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I haven't posted for a while due to work and before that study and I now have long covid, but I hope to reverse that trend and start posting book reviews once more and information about writing. 

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz My rating: 3 of 5 stars Occurs in a universe where there are six mounds of rock that when hit in the right combination allow time-travel througout earth's history. They are well known and time geologists use them all the time to not only view history but edit it. This is different from most time-travel stories where the characters are usually worried about changing history and causing unexpected results. They can't make massive instantenous changes (like killing Hitler) to history, the changes have to be slow, like planting a seed of a thought in a person's mind. In this version of the timeline the supression of women is slowly being increased, but a group of women are fighting back by editing the timeline. Learnt a bit about a few historical figures like Anthony Comstock, a special agent in the 1890's who was allowed to read every suspected liberated women's mail and arrest them for anything he deemed obsecene. Th...

It has been a while since I posted anything. I was way too busy last year to regularly post (I started up a web design business on March 19 - Wangaratta Website Design Services - and before that I did a six week intensive NEIS course on how to start and run a business). I had many long weeks of work, working late into the night some nights and on the weekends. But I still managed to read 17 novels by setting aside a couple of hours on three nights a week to read. Here's what I read:  1. Purity, Jonathan Frazen  2. Testaments, Margaret Atwood 3. The Drowned World, JG Ballard 4. The Wall, John Lanchester 5. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu 6. The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Richard Flanagan 7. The Old Lie, Claire G Coleman 8. Engine Summer, John Crowley 9. Wake, Elizabeth Knox 10. Clade, James Bradley 11. Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson 12. The Affirmation, Christopher Priest 13. The Swan Book, Alexis Wright 14. Pattern Recognition, William Gibson 15. Lone Wolf World, Anthony ...

Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump authorised news source, you’d   know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaids Tale . I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in an almost post-apocalyptic US (Gilead). I re-read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for a university course, where we studied the text in-depth, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind as I read The Testaments. I have not watched any of The Handmaid’s Tale television series, so maybe people who have will have made different connections to The Testaments than I did, and have different reactions. The Testaments takes us back to Gilead 16 years after The Handmaid’s Tale . It tells the story from three points of view. From that of a 16 year-old-teenager whose mother escaped with her from Gilead to Canada when she was a ...

Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...

Hi everyone, It’s been a while since I posted, I have been busy, sick and slack. I plan to write a few more blog posts this year. As usual they will be mainly about writing and science fiction, concentrating on apocalyptic and time-travel fiction. But first a bit of a summary of 2019, my annus horribilis. 2019 2019 started with my finishing three very challenging years of study with a BA in Internet Communications in early March. The degree was easily the hardest study I had done. Way harder than my Master of Creative Writing. I think its difficulty was due to the combination of doing web-design subjects, (I had virtually no knowledge of even html) and getting used to the “Arts” way of thinking, with its huge emphasis on well researched and argued essays. Due to the nature of the degree, I also had to learn many software packages and web platforms, like video editing software to create video mashups for assignments. I should have been happy when I completed my degree, as I did extr...

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I very much enjoyed being challenged in my thinking by the two novellas in this collection. It contains two very different stories: Caught Between Love and Loss, and the title story, A Refugee’s Rage. Caught Between Love and Loss This story starts out as if it is going to be a story about Richard, a guy who buys a block of land in the bush and decides to build a house on it, but then gradually becomes a story about his girlfriend, Rachel, as she struggles to define what her relationship with Richard is. Is he just a lover? Perhaps a potential long-term boyfriend? Is she in love with him? Or is she just in love with the idea of building a house and living in a beautiful rural Australia setting? The house becomes a metaphor for their relationship as the reader wonders whether it will ever be complete. The story tugs at the heart as you hope they can find a way to really connect. A Refugee’s Rage In contrast to the first story, A Refugees Rage is a very ...