbitt

BABBITT

Lewis, Sinclair (Bantam Classics, ISBN 9780553214864)

Hilary and I both held tenure as delivery drivers at a pizza restaurant on Centre Road called, ‘La Casetta‘. I majored in second-hand smoke inhalation while Hilary pioneered a study into the effects of alcohol on Italians.

The cook used a substance called, ‘Beef Booster’. Like Sinclair Lewis’ boosterist, he knew that you had to have pep, by golly. When the pizza needed more pep he would open a bucket of Beef Booster and heap it on. Continue reading

From A Reader’s Point Of View

  By

from_a_readers_point_of_view

When I was living another life, in another country, some years ago, I worked for a time as a marketing researcher. My job, in this other life, was to sit hidden in shadows behind a one-way mirror – from this place I observed, made notes on and recorded the opinions of the product test group of the hour. They knew I was watching them – there was to inform them of this them of this, and besides which, I suspect the giant and otherwise completely incongruous mirror in an otherwise dull office complex would have been something of a give-away. Continue reading

No comments

Saturation

  By

SATURATIONsaturation

This shows the trajectories of some blobs of colour as they egress from three moving bodies. Each body and all the blobs of colour that egress from it accelerate towards one of the other bodies with a constant magnitude of acceleration: the yellow blobs and the body that expels them accelerate towards the body that expels magenta blobs, the aquamarine blobs and the body that expels them accelerate towards the body that expels yellow blobs and the magenta blobs and the body that expels them accelerate towards the body that expels aquamarine blobs.

Over the course of its life, each blob loses brightness. If it passes close to a body other than the one that expelled it, it also loses saturation. Continue reading

The Fault in Our Stars

  By

the_fault_in_our_stars

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

John Green (2010) ISBN-10 0143567594, ISBN-13 9780143567592

John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is now a film set for release in Australia on June 5th 2014.  And there, dear reader, is your deadline to read the book.

TFIOS (as we Nerdfighters call it) had been sitting on my list of to-be-reads for a while. Not as long as some others, but, eh,  a while. While I quickly devoured all his other novels, I left this one sit a little longer. I mean, why hurry the emotional seasick-making ferry ride of a book dealing with teenagers and cancer? Continue reading

  • You might also like

    • Cold Comfort Farm

      COLD COMFORT FARM Gibbons, Stella (Important Books, reprint July 2013, ISBN 978-8087830628) For some reason anything written in the era of the Jazz age kind of reads like a light hearted romp that could have been written in the 1980s. I suspect both eras were famously of unfettered youth getting their stockings off … Continue reading