Val's Random Comments

Well, it has certainly been an eventfully year for me on all fronts and reviewing was no exception. I most certainly didn't expect to be...

I was hoping to finish Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax in 2009 and I have managed in the nick of time. This is going to be the l...

One argument in the (completely pointless) debate on whether or not science fiction is dying is that the genre is a very anglophone affair. ...

One of the three book stores in the city centre of Almere went under a couple of weeks ago. This is a real shame. It was not the largest of ...

For some reason not entirely clear to me at the moment I attempted to read Edward Rutherfurd's latest novel in the busiest week of the y...

Dragons are a fantasy cliché I am not particularly fond of. Not that it cannot be used to great effect but I rarely encounter books where th...

Summer of the Apocalypse is to date the only novel by James Van Pelt (I promise to stick with the US spelling of his name but why on earth ...

I was lucky enough to win another contest on one of the Dutch language SF/F forums I frequent. Het Bouwplan appeared with the small publishe...

In March 2008 one of the titans of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90. At the time he was working on The Last Theorem ,...

I hate to leave a series unfinished if it is at all palatable and while the first two books of the Night Angel trilogy where not brilliant, ...