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Best books of the millennium so far
The BBC asked a bunch of US critics, what is the greatest novel of the millennium so far? Such an obviously completely bullshit question, you can imagine my eagerness to see the results. I was really...
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The Clay’s the Thing
From Bailiwick: Bristol’s Independent Listings Magazine Jason Wyngarde talks to playwright Peter King about filming, feminism – and working with Ray Harryhausen Peter King Local playwright and...
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Four or Five Things About China Miéville
[Just stumbled across this old thing I wrote for the Wiscon 17 Programme Booklet in 2003, when China and Carol Emshwiller were GOHs] Saturday September 28th 2002 was a bright and clear day in London....
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On Matters Locomotive and Tentacular; or, Four or Five (More) Things About...
[After finding yesterday’s old piece on China, I remembered doing this one, too. But on reading it, I have no memory at all of writing it. It’s from the Readercon 17 programme, back in 2006 when China...
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China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (Macmillan 2000)
[A version of this review appeared in Foundation 79 (2000), 88–90. Which I think makes it the first thing on China to appear in an academic journal. Yay me!] Vivid as a comic book, Miéville’s King Rat...
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China Miéville, The Scar (London: Macmillan, 2002)
[A version of this review appeared in Foundation 86 (2002), 132–4] The Scar returns to Perdido Street Station’s Bas Lag, but it is not a novel about return: it is about departure and loss. Part of that...
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The Hogs of Haddon Hall
In Haddon Hall, the seat of the Duke of Rutland, which dates back to Tudor times and beyond, there is a recurring porcine motif. I took these pictures intending to write about the ancient Peak District...
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The City in Fiction and Film, week one
This year we launched the new single honours BA Literature and Film Studies. The single honours bit is important. In a joint honours with a name like this, generally students could expect to take a...
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Crimson Peak (del Toro 2015)
Pretty much all the commentary so far has been about one of two things. Critics have been unanimous in their praise of how gorgeous the film looks, from its gothicky design to its fabulous frocks and...
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Memory Palace
From 18 June to 20 October 2013, the Porter gallery in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum was home to Memory Palace. Sponsored by Sky Arts Ignition, it is the first graphic arts exhibition at the...
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Crumbs (Miguel Llansó Ethiopia/Spain/Finland 2015)
Ultimately, the opening text tells us, the war became unnecessary. Perhaps it was a mutation, or perhaps bone-deep ideology just changed. But people gave up on survival, on perpetuating the species....
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My top twenty books of 2015
This year, I read 166 books for pleasure. (My definition of ‘pleasure’ here includes background reading for new modules, research projects, reader’s reports, reviews, blurbs, etc, as well as ploughing...
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The City in Fiction and Film, week 16: JG Ballard’s High-Rise, chapters 1-9
Week 15 This week we began to work on JG Ballard’s High-Rise (1975; all quotations from pictured edition, London: HarperCollins, 2006), reading the first nine chapters and also watching William Klein’s...
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Pilgrim Award acceptance speech
Back at the start of July, I was awarded the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award for Critical Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy (which is...
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My top 20 books of 2016
In 2016, I read 243 books – there were a lot of short ones this year, and more comics than usual, plus I wrote a couple of synoptic chapters that required a lot of very fast reading or re-reading....
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