As the dominant species on the ever-worsening earth block, Homo Sapiens has developed quite the existential swagger. Unchallenged for some 300,000 years, we think we are the be-all and end-all of sentient, kings and queens of all we survey, so mighty and in control that there is nothing we cannot Continue Reading
Books
Book review: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
ARC courtesy Angry Robot Books – release date 8 September in UK and Australia. Buried somewhere deep within a great many of us is a compulsive need to seek grand, soul-soaring adventure, the kind that plucks you giddily out of the banal and the everyday and sends you on a Continue Reading
Woof! Asterix’s Dogmatix gets his own book!
One of the great delights of the Astérix comics (and they are multitudinous), which began in 1959 under the stewardship of writer René Goscinny and illustrator Albert Uderzo – these duties are now handled by Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad respectively – is a very small, feisty and mischievously lovable Continue Reading
Book review: The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper
Something that LGBTQIA+ people of a certain age accepted, reluctantly it is best to add and with great disappointment, was that, growing up, they were likely to never see people like them reflected in grand and epic love stories on TV, and in movies and books. It meant that as Continue Reading
Time for some adventure! Join Doctor Who: The Runaway TARDIS
SNAPSHOTIn this adventure, 9-year-old Lizzie runs away from home (with a bag full of peanut butter sandwiches) after feeling lonely at her new school. She accidentally ends up in the TARDIS and meets The Doctor. Things go awry when Lizzie drops her sandwich into the TARDIS console, causing it to Continue Reading
#ChristmasinJuly book review: Last Christmas in Paris by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb
It’s not an unusual thing to be so completely drawn into the lives of a book’s characters that they come to feel like temporary flesh-and-blood fellow companions on the journey of life. Far from merely residing on the pages, these people are as real as your own family and friends, Continue Reading
Pop culture festiveness! The 5 ornaments I hung on my #ChristmasInJuly tree
I have put up a Christmas in July tree! Those who know me well will not be surprised by this at all, since I love Christmas with the same fervour and passion that I reserve for caramel cheesecake and releases of new books by my favourite authors. But in previous Continue Reading
Book review: How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang
All of us, somewhere deep down or agonisingly close to the surface, long for a place or a person to call home. It seems to be (understandably) hardwired into us, an impelling desire to not simply find someone or some place, because anyone can do that with enough bars, datings Continue Reading
Book review: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar
We live in mysteriously varied worlds. That’s right – worlds. When Disney opined that’s a small world after all, they likely weren’t taking into account the theory of the multiverse which posits that the Earth we know and if not love, somewhat tolerate, is just one of many multiple versions, Continue Reading
Book review: Wilding by Isabella Tree
We live in an increasingly blighted world. This is not an assessment borne of alarmism or sensationalist tendencies; study after study is showing that the Anthropocene age, the dates of which have not been conclusively agreed but which aligns roughs with humanity’s impact on the Earth’s geology and environment, is Continue Reading