J.G. Ballard : The Complete Short Stories
Aug21

J.G. Ballard : The Complete Short Stories

The Pacifics of Our Imaginations: J.G. Ballard The Complete Short Stories       “In the codes of Renata’s body, in the junctions of nipple and finger, in the sulcus of her buttocks, waited the possibilities of a benevolent psychopathology.”  (Zodiac 2000) “Its ruined appearance [was] profoundly depressing, an Auschwitz of the soul whose mausoleums contained the mass graves of the still undead.” (The Terminal Beach) “Already...

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A Feast for Crows: Book Four of A Song of Ice and Fire
Aug21

A Feast for Crows: Book Four of A Song of Ice and Fire

A Feast for Crows Book Four of A Song of Ice and Fire     Those early episodes of HBO’s Game of Thrones…they seem so long ago, don’t they?  Why, back then Ned Stark’s head was still firmly attached to his shoulders and Daenerys’s dragons were cute and playful little tykes.  Now, with the penultimate series well under way, Ned’s head is but a distant memory and the dragons are all grown up and ready to burn… So I thought it might...

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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)
Aug12

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)     I had been given the erroneous impression that writer/director Luc Besson simply thrusts the audience into Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets with little or no context to help establish the coming action. Not so. To the hauntingly familiar notes of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ we see the space station Alpha in 1975 orbiting the earth as different races from the home...

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