Anita gets a solid for stars for what it is and what it has done. If it had been written TODAY I'd poetically give it a three... maybe three and a half.This is easily the earliest installment in the urban fantasy genre I've tangled with and was cited by Neil Gaiman as one he grew up with. While...
Keith Roberts’ The Chalk Giants is not so much a novel, but a collection of linked novellas. This linkage, in the edition I read, is slight, involving a returning fertility goddess. How these links are harmonized, is a bit muddy. On one hand, it may be better to take the stories as stand alone...
Contents • Keith Roberts. The Passing of the Dragons. 1972• Douglas R. Mason. Algora One Six. 1972• James White. Commuter. 1972 Why is the polite young man so interested in the old lady?• Sydney J. Bounds. The Possessed. 1972• Colin Kapp. What the Thunder Said. 1972• H. A. Hargreaves. Tangled Web...
A panoramic novel of men and machines, Kiteworld presents a future world in which sturdy, highly trained crews launch daring pilots into the stratosphere, borne aloft on giant Cody manlifter kites to watch the horizon and the skies for demonic monsters strikingly suggestive of guided missiles and...
Ceilings and walls, once white, were stained with the golden-brown glaze of nicotine; the walls, timbered and coarsely pargeted, were enlivened with plaques and ornaments, trays and medallions of brass. Among them were curious rural relics: a set of quoits, chained and chrome-plated; stirrups and...
James Elroy Flecker. It wasn’t all that late, not much after twenty hundred; but day after day of heat had produced a strange, hazy overcast, so that the light seemed to be draining away faster than usual from between the high chalk hills. Kaeti stood arms folded at the one window of the cell, st...
Then the growly thing in the sky came closer very quickly, and barked once like a dog on the roof of the shack. The Rural heard the scutter of its claws; at this point she woke up. She had been dreaming; though it is by no means certain that the concept was known to her. She was very afraid. She ...
A single lamp, hung above them from one of the heavy beams, threw their faces into sharp relief, accentuated the pallor of the sick man as he lay with one end of Father Edwardes's violet stole tucked beneath his neck, the fabric stretched between them like a banner of faith. The old man's eyes ro...
You’re disoriented; for a moment you think you’re back in your room in Fellbarrow Road. You go to swing your legs out of bed but you’re already lying on the floor. You sit up, and bang your head again. It’s pitch dark, nothing’s where it ought to be. You nearly panic; then your hand brushes the s...
As there is no point at which one can be said to sleep. The man in the bed reflects on this. Seen as a metaphor, its inference is clear. Birth and death alike are unremembered. What cannot be remembered cannot exist. It is not real. He wonders that he has never before understood such a very simpl...
‘Up, up…down. Yes, definitely down. Overpowering it. Up, down. That one’s all right. Down, down…’ He strode grandly along the big upstairs room, with its mansard lights, its piles of paintings and frames. He turned at the end of his domain, and viewed the potential collection. Kaeti was surprised...
To the east were the hills that form the high spine of Brigantia; west and south lay the impenetrable fastness of the Silures. The fortress stood squarely in the gap, effectively defenceless, a standing invitation to seaborne attack; it was the weakest link I had yet seen in the defences of the P...
Within minutes of the lorry moving off, my head had cleared and I was able to realize, icily, just what sort of a fool I’d been. I sat huddled in a corner of the truck, steadying myself as well as I could against the jolting and swaying; round me the merriment went on unchecked. Bottles were drai...