Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Brian Aldiss: A seriously speculative entertainer
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
MANY years ago, I winced at Brian Aldiss’s polite but emphatic battering of a hapless presenter during a disastrous Radio 4 interview.
So I was nervous when The Third Alternative magazine commissioned me to interview Aldiss in 2003. Brutal with poorly framed questions, he was nevertheless generous with his time and profligate with his witty asides.
Disgusted with consumerism, corporate greed, religion and literary snobbery, he could also be scathing about science fiction, the genre for which he is best known: “Fans threatened to break my legs when they first read Billion Year Spree [Aldiss’s history of SF], illiterates that they were,” he revealed during the interview. “Of course things have settled down a bit over the years but I am still a constitutional non-joiner.”
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