Holiday Movie Challenge

Me and the bidie-in, we’re rubbish movie watchers. We’ve got this huge stack of DVDs by the TV at home and many of them have never made it out of their cellophane. Why? Well we’ve got very poor at setting aside the time to actually sit down and pay attention to something the length of […]

Finkle in June/July

Fans (aw c’mon there have to be some) of Markee de Saw and Bert Finkle have a couple of very choice opportunities of catching up with their weird musical stories over the next few weeks. First up we’re delighted to have been delighted to perform at Itsy’s Kabarett presents: TABU in Edinburgh’s swanky Voodoo Rooms […]

Bits and pieces

Coming (reluctantly) to the end of welcome and recuperative break in the Trossachs, and catching up on a few nuggets of news that have come my way over the last week or so. The Ephemera (plus a mini interview) was featured last week at Indie Books Blog, a terrific resource for discovering new, indpendently published […]

May’s reading

Chunky style reading this month. No shorts, but the new Interzone only just arrived so hopefully something from that will make June’s list. Odalisque by Fiona McIntosh – been quite a while since I read a genuine THE* Fantasy novel, and it’s always good to keep up with what’s happening. This one was actually published […]

Stag and Dagger 2011

So, Saturday. Stag and Dagger. A shitty day weatherwise, and it was good to see a decent turn out at all the venues I was at. Not that the weather should’ve affected anyone’s enjoyment of the music, but it might have put a dampener on the general mood. Not mine though. I manage to squeeze […]

More good things for Mr Duncan

Hot on the heels of the news of his Spectrum award, Hal Duncan has announced a new book. His A to Z of the Fantastic City features Hal’s unique take on the what makes a city fantastica, focusing on some truly eclectic examples, including: Ambergris, Dublin and Sodom, along with 23 others. If that weren’t […]

Looking forward to Stag & Dagger

This weekend sees the return of Stag & Dagger, an inner city multi-venue indie music festival that is dear to my heart. I went last year, although I seem to have completely neglected to blog about it at the time (for the record it was very similar to my experience of Hinterland the year before). […]

Hal Duncan: awesome awardiness!

Great to hear that Hal Duncan’s amazing story,”The Behold Of The Eye” has won this year’s Gaylactic award for short fiction. Yay for Hal!

Maxwell: master of imagination

Nice piece in the Scotsman noting that it’s 150 years since physicist, James Clerk Maxwell took the world’s first colour photograph. Maxwell was a hero of mine during my student days for being the guy that came up with the equations that neatly explain how electric and magnetic fields work. Like PJ Moore, noted in […]

Signal boostage : the Vandermeers uncovering Finland

When I was in Warsaw with Jeff Vandermeer I got interested in European (specifically Polish) genre fiction, and during that weekend Jeff told me that he and his wife Ann would be spending some time in Finland the following week. Finland, he told me, has the most amazing SF community. You should definitely go to […]