Microbes are out there: Aliens, ed. Jim Al-Khalili

I love it when Jim Al-Khalili communicates science. He’s a physicist, a BBC Radio 4 presenter of science programmes (The Life Scientific is a great podcast, btw) and he’s written, among other books, a fine work on the history of medieval Arabic science. (I have no idea about his academic publications because I can’t read … Continue reading Microbes are out there: Aliens, ed. Jim Al-Khalili →

Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer

This podcast scripts catch-up from Really Like This Book is on the first of Gene Wolfe’s epic science-fiction & fantasy tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, The Shadow of the Torturer (1981), the only one of the four I have been able to finish. It is EPIC, a tremendous, sprawling feast of fantastical invention slathered over … Continue reading Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer →

Jules Verne meets Conan Doyle with aliens: Philip José Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg

The title is the second-best thing about The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. How can you resist the suggestion that Phileas Fogg kept an alternative log of his trip Around the World in Eighty Days? What else could have happened that the world didn’t know? The first best thing about the novel is the answer: … Continue reading Jules Verne meets Conan Doyle with aliens: Philip José Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg →

Gender and body difference in Vonda N McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting

This was Vonda McIntyre’s first novel, published in 1975, about twenty years after the first thalidomide disaster in Germany, the UK and North America, in which around 10,000 children died or were born with malformations. The novel is about disability, and difference, and how society accepts and rejects different differences. It’s also an astoundingly undated speculation on a … Continue reading Gender and body difference in Vonda N McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting →