Val's Random Comments

I haven't finished a book this week and next week is going to be a very busy at work. As a result there won't be reviews this weeken...

Guy Gavriel Kay is not a fast writer. His novels take a lot of research. Over the past two decades he has published about one book every t...

A Dutch edition of Steph Swainston's short story The Wheel of Fortune was my introduction to her writing. I decided quickly I needed to...

A few weeks ago I received the anthology Lightspeed Year One , edited by John Joseph Adams, as a reward for supporting one of their Kickstar...

This review is a rewritten version of a piece I wrote in 2009. I have reread the collection last week but my opinion of it hasn't change...

Drowned Worlds: Tales from the Anthropocene and Beyond is an anthology recently released by Solaris. Editor Jonathan Strahan mentioned in...

Writing must be a great profession, - you can kill off entire worlds and get away with it. Having been a Stephen King fan for about 20 yea...

Chinese-American author Ken Liu's star is rising in speculative fiction. He started selling stories in 2002, but the bulk of his work ...

The Wurms of Blearmouth is the fifth instalment in Erikson's Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas. In the fourth, Crack'd Pot Tr...

For some reason I never get around to reading as much short fiction as I'd like. Collections and anthologies are a pain in the backside ...