Giant Squid Creations

It is with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to Brian W Aldiss, a stalwart writer and scholar who passed away on the weekend aged 92. I think the first book of his that I read was Billion Year  Spree, his history of science fiction. It's a fascinating read and influenced me greatly. I was doing my Honours at the time and his definition of science fiction, particularly that it is set in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould, shaped my thinking at the time and infiltrated my whole thesis, even if it was off topic. My ideas on genre have shifted in the last couple of years, and I do not hold so closely to Aldiss' own, but they're still influential, and I wouldn't be where I am without them. I haven't read his most famous fictional works, the Supertoys stories that Spielberg's movie AI was based on, or the Helliconia series, but I have read a couple of others. The first was Frankenstein Unbound. It took me a bit to accept what was going on and for a while I probably wou...

In preparation for the next semester (or trimester as DU calls them), I read two introductions to books introducing the various voices within literary theory, both of which asked that essential question, what is literature? Of course, the answer is vague, partly because it's a debatable point and partly because they were introductions and they can't give it all away. But it made me think about what literature is or has been to me, which is something I probably should think about if I'm studying Literature. The first thought I have is remembering the many times I rearranged my books in my teens. It was something I did at least once a year I think. I would take every book off the shelf and put them into piles according to how I wanted to organise them, then work out the best way to arrange them all on the shelves. I could make a joke here about how much of a nerd I was/am, but, as I think about it, I'm not going to wear that label over this - I love books, I always have...

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan My rating: 4 of 5 stars I just spent the better part of two days reading this so I figure I should write something about it. I'd like to say I did that because it captured me completely, but the truth is I powered through it because of an assignment and because I'm not at work this week. Not that it didn't capture me and I'm glad I read it in such a consolidated period. It's a very well written and quite sumptuous story cycle, the interconnections are laced through ever-so neatly down to a pair of pants I presume one character bought second-hand after another had given them to charity. Numerous lives are wound as threads through this tapestry, covering a good fifty or so years. It could be argued the last story ties up too many of those threads, but the resolution is still ambiguous and the way the characters come together is not convenient plot wrangling like a melodrama but a clever device, itself a metaphor for the ...

I had some time to kill while near my local bookshop, so, like any sane person, I went in. I wasn't after anything but thought I'd see what H.G Wells they had. I didn't expect much, just the latest Penguin or Wordsworth edition of The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds tucked away in the Classics section, but there was always a chance of The Country of the Blind and Other Stories , which I'm considering buying in physical form. There was no trace of any mention of his name whatsoever. It had never occurred to me that there would be a bookshop without at least one title of his in stock. This disappointment I could have borne if not for the second shock I received today. I went to the local library to pick up some reserved items, including two books on Mr Wells' life and work. The librarian, as she waited for the computer to catch up, looked over the covers then asked, in all seriousness, 'Who's he?' She had to repeat the question, I couldn't co...