Marc Aplin's Blog, page 234

Hugo Award Nominees Announced.

For those that missed it, yesterday the finalists for the 2014 Hugo Awards and finalists for the 1939 Retrospective Hugo Awards were announced live from EasterCon in Glasgow. As expected, the Awards team were able to announce that they had broken all previous voting records with 1,923 valid nominating ballots (1,889 electronic and 34 paper) coming in for the […]

Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson

This review contains some spoilers. Read with caution if you have yet to finish the book. Midnight Tides, book five of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, provides robust proof of Steven Erikson’s skills as an author, and kicks the whole series into overdrive. Now at book 5/10, we have made it to the middle […]

The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski

I try not to get my hopes up too high when I check out new author/book recommendations from friends or even other book reviewers I respect. What touches one person does not always apply for another. Plus, my reading list seems to grow at a rate that would require me to give up work and […]

Hugo Award Finalists To Be Announced Saturday 19 April

Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”), has announced that the finalists for this year’s Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and for the Retrospective (“Retro”) Hugo Awards for 1939, will be announced on Saturday 19 April, starting at 8:30 p.m. BST. The nominations announcement will be live-streamed from […]

Neil Gaiman lecture: Reading and obligation

For those that missed it late last year, here is a lecture which Neil Gaiman gave focusing on the future of reading and libraries focusing particularly on children and young people. In the lecture, the bestselling author advocates his belief in the importance of reading for pleasure and our obligations as readers, writers and citizens’ […]

Reading Agency survey finds 63% of men rarely read

In a saddening, disappointing report, The Reading Agency has found that as many as 63% of men have given up reading books almost altogether in favour of television and movies. Of these 63%, 30% went so far as to say that they hadn’t done any reading worth mentioning since they left school. I have to […]

Children’s Fantasy: Eight of the Best – Part One

I do not write for children, but entirely for myself. Yet I do write for some children, and have done so from the beginning. This wonderful, contradictory statement comes from Alan Garner, who merits a place – at least in my mind – at the high table of children’s fantasy literature. Garner continues: Only recently […]

In Defence of the Chosen One

One of fantasy’s most commonly mocked tropes is the chosen one. This makes sense; it’s also one of fantasy’s most recurring tropes, and there are a lot of very good reasons why it can feel like a clichéd or even lazy feature. However, I don’t think the chosen one narrative is always negative; in fact, […]

Dunk and Egg Collection Announced

Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hadn’t seen, read or at very least heard of A Game of Thrones… However, the stories of ‘Dunk & Egg’ – The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2003) and The Mystery Knight (2010) – are far less well-known – mainly because they’ve been buried in genre […]

“Silver Linings” by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris

Last month the newest edition to Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris’ Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series was released. The latest installment, Dawn’s Early Light, features Braun and Books on their next assignment, which brings them to the United States to investigate a series of nautical and aerial disasters. If you’ve not gotten a chance to […]