Once upon a time–when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was still in high school–I had a wonderful English teacher who treated his students as peers and insisted that we all call him by his first name; his enthusiasm for literature and drama was outright contagious. He convinced me to read outside my preferred genres
Philip K Dick is in my opinion and many others the master of science fiction. His works seems to drip off the tongue when one mentions said genre, such works as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly – the list
The world is besieged by natural disasters, a disease that affects only the young is spreading, and tragedy appears at the forefront of everyone’s lives. The Migration is a wonderfully skilful novella that combines an elegiac beauty with an overarching sense of societal menace. Written from the perspective of Sophie, a sixteen-year-old girl who is
What is interesting about literature written in the past is the omnipotent manner with which one, from our saggy hi-tech sofas in the future, can now read it: the time capsule quality of it. A quality so much more heightened when reading someone’s version of the future as written in the past, often wildly off
It is both bizarre and resonant that, in the same year Donald Trump has declared he is going to create a Space Force for planet Earth, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, by many considered one of the all-father texts of military science fiction, should be reprinted. Originally published under the title ‘Starship Soldiers’ in The
Just when the world turned around a little too fast and spun itself into a new dystopian reality is hard to pin-point exactly. It seems it might have kicked-off around 2016 when every one of your favourite celebrities started dying and the Western electorate ticked the box marked ‘collective suicide pact’. Then again, it could
Ah, Mars. There isn’t a planet in the celluloid Galaxy that gets more attention than the mysterious red world, where countless films have tried to unearth the riddles of what may lie beneath the surface of the terrestrial planet, with its thin atmosphere composed primarily of carbon dioxide. The Martian, On The Red Planet, Mission
The gunshot rang out through the empty club as silence slowly reclaimed her hold on the room. It was done. Weeks of only catching minutes of sleep, every meal being whatever would fit in one clenched fist but I had done it. The Fenchurch Crime family was no more. Gregory Fenchurch still twitched at my
Annihilation is the second big screen directorial endeavour from Alex Garland, who made a name for himself initially by writing The Beach, which was closely followed by The Tesseract. He then began working on a number of Hollywood scripts including 28 days later, Sunshine and a personal favourite of mine, Dredd. In 2015 he dipped his directorial toes into the film
Ray Bradbury’s classic envisages a dystopian future in which the job of firemen is to seek out books and burn them. In this edition, introduced by Michael Moorcock, Sam Weber’s astonishing illustrations perfectly capture the novel’s haunting atmosphere. IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see
