Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 215

The Home Store From Hell

As you know I enjoy the peculiar shops of the Eastern bloc, but they aren’t the only strange sellers of tat to be found in the world, as this North African store testifies. First of all, it’s vast, and there’s nothing at all in it that any sane westerner would want in their home. Floor […]

The Full Story Of ‘Maryann’ & The Missing Book

Earlier this week a reader pointed out that a copy of Maryann Forrest’s extraordinary and prescient ‘HERE: Away From It All’ is currently selling on eBay for 450 squids. That’s an astonishing thing to have happened to a forgotten novel, but for those of you who missed the full story of Maryann Forrest and […]

England & The Tropics

For an author who is continually associated with London, I’m desirous of leaving it a lot. The city is perfectly pitched at a central point for travelling, and as it’s possible to reach anywhere in Europe by simply catching a train at a station just a 10 minute walk from my front door, the temptation […]

Missing Marvels

As many of you know, for several years now I’ve been running a column called ‘Invisible Ink’ in the Independent on Sunday about authors who wrote the popular books which have vanished from bookshelves. Every once in a while I update my favourite ‘missings’, so here’s the current revised list, and you can find more […]

Collecting Reprinted Stories

Readers always express surprise when they discover a writer has prolific output; it’s as if a good book should take a defined number of years to mature, but this is not the case at all. We each work at our own speed, according to what we can manage. Our normal lives still have to be […]

How Hard Is It To Get Into SF?

My former agent once told me, ‘I accept any kind of fiction except science fiction.’ When I asked her why, she explained, ‘I just don’t think I could do it justice,’ which was a polite way of saying that she didn’t understand it. But to me, not understanding everything was the point and purpose of […]

Darkness Over England

Recently there have been moves in Paris and New York to darken lights above certain floors in order to help migrating birds and to generally improve the quality of life in cities, but London and England show no sign of following suit. Residents of the North London area Dartmouth Park want to douse their lights, […]

London Gets A Creepy New Street

The SF novel The Day of the Triffids haslinks to Hampstead in North London, and is set to be celebrated with a new road name, for an alley that will be opened after being shut for years. Author John Wyndham’s 1951 book tells the story of how the ambulatory poison-spewing plants take advantage of a […]

On The Move Again

For the next few days I’ll be posting at slightly different times than usual as I’ll be in North Africa, grabbing a few days’ R&R in Morocco, which is always a good way to chill out (or get gastro-enteritis, depending on how late you eat in the Jemaa El Fnaa, the market place in the […]

Home Technology: We’re In Control Now

A few months ago, Google Glass opened a very snazzy store in my neighbourhood. It looked like an opticians run by supermodels. Each time I went in I found a few people trying out Google Glass then beating a hasty retreat. They didn’t even stay for the free coffee. I tried them and found them […]