Hilary Bailey (1936–2017)

M.John Harrison - Running down

A chance meeting with an old school acquaintance leads to a deepening involvement with chaos...

White stars - Michael Moorcock

No Jerry Cornelius but lots of strange characters, happenings and locales...

Barrington J.Bayley - The bees of knowledge

A man left in a space suit after an accident is rescued by some very familiar aliens....

Peter Jobling - Building blocks

On a planet with threw moons an archaeologist notices something odd in his latest dig...starts well but loses focus...

Mal Dean - Slow drag

A rather painful visit to a library?

Robert Meadly - Conversations at Ma Ata

A difficult journey is interrupted by a fanciful argument about a crime seen in a mirror....

Robert Meadly - Love at lost sight

A man is transfixed by a woman on a train...things get stranger and stranger...

Nigel Francis - The broken field

Very odd, seems to be about missing limbs...

Nigel Francis - Black hole

Declares this is about 'Bloodseed space disturbances' dated from 1999to 2000...… (more)

I suppose I'd better start by saying I'm generally annoyed by writers resorting to elaborate devices to get in first-person narration for their (often historical/mythical, but not always) protagonist, no matter how unlikely that seems—here Bailey needs Cassandra to survive long beyond the defeat and sack of Troy in order to start writing her memoirs twenty years later. After all that elaboration, you might think that it's all going to be Cassandra, but in fact it isn't, we stray into the heads of other people at certain points. I don't think tight first-person or third-person narration is the only way to tell a story, but I certainly find it disappointing when writers go to considerable lengths to find a first-person narrative device, but then stray off it.

I didn't think it was possible to write a boring novel about Cassandra and Troy, but ultimately this one was one.… (more)