Author Archive: NealeMonks
Birding Without Borders by Noah Strycker (book review).
Here’s a book about a hobby taken to an extreme. Casual birdwatching is common enough, and some people take it a bit seriously, planning daytrips or summer holidays to places with particularly interesting variety of birdlife. But Noah Strycker aimed even higher, taking himself around the world with the aim to ‘spot’ at least half […]
Star Wars: Dawn Of The Jedi: Into The Void by Tim Lebbon (book review).
Set thousands of years before the ‘Star Wars’ films, the ‘Dawn Of The Jedi’ series of novels focuses on the Je’daii order, a group of Force-sensitive individuals dedicated to keeping the balance within the Force. So, while somewhat analogous to the Jedi Knights of the ‘Star Wars’ universe featured in the films, they rejected the […]
FBP: Federal Bureau Of Physics #3 by Simon Oliver and Robbi Rodriguez (comic review).
Trying to assess the merits of a comic book series from a single issue part-way through the storyline isn’t easy at the best of times and the complex world of ‘FBP’ doesn’t help. But the overall gist is this: randomly occurring ‘bubbleverses’ pop up in our world and, within these, the normal rules of physics […]
Alien Bones by Chris Wyatt and Chris Green (graphic novel review).
Spaceships! Aliens! Dinosaurs! Pirates! Mix ’em together and what do you get? Well, in the hands of writer Chris Wyatt and artist Chris Green, a competently presented thriller aimed at young adults but with enough pizzazz to engage older readers as well. When schoolboy Liam loses his palaeontologist father in what appears to be an […]
Inferno Revealed: From Dante To Dan Brown by Deborah Parker and Mark Parker (book review).
Bridging the gap between literary criticism aimed at scholars and the readers of mass market fiction of the sort Dan Brown produces isn’t easy. Virtually nothing about Danté’s ‘Inferno’ is accessible by modern standards, not least of all because very few people read epic poetry of any sort, much less those written in medieval Italian. […]
Assassin’s Creed #001 (comic-book review).
From its origins as a video game, the ‘Assassin’s Creed’ franchise has successfully been spun out into a number of different media, including graphic novels and comics. The central idea is that there are two hidden forces at work in the world and have been for centuries. One is trying to bring humanity into a […]
Beneath An Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan Volume Two by Caitlin R. Kiernan (book review)
In the introduction by S. T. Joshi reflects as much his literary preferences as the work of American author Caitlin R. Kiernan in stating that she does not describe herself as a horror writer but as an author of weird fiction. The differences between these two genres are debatable and they are perhaps best thought […]
Shades Of Milk And Honey (The Glamourist Histories book 1) by Mary Robinette Kowal (book review).
Mix Jane Austen’s novels with the ‘Twilight’ juggernaut and you pretty much have where this book, ‘Shades Of Milk And Honey’, is going, though of course this being the world where no self-respecting fantasy author can possibly tell their tale in a single volume, it’s merely the first instalment of a five-book story. It’s also […]
Tales Of Ramion by Frank Hinks (book review).
Frank Hinks is a barrister and a dad and it is this latter activity that led him to start writing children’s books during the early 1990s. The ‘Ramion’ stories were born out of the stories he told his young sons and his three boys feature in both these volumes as the primary protagonists. Ramion itself […]
Mars by Rod Pyle (book review).
Mars is the planet most like the Earth in terms of environmental conditions and the one that holds most tightly to popular imagination. When HG Wells published his ‘War Of The Worlds’ in 1897, scientists couldn’t quite resolve surface details through the telescopes of the time and some believed they could see canals criss-crossing the […]
