Our Selves, Alone. Extract 4. Nthposition. 2010
“When society was organised along rational lines, it is surprising how many people were left behind.” That line is striking on re-reading this stories. I am not sure how well my…
Category: alt hist
That damn family part 4 of 4 (or possibly more!) nthposition March/April 2008
Part the last of what is previously available to read here and here and here It has naturally enough struck me that this could continue for a while – after all I don’t…
That Damn Family. Part 3 (of 4) nthposition.com , March/April 2008
Here there is a great dollop of exposition in the best declamatory style – including the word “yeomen”. Indeed, “local yeomen”. In the phrase “gathering local yeomen”. Ahem. Part 1…
That damn family. Part 1 (of 4) originally published nthposition April/May 2008
“Updating” myths or fairytales has always struck me as an endeavour at best pointless, at worst insulting. Guilty of believing our own times are somehow unique – uniquely wise, uniquely…
Music For Another World. Ed. Mark Harding. SF Site review, 2011
This is a rather grumpy review. I found the writing in this anthology by and large ponderous and forced, too self-consciously “literary.” I think that is pretty clear from the…
Fiction updates
A while ago (during November, to be exact) I blogged that I was using NaNoWriMo as a framework for trying to finish a story I was writing. I wrote that I…
David Szalay’s “The Innocent” and Andrei Makhine’s “Brief Loves That Live Forever”
While Makine is Russian-born (writing in French) and Szalay is Canadian-born, these two works have much in common. Short, but genuinely epic in scope, showing how individual lives were shaped by…
Review of “Red Inferno”, Robert Conroy, SF Site 2010
My first SF Site review, and continuing the theme of alternate history. Conroy’s work is much more straightforwardly alternate history than Owen Sheers’ Resistance , and a much less impressive literary work,…
Séamus Sweeney 