In last week’s post Jane Dougherty raised the interesting question as to whether modern Young Adult fantasy sanitises the world for its readers, serving them…
2 CommentsOn and on I sped into futurity...
In last week’s post Jane Dougherty raised the interesting question as to whether modern Young Adult fantasy sanitises the world for its readers, serving them…
2 CommentsThe first draft of my next novel and sequel to Thumb, Ragged Claws, is now finished and tucked safely in a drawer for a month.…
1 CommentIn 1936 Alexander Korda, flush from his success with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), collaborated with H. G. Wells to turn the writer’s…
4 CommentsBeware – mild spoiler alert. It’s a truism that, on the whole, film and TV sf lags behind the written genre by twenty to thirty…
3 CommentsFlatland 2: Sphereland is the sequel to the movie Flatland which I mentioned in a blog post last year. It’s a charming 36 minute animated…
Leave a CommentThe English Civil War period has always been a rich source for horror. James I whipped everyone up with his book Daemonologie in 1597 and…
3 CommentsEmily 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…
6 CommentsI stumbled across Cyberpunk when living in Tokyo. This had both its advantages and disadvantages. Half the time it felt like I was living in…
2 CommentsSpoiler Alert – if you haven’t seen the film and plan on doing so, watch it first then read this. This is a very odd…
6 CommentsFor 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…
19 CommentsI’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…
4 CommentsLast 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…
1 CommentThink Beauty and the Beast and the first images that spring to mind will probably come from the 1991 Disney film and subsequent stage shows.…
2 CommentsThe British Space artist David A. Hardy has just re-released, on DVD, the rare Soviet 1957 film Road to the Stars, directed by Pavel Klushantsev.…
1 CommentI’m delighted that Sally Potter’s film Orlando, based on the book by Virginia Woolf, is now available on iTunes. Orlando is one of those books…
Leave a CommentThis week I learned that the English actor Bob Hoskins is retiring because of Parkinson’s disease. It’s sad news. I’ve always admired his work so…
3 CommentsI love computer animation and ever since I had a BBC B 32K computer in the early 1980s I’ve been trying to teach myself how…
1 CommentSilent Science Fiction movies are understandably dominated by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) which is a truly astounding piece of German Expressionist film. Two years before…
2 CommentsA few days ago I saw The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe. It was huge fun, especially for someone who used to sneak out…
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