Reprint: The End

Tags

Alfred Bester, Brian Aldiss, Carolyn See, Clifford D. Simak, Douglas Adams, Edgar Pangborn, Elizabeth Hand, George R. Stewart, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, Jack London, James Morrow, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Lucius Shepard, Mary Shelley, Nevil Shute, Octavia Butler, Peter George, Philip Latham, Piers Anthony, Raymond Briggs, Richard Jefferies, Ronald Wright, Russell Hoban, Stephen Baxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich

I had great plans for my Cognitive Mapping series that ran in Vector between 1995 and 2001. At one point I envisaged producing 100 of the columns, which could then be gathered together as a decent-sized book. But at some point the project ran out of steam. I had maybe another half-dozen columns started but never completed. Apart from a parody piece (written by another hand, not naming names Mr B****r), the column was over. But at the end of 2005 I produced one last hurrah, appropriately enough on how science fiction deals with the end of things. This last column was published in Vector 244, November-December 2005.

Reprint: A Beast Licking its Chops

Tags

Ann Leckie, Christopher Priest, Ian McEwan, John Wyndham, Miguel de Cervantes, Simon Ings, Thomas M. Disch

Now that a new Interzone is out, I thought I’d reprint the interview with Simon Ings that appeared in the last issue. This accompanied my review of Wolves which I’ll also be posting here in the next few days.

Reprint: Aliens

Tags

Andrew M. Butler, Arthur C Clarke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederik Pohl, Gwyneth Jones, H.G. Wells, Jack Finney, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Olaf Stapledon, S Fowler Wright, Vernor Vinge

Back in 1995 (good heavens!) I began a series of columns for Vector in which I would explore various standard tropes of science fiction. The series lasted until 2001, with an extra piece added in 2005. Not a bad run. They all had pretty much the same format: a couple of illustrative quotations, then a very broad historical survey of the trope leading back to the works from which my opening quotes had been taken (it was based on a series by David Lodge that had been running in the Guardian at that time. Andrew Butler gave me a title for the series, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, and this was one of the earliest of them. It first appeared in Vector 188, August 1996.

Reprint: Nebula Awards Showcase 2004

Tags

A.E. Van Vogt, Adam-Troy Castro, Alexei Panshin, Allen Steele, Anna Kavan, Anthony Boucher, Arthur Sellings, Bob Shaw, Brian Aldiss, Carol Emshwiller, Charles Stross, Damon Knight, Darko Suvin, Frederik Pohl, Groff Conklin, Harlan Ellison, Harry Harrison, Jack McDevitt, Jerry Oltion, John Wyndham, Katherine MacLean, Lesley What, Megan Lindholm, Mervyn Peake, Michael Swanwick, Molly Gloss, Neil Gaiman, Peter Jackson, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury, Richard Chwedyk, Sharon Lee, Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Willis E. McNelly, Willy Ley

I haven’t actually included any anthologies in my reprints so far, even though I have reviewed an awful lot of them. So I thought I should include one today. This review of Nebula Awards Showcase 2004 edited by Vonda N. McIntyre was, I think, written for The New York Review of Science Fiction, but I can’t find a record of it being published. So this may be its first appearance.

Reprint: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh

Tags

Amitav Ghosh, Arthur C Clarke, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Gabriele Salvatores, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, J.G. Ballard, Jagdish Chandra Bose, John Wyndham, Jules Verne, Ramanujan, Ronald Ross, Stanislaw Lem, Stayajit Ray

In a sense, this isn’t a reprint. I conducted this interview with Ghosh just after he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Calcutta Chromosome. It appeared for a while on the Arthur C. Clarke Award website, then disappeared. It has never appeared anywhere else.

The New Elizabethans

Tags

Arthur C Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Charles Chilton, Charles Eric Maine, Christopher Priest, Frank Hampson, John Christopher, John Lymington, John Wyndham, Katherine Burdekin, Mary Shelley, Richard Cowper, Ronald Wright, S Fowler Wright, Sarban

On the morning of 6^th February 1952, George VI was found dead in his bed at Sandringham. Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, was crowned Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey on 2^nd June 1953. Those sixteen months saw newspaper columnists frenziedly proclaiming a ‘new Elizabethan Age’.