Review of Iron Man

When I finally got to the front of the queue at Manchester’s Odeon cinema and asked for a ticket yesterday it was about 2:15. Screenings began every hour so I asked for a ticket for two o’clock - on the basis that there’d be ten minutes each of adverts and trailers before the film started. [...]

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Review of Double Solitaire by Melinda M Snodgrass

This chapter of the Wild Cards saga employs the now-familiar technique of dividing the narrative in two and presenting the bifurcated story in separate volumes. It’s happened before in this series (books six and seven) and George R R Martin has also done it with the last and next volumes of A Song of Ice [...]

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Review of In Bruges

First off, if you haven’t seen In Bruges and aren’t planning to - you should. It’s not without its flaws, but it is very, very good. I liked it, anyway.
The film struck more than anything as a cross between Father Ted and … well, insert the title of some fairly brutal crime film here … [...]

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Review of Jokertown Shuffle edited by George R R Martin

This, the ninth Wild Cards book, continues the story begun in One-Eyed Jacks, and it works a lot better, although still not as well as earlier volumes.
The main problem (as it was with book eight) is the structure: short stories worked perfectly for the original Wild Cards book because each story showed one episode from [...]

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Review of One-Eyed Jacks edited by George R R Martin

Unusually, Martin isn’t credited as an author of any part of this, book eight of the Wild Cards series. Also, the book takes the form of linked short stories, much like the very first volume, instead of a ‘mosaic novel’, like most of the other books. I think it suffers a little on both counts.
More [...]

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Review of The Chronicles of Morgaine by C J Cherryh

The Chronicles of Morgaine is a trilogy consisting of Gate of Ivrel (1976), Well of Shiuan (197 and Fires of Azeroth (1979) (and I’ve just learned there’s a fourth book, written much later: Exile’s Gate - I’ll have to get hold of that). I’ve owned this particular book for two or three years, having [...]

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Review of Dracula by Bram Stoker

Most books one reads, one has little idea what exactly will happen, but reading the original novel of one of the most famousest stories ever is a little different. My secondhand edition is actually a tie-in with the Francis Ford Copola film from the 1990s (how long ago that was), which I’ve seen, but not [...]

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Review of Dead Man’s Hand by George R R Martin and John J Miller

This is book seven in the Wild Cards series; books five, six and seven form a kind of internal trilogy, and as it’s been well over a year since I read the previous two, I wasn’t entirely up to speed with the back story. Even more confusingly, the events of this book are concurrent with [...]

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Review of Matter by Iain M Banks

The slightly strange thing about Matter is that it almost seems more like an Iain Banks book rather than an Iain M Banks book. For a start, the three main characters are all siblings - Djan Seriy, Ferbin and Oramen are the surviving children of the king of the Eighth. (Iain Banks is an only [...]

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Review of Fortress in the Eye of Time by C J Cherryh

As previously noted (a long time ago, it seems), C J Cherryh (not to be confused with C J Cregg) is a favourite author of one of my favourite authors (Stephen Donaldson) - and this simple fact is one main reason I bought this book (in Mumbai). And I’m glad I did.
The novel is written [...]

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