Tag: Victorian
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Point and Click Horror – The Last Door
Recently I’ve started playing a handful of point and click horror games, mainly because I do a lot of travelling and at the end of the day I often want to unwind with something simple I can put down and pick up whenever. Mainstream PC games can demand a lot of time and thought, and, […]
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Why Terry Pratchett is not Great Literature
Jonathan Jones wrote an article in The Guardian in which he stated that he had never read Terry Pratchett and had no intention of doing so because the discworld novels lacked literary merit, unlike Jane Austen’s books. It had all the hallmarks of a throwaway space filler deliberately designed to whip up controversy and the […]
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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and Logicomix
Comics again, this time with a couple of wonderful graphic novels that tackle similar mathematical themes but in very different ways. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou focuses on Bertrand Russell’s attempt to create a mathematical foundation for logical truth, while Sydney Padua’s The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace […]
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Autun Purser – Fantastic Travel Destinations
I came across the wonderful Fantastic Travel Destination posters of Autun Purser at Dysprosium and immediately bought the complete set of cards and a print for one of my own personal favourite locations – the Lidenbrock Sea from Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. He’s very kindly written a post about his […]
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Interview with Jim Burns
Go here for my review of Jim Burns’ latest book The Art of Jim Burns: Hyperluminal. Can you talk us through one of your paintings from concept to finished image – both in terms of the idea and the practical execution. My choice would be Tea From an Empty Cup or Crucible purely because of […]
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Jim Burns – Hyperluminal
For me the golden age of science fiction and fantasy paperback illustration in the UK spanned the 70s and 80s. While 60s covers often favoured a minimalist Pop/Art approach the following decade saw an explosion of wildly imaginative and entrancing art, dominated by a handful of painters, each with a very distinctive style. New English […]
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The Company of Wolves (1984)
Wandering through Kate Bush’s imagination a couple of weeks ago made me think of a peculiarly English brand of dark fantasy that started in the late Victorian era with writers like George MacDonald and Lucy Clifford. These and others managed to write children’s stories possessed of such toe-curling nightmarish terror that they continue to haunt […]
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Patrick Woodroffe
I’d already planned on doing an article on the fantasy artist Patrick Woodroffe when the news came in that he’d passed away and so, sadly, this has become my personal tribute to his powerful and often frightening imagination. Patrick Woodroffe was one of a small group of painters and sculptors working in the 1970s whose […]
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The Grotesque
This is the first in a series of posts looking at the Grotesque in literature and art. It’s a subject that’s fascinated me for years (in fact I wrote my Masters thesis about it during the time of the Old Republic). I thought I’d kick off by trying to understand what makes something in writing […]
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Classrooms of the Future
I work in education, advising ministries throughout the world on how to best use technology in the classroom. For most the process is one of constant catch up. Technology changes on a monthly basis, while education systems tend to work on yearly budget cycles. Furthermore if you tinker with something you usually don’t see the […]
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The Bookman’s Tale by Charlie Lovett
Like a moth to the flame I find myself once again drawn into the strange world of the Shakespeare authorship question, though this time it’s through the entirely charming and entertaining novel The Bookman’s Tale, by Charlie Lovett. This is a thriller aimed at antiquarian book lovers, and as such falls somewhere between The DaVinci […]
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Flatland 2: Sphereland
Flatland 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 short based on the original novel by Edwin Abbott, and one of the book’s own sequels Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe, written in 1965 by the […]
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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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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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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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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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John Martin – Catastrophic Artist
A belated Happy New Year to everyone. This post is a bit later than I anticipated because I’ve spent the weeks after Xmas finishing the second draft of Thumb. It’s now been put into a drawer for a month to ferment before I give it another going over and then send it to my editor. […]
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Bugs of the Empire
A little while ago I wrote about the Eagle Comic in the early 1960s. The Captain was a similar magazine from the beginning of the twentieth century. The upsurge in adventure books for boys in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras paved the way for the first periodicals aimed at the Empire builders of tomorrow. […]