Eco-dystopian sf curiosity: Naomi Mitchison’s Not By Bread Alone

This completely obscure eco-science-fiction novel by Naomi Mitchison from 1983 shares a title with another obscure novel, by Vladimir Dudintsev of 1956. Naomi Mitchison was not a Communist, but staunchly socialist, and had visited Russia in the 1930s. Both novels deal with the paradox of the individual’s intentions being devoured by the forces of the … Continue reading Eco-dystopian sf curiosity: Naomi Mitchison’s Not By Bread Alone →

Mary Renault and The Praise-Singer

Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book's podcast script catch-up is R, and today’s author is Mary Renault. This twentieth-century British author (publishing from 1939 to 1981) is most famous for her meticulously researched historical novels about classical and ancient Greece. She is an outstanding author. Her novels are easy to slip into, because she tells … Continue reading Mary Renault and The Praise-Singer →

You May Well Ask: Naomi Mitchison’s roaring twenties

‘But my baby died’. That’s the last line in Naomi Mitchison’s second volume of memoirs, You May Well Ask. It's a grim cliff-hanger that isn’t, because this happened in 1940 when she was running a small Scottish estate in Carradale, on a dangling arm of land off western Scotland that snuggles up to Arran in the Firth … Continue reading You May Well Ask: Naomi Mitchison’s roaring twenties →

Sex in space: Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman

For years I’d thought that I had read pretty much everything Naomi Mitchison had published. Oh how wrong I was. I rechecked, and found to my horror that Mitchison herself couldn’t remember how much she’d published, but 70 books or thereabouts would be about right. Swift detour to abebooks.co.uk to order some of the many that I’ve … Continue reading Sex in space: Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman →