Mark Charan Newton

In a moment of shamelessness, my editor Julie Crisp asked me to plug the trailer for Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are The Angels. Of course, I was going to anyway, but I wasn’t going to let her know that. Don’t forget to check out my conversation with Alden. You need to a flashplayer enabled browser [...]

[Read more →]

A few months ago I wrote a post about the fetish that bloggers have for frontlist titles – those books about to be released, the hot new things. I’m increasingly discovering that there is something resembling a backlist movement. This is what the internet should be used for – not to prop up the titles [...]

[Read more →]

Alden Bell is a Tor UK stablemate, and the author of the incredible book, The Reapers Are The Angels. Using whatever power this blog has for good, I thought it would be great to have a back and forth chat. He’s a great guy, and this was fun to do – we had a wide-ranging [...]

[Read more →]

I’m sure this is a variant of a theme that has repeated itself for years, though I wonder if this time it has some chops: Professor Sharon Lamb, from the University of Massachusetts in Boston, accuses the new generation of superheroes, exemplified by Robert Downey Junior’s playboy millionnaire Iron Man, of being bad role models [...]

[Read more →]

A rare interview with a grand master of American literature, Don DeLillo: DeLillo now lives in Westchester County in New York State with his wife, Barbara, a landscape designer, but he has not completely left his childhood neighbourhood, a place he insists still “looks the same, though the people are different”: an influx of new [...]

[Read more →]

Not a review, this – just some impressions. First I’ll be upfront: I’m a big fan of Harrison’s work. Nearly everything that he’s written is of superior quality. His descriptive power is second-to-none, and he can distinguish any environment with remarkable power. This is especially noticeable in Climbers, his non-SFF novel. It’s the story of [...]

[Read more →]

I’m not going to add to the numerous posts that can be found throughout the Internet. I’m not going to review Inception; suffice to say I enjoyed it; I enjoyed the emotionally flat tone, and enjoyed the how-the-fuck-did-they-film-the-hotel-corridor-scene assault on the mind (I don’t want to know the answer to the latter, thanks). And I [...]

[Read more →]

If you buy SFX Magazine this month you will notice that there is a book club feature written by someone called “Mark Charon Newton” with the interesting and much cooler “o” spelling of Charan. I don’t know who this chap is, but his write-up on Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock makes me want to read [...]

[Read more →]

The Guardian blog on giving pink sparkly pony-tailed book covers to girls: Earlier this year Meg Rosoff expressed a desire to let loose with an illegal firearm, goaded by the “aggressive pinkness” of the upcoming Queen of Teen award. My immediate reaction was to applaud her vehemently. The Q of T website has all the [...]

[Read more →]

There are some interesting discussions to be found at the blogs of Tobias Buckell and Jay Lake, where they discuss the lack of mid-career advice online. The audience changes. For one, the aspiring authors, whether they realize it or mean to do it, start pushing back. If you start thinking out loud about problems they [...]

[Read more →]

This came in the inbox this morning, and I thought I should share the news. (Nice one, Cheryl!) — Introducing Wizard’s Tower Press Wizard’s Tower Press is a new small press publisher specializing in science fiction, fantasy and related literature. Founded by Hugo Award winning critic, Cheryl Morgan, the company aims to do the following: [...]

[Read more →]

As reported in the Guardian, Internet addiction is driving South Koreans into realms of fantasy: According to the government, about 2 million South Koreans – nearly one in 10 online users – are addicted to the internet. Many spend every waking moment immersed in role-playing games, in which players form alliances to guide their characters [...]

[Read more →]