Book Group report: D is for … Dune

Dune by Frank Herbert This was our book group choice for this month – a good lockdown read being a veritable chunkster (884 pages in the edition I read). I’ve read it twice before, as a teenager in the 1970s followed by sequels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, then again in the 1980s after Read More

We’re doomed! Or are we?

A Farewell To Ice by Peter Wadhams One theme that has emerged in much of my reading of late is that of icy and mostly northern climes. From Beryl Bainbridge’s Titanic novel Every Man for Himself to Midge Raymond’s Antarctic penguins in My Last Continent to Eowyn Ivey’s Alaska in To The Bright Edge of the World, then Stef Read More

The end of California dreaming?

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins I adore speculative fiction. Show me a post-disaster scenario or near future alternative society and I’m all over it, as they say. Given the puffs on the cover for the author’s first book of short stories, Battleborn, and knowing only that this novel is set in a near-future California Read More