Tag archives for Fiction - Page 15
Book Review – First There Wasn’t, Then There Was by Troy Blackford
First There Wasn't, Then There Was by Troy Blackford My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a very strange tale, and definitely the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from someone who'd lost everything and was living on the streets. The premise is that four young guys, all smokers, see an old man shambling around every day when they are out on their smoke breaks. The old man is always talking, never stops or addresses anyone directly and refuses money or any other attempts to engage. He never stands still long enough for them to hear what he says. One day one of the young smokers has an idea, they pop a digital dictaphone in his pocket and record what he says for a few hours. When they listen back they find an unexpectedly coherent story, told consciously…
Book review – Casting Shadows Everywhere by L.T. Vargus
Casting Shadows Everywhere by Vargus My rating: 4 of 5 stars A dark and twisted coming of age tale with a satisfying conclusion. Told as a teenage boy's journal this breaks a couple of writing rules, it is mostly tell with little show, which works because this is a journal. There are stories through the journal of the protagonist's fevered dreams, and we get 'then I woke up' a couple of times. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, we get a good view of the inner psyche of the character (helped along by the fact that there is also a commentary on what he's learning in Psychology 101 that seems to mirror some of what is going on in his life). The basis of the story is that Jake has grown up in a single parent family. Lacking a…
Book Review – The Summer Isles by Ian R MacLeod
The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod My rating: 4 of 5 stars An alternative history through the eyes of a gay Oxford don. The premise is that the Germans won the First World War, their March 1918 offensive succeeded and the war ended in the August with the defeat of France and Britain. The Peace Treaty strips Britain of a number of colonies and overseas territories in much the same way that the Germans were in our own history. Britain has a violent period in the 1920s and a former corporal, John Arthur, becomes the leader of a Modernist movement. The story starts in the early part of 1940 when the Empire Alliance has been in power for at least a decade. A number of short victorious wars has restored much of the Imperial prestige lost at the end…
A215 – TMA02 – Rounds
This is the story I submitted for the second assignment on the Open University A21 Creative Writing course. There will be a revised version of it eventually to improve it in line with the tutor feedback. Rounds Alice clipped the name badge onto her uniform before picking up her keys. First stop today was Granny Jack's house. She needed advice before visiting Fiona, her childhood friend. Outside it was a warm, dry spring day. Daffodils bloomed and the hedge had lost its clipped rectangular shape. Alice's car was parked on the narrow roadway outside her terraced cottage. She opened the boot with her key and checked the contents of her bag before taking it out and locking up behind. She strode off along the road, swinging the bag as she went. Granny Jack was the oldest living resident of…
Book Review – Memory by Linda Nagata
Memory by Linda Nagata My rating: 4 of 5 stars I very much enjoyed this and there is a real sense of both the characters and the setting developing over the course of the story. The back cover blurb describes it thus: "A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives: On an artificial world with a forgotten past, floods of "silver" rise in the night like fog, rewriting the landscape and consuming those caught in its cold mists. Seventeen-year-old Jubilee knows that no one ever returns from the silver--but then a forbidding stranger appears, asking after her beloved brother, lost long ago to a silver flood. Could he still be alive? And why does the silver rise ever higher, threatening to drown the world? Jubilee pursues the truth on a quest to unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther…