Category: Blog
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The Japanese Wuthering Heights – Arashi ga Oka (1988)
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a really odd book. On the surface it’s the first bodice-ripper – a passionate tale of doomed love set among the Yorkshire Moors. Yet our ideas about the story, and the tragic duo of Cathy and Heathcliff, often come from the myths that that have built up around the novel,…
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Frank Frazetta
I’m still waiting for Conan. The first Arnold Schwarzenegger film was kind of OK, and had one or two impressive moments. The second was dire and I still can’t bring myself to watch the remake with Jason Momoa (despite the fact that his Khal Drogo is as close to Conan as anyone – though Rory…
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Minecraft Memory Palace
I’ve been a fan of memory systems for years, especially the Memory Palace method of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Known as the ‘System of Locii’ this is based on the principle of using places to remember things. This is how it works – you think of somewhere you know (such as your house) and…
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The Castle of Otranto
There’s one school of thought, kicked off by Brian Aldiss in his book A Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973), that says that Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know it started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her novel came at the end of the original Gothic movement in literature, and carried with…
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Aeon Flux – the animated series
I stumbled across Cyberpunk when living in Tokyo. This had both its advantages and disadvantages. Half the time it felt like I was living in a true William Gibson world, especially when walking through Shinjuku at night or hanging out in some grungy bar where cyber geeks rubbed shoulders with the Yakuza. Unfortunately it only…
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White Tiger (2012)
Spoiler Alert – if you haven’t seen the film and plan on doing so, watch it first then read this. This is a very odd Russian symbolist fantasy set during the Second World War, and based very loosely on Moby Dick. After a battle on the Eastern Front a tank driver is found with 90%…
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Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
I’ve just finished reading the collection of essays Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells. The book is designed to counter the increasing number of what it politely refers to as ‘anti-Stratfordians’ – those who believe that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of the plays attributed to him. A couple of years ago…
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Thumb available in paperback!
Thumb is now available in paperback from Amazon, priced $9.99 in the US, £7.99 in the UK and €11.17 in Europe. I confess to being biased but I’m really happy with the quality – the book looks and feels nicer than a lot of standard trade paperbacks. Anyway, the links to buy the book are…
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The Singing Ringing Tree
For a certain generation in the UK, The Singing Ringing Tree, an East German take on a Grimm-style fairy tale is indelibly carved on our psyches, giving us all the screaming habdabs for years. Many of us still wake up crying in the middle of the night over fading visions of large plastic goldfish, grizzly…
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Thumb – Out Now!
The universe is empty. The stars are dead. The worlds are no more. The last humans struggle to create a god to save them from the utter end. In the shadow of this colossus Max Ocel rescues a beautiful stranger from the clutches of an insane giant, and sets in motion a chain of events that…
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Countdown to Thumb
A flat singularity carried the unfinished body of God through an empty universe. The colossus lay on his back, a being so vast he might easily have put his arms around a world, if any still existed. His left hand rested palm upwards. In the shadow of the Thumb a brass and wooden flying machine…
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German Expressionist Flyer
I’ve been working on some art/visualisation pieces for Thumb. As I mentioned before I wanted to capture the feel of the German Expressionist artists and films of the 1920s and 1930s. The movement grew out of a desire to overturn the established order of nineteenth century Europe, whose triumphalist and Imperial certainties had been completely…
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The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke – Richard Dadd
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards British painting bore little resemblance to its European counterpart. While the French Impressionists forged ahead with their bold experiments in light and composition, English painters headed off into the realms of Genre and Narrative art. For them and their audiences the content of a picture became more important than how…
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In search of the perfect notebook
When I worked for Scotland Yard in the 1980s I had a Filofax, which was pretty standard for people living in London at the time. I took it with me to Japan and used it for all my notes and planning until it fell to bits, at which point I bought another. I still have…
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Concept art for Thumb
In the Wastelands at the end of time stands a house that contains the secret to humanity’s survival.
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The Monster of Lake LaMetrie
Following on with the Victorians and Dinosaurs theme, one of the strangest science fiction stories I’ve ever come across is The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis, first published in Pearsons Magazine in September 1899. The plot is completely absurd, but wrapped up in this short narrative is a fascinating series of revelations…
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Cartoonophobia by Jim Barker
I wanted to give this blog post over to a friend of mine who is a brilliant independent cartoonist; Jim Barker of Jim Barker Cartoons and Graphics. Having lived in Japan for ten years, I can entirely sympathise with this. For the Japanese, manga are a narrative art form to be taken as seriously as…
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Life Before Man
On my last trip up to Yorkshire I found one of my favourite childhood books, Life Before Man, by Zdenek Burian (pictures) and Zdenek V. Spinar (text), published in 1972 by Thames and Hudson. I bought this when it first came out and it entranced me for years. Nowadays photorealistic dinosaurs are de rigueur, thanks…
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Tangerine Dream – Phaedra
I started reading science fiction round about the same time I got into music, and so being a fairly literal minded so-and-so I immediately embarked on a quest to find albums I could read Asimov, Heinlein, and Moorcock, to. Of course there were a few attempts to write directly SF-inspired music. Who can forget The…
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Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, (1950)
Last year I wrote about Jean Cocteau’s beautiful re-telling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, La Belle et la Bête (1946). In many ways it was a perfect movie for the age, giving war-weary French audiences an hour or two’s respite in fantasy while re-asserting French tradition and culture through the art of…