Tag: reading

Radio Times

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked in to 774 ABC Melbourne for Raf Epstein’s monthly ‘Read with Raf’ book club, to chat about ‘The Martian’. I’d sent in a review based on my blog piece and Raf enjoyed it enough to want more. Raf, Alicia Sometimes and...

The Rise of the Super-reader

Reading has become a more stratified activity than ever. Imagine a Healthy Food pyramid, but instead populated by readers. At the bottom, sadly, are people who don’t read at all. I’ll leave analysis of whether this section of the community is growing or not to people with massive research...

‘Year’s Best’? Perhaps not …

It’s that time of the year again, and I’m not talking about the festive season. I’m talking about the end of year musing that gives us the parade of ‘Year’s Best Books’ lists or ‘Holiday Reading Guides’ that are starting to feature in the arts pages and corners of...

Five Top Hard SF Books

I was inspired by Linda Nagata’s thoughtful article to write this one. Hard SF can be a hard sell. Of all the multifarious and diverse aspects of Science Fiction, Hard Science Fiction is the one most likely to get non-readers recoiling in horror. It’s the SF sub-genre most parodied,...

Five Great Historical Fantasy Novels

I’m happy enough with my Extraordinaires series being called Steampunk, but I’m more and more coming to think of it as Historical Fantasy. And by Historical Fantasy, I don’t mean Alternate History (stories in a world like our own that has taken a different historical path) or standard Fantasy...