(courtesy Simon & Schuster) Great big expansive sci-fi stories are always a huge delight to lose yourself in. While the really good ones ask some fairly intense questions about who we are and why we do what do (and why maybe we should rethink that because reasons), they also have Continue Reading
Book review: Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia) We live in a perilously binary world, one that separates everything into stark Os or 1s and refused to entertain the idea of halves, gradients or places in-between. Armed with that dangerously blinkered mindset, people then begin to assign worth and blame to those that either Continue Reading
The short and the short of it: The ultimate sacrifice of Crow: The Legend
(courtesy Baobab Studios) SNAPSHOTFrom the director of Madagascar, INVASION!, and ASTEROIDS! comes Baobab Studios’ latest visionary VR animation. The carefree forest animals imagine spring will last forever. However, winter comes and the animals soon realize that their lives are in danger. What they need is a hero; what they need Continue Reading
Songs, songs and more songs #96: Jacob Collier, almost monday, Peggy Gou, Dorian Electra + Jhariah … and Eurovision 2024 news!
(via Shutterstock) Music has the power to move us in ways that perhaps we don’t always understand. The really good stuff is near impossible to ignore or dismiss, and honestly why would you want to when it makes you feel so alive, and these five songs from a group of Continue Reading
Book review: The Death of John Lacey by Ben Hobson
Humanity loves its motherhood statements. There’s something comforting about referring to brotherhood, mercy and justice because they sound full of virtue and goodness and the assumption is made, somewhat erroneously, that everyone knows exactly what’s meant by them. But, like the word “love” itself, there’s often little examination of what Continue Reading
Survival against impossible extraterrestrial odds: Invasion ends its second season with hope … and not? (S2, E6-10)
(courtesy YouTube (c) AppleTV+) What a way to finish a season! While some series which start with brooding, slow-building portent and doom, and Invasion has had that in slowly nuanced spades throughout its first season and the second, fumble things going into the big dramatic narrative payoff, this exquisitely well-delivered Continue Reading
#Halloween movie review: Haunted Mansion
(courtesy IMP Awards) Creative inspiration can come from all kinds of strange, beautiful and unexpected places – a waterfall at sunset, a colourfully-dressed woman on a train at peak hour or a snippet of history, long forgotten but dredged up to fill a social media post with a fascinating factoid. Continue Reading
#Halloween book review: Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you. A book, they will assure you with a mix of solemnity and enthusiasm, is Continue Reading
#Halloween graphic novel review: Voyaging Vol. 1 – The Plague Star by George R R Martin (story) and art and adaptation by Raya Golden
(courtesy Penguin Random House) If really good sci-fi is all about to taking a great big, long, hard look at the dark soul of humanity, and the best of it is, then Voyaging Vol. 1 – The Plague Star by George R R Martin with art and adaptation by Raya Continue Reading
Retro movie #Halloween review: Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost
(courtesy IMDB (c) Warner Bros. Family Entertainment) Halloween would not be Halloween without Scooby-Doo! somewhere in the hauntingly spooky and hilariously freaky mix and, of course, solving a great mystery which in the case of 1999’s Scooby-Doo! and the Witch’s Ghost is literally bewitching one quaint New England town. The Continue Reading