German Expressionist Flyer
I’ve been working on some art/visualisation pieces for Thumb. As I mentioned before I wanted to capture the feel of the German Expressionist artists and films of the 1920s and 1930s. The movement grew...
View ArticleThumb available in paperback!
Thumb is now available in paperback from Amazon, priced $9.99 in the US, £7.99 in the UK and €11.17 in Europe. I confess to being biased but I’m really happy with the quality – the book looks and feels...
View ArticleFlatland 2: Sphereland
Flatland 2: Sphereland is the sequel to the movie Flatland which I mentioned in a blog post last year. It’s a charming 36 minute animated short based on the original novel by Edwin Abbott, and one of...
View ArticleThings to Come (1936)
In 1936 Alexander Korda, flush from his success with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), collaborated with H. G. Wells to turn the writer’s future history The Shape of Things to Come (1933) into a...
View ArticleOlivetti Lettera 32
A Happy New Year to everyone! This is my one hundredth post and I thought I’d follow tradition by talking about what Santa brought me for Christmas. When I was eight years old, and a precocious little...
View ArticleYou’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack – Tom Gauld
A while back I posted one of Tom Gauld’s cartoons on this blog and wrote a brief piece for my newsletter. His work is so clever, and pushes so many of the right buttons for an Eng-Lit professor turned...
View ArticleClassrooms of the Future
I work in education, advising ministries throughout the world on how to best use technology in the classroom. For most the process is one of constant catch up. Technology changes on a monthly basis,...
View ArticleRagged Claws available on March 16th!
Max and Abby are trapped in the city of Interosseous where the inhabitants navigate through the treacherous streets using the giant faces in the sky. If humanity is to survive Max must contact the...
View ArticleSoviet Space Art
Last week I was working in Russia. I attended a conference in Tver, halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg where I was set on fire. I was also asked to be one of the judges for a final graduation...
View ArticleSin City 2: A Dame to Kill For
Last night I went to a Sin City double feature where I watched the original followed by the sequel in 3D. Very entertaining and well made, the 3d enhances the unique visual style of the original and...
View ArticleSome games I’ve played…
A Happy New Year! I thought I’d kick off 2015 with a blog post about some of the games I’ve played and enjoyed over the last twelve months. Games are often seen as one of the writer’s deadly enemies....
View ArticleTully Zetford – Hook: Whirlpool of Stars
As I’ve mentioned before, 1974 marked my Looking into Chapman’s Homer moment when on opening Science Fiction Monthly number 2 I had the same feelings as ‘stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, He star’d at...
View ArticleLife on Uranus – Frank R. Paul, Fantastic Adventures April 1940
I came back from Eastercon 2015 with several pulp magazines, including a couple of copies of Fantastic Adventures carrying Frank R. Paul’s ‘Life on..’ series. This was a wildly optimistic attempt to...
View ArticleAutun Purser – Fantastic Travel Destinations
I came across the wonderful Fantastic Travel Destination posters of Autun Purser at Dysprosium and immediately bought the complete set of cards and a print for one of my own personal favourite...
View ArticleLovecraft by I. N. J. Culbard
A while back I wrote about the H. P Lovecraft Historical Society’s film of The Whisperer in Darkness. It’s a great movie and by and large it does a good […]
View ArticleThe Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and Logicomix
Comics again, this time with a couple of wonderful graphic novels that tackle similar mathematical themes but in very different ways. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis […]
View ArticleSorcerer – The Game of Magical Conflict
Having cut their teeth on the first ever grown-up science fiction game Starforce: Alpha Centauri in 1974, the US company Simulations Publications turned to fantasy a year later with Sorcerer: […]
View ArticleCosmonauts at the British Science Museum
The only mildly interesting scene in that otherwise steaming heap of found-footage nonsense Apollo 18 is when the US astronauts stumble across the Soviet LK Lunar lander sitting in a […]
View ArticleCosmic Fire Clowns – Bob Haberfield’s Moorcock covers.
On the one hand it’s great that SF and Fantasy are more or less mainstream these days, and so every Waterstones has a huge selection to browse. On the other […]
View ArticleZardoz (1974)
What better way to recover from New Year’s Eve than a leisurely afternoon watching John Boorman’s cult classic Zardoz. Putting aside the seriously disturbing sight of a post-Bond ever so […]
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