It’s hard to know where to start with Delany. He’s not really been much within SF for a long time, and my favourite novel by him (and probably by anyone), while published as SF, mostly isn’t. Still, he started in the field, writing […]

I like a good series character in my crime fiction, and no one has offered us more of these than Block, and they cover a range of styles.
Matthew Scudder (16 novels) is a private eye in NYC, whose best friend is a hardened criminal. The novels vary i[…]

I happened to just now read one of his, The Cosmic Rape, which prompted me to write about him next. This short 1958 novel is about a hivemind entity making first contact with humanity. It has taken over two galaxies and is working its way through its[…]

McBain, writing under that name and Evan Hunter (which he changed his name to in 1952, from Salvatore Lombino), is the only writer by whom I have read over a hundred books, and that is likely to remain true for a long time, maybe permanently. And I&#[…]

I just read on the BBC’s site that there really are intelligent aliens. This article may represent the research accurately, but that just tells us that the ‘research’ is a bunch of people making up shit and feeding it into a compute[…]

I haven’t read all that many new writers within this genre in recent years, and I’ve been impressed by even fewer, but China Mieville is exceptional. His first book is not great, but the next two, Perdido Street Station and The Scar, are […]

I’ve just reread all of this, and I totally love it. It is difficult and demanding, and I wonder if the editors were tempted to provide annotations, footnotes or some such – but eventually I decided they weren’t needed. I’m no[…]

Vachss is a unique writer. Most of his novels centre on a man named Burke, someone far enough beyond the underworld that they don’t know he exists. He makes a living ripping off child porn fans and wannabe mercenaries, and will take a PIish cas[…]

(The start of a parallel series to that recently started on crime writing. I’ll repeat something of what I said there: I mostly read literary fiction, so I’m mostly looking for the same kind of qualities I like there in SF. I know my scie[…]

(Introductory notes: my series Comics: A Beginner’s Guide seemed to go over quite well, as far as I can tell. It occurred to me that there were two other areas where I have sometimes been asked for guidance and recommendations – the other[…]