The SF Site: Featured Reviews Archive

The reviews are sorted alphabetically by authors' last name -- one or more pages for each letter (plus one for Mc). All but some recent reviews are listed here. Links to those reviews appear on the Recent Feature Review Page.

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The Twist by Richard Calder
reviewed by Nathan Brazil
The central character is a 9 year-old anti-hero named Nicola E. Newton. She runs away from home, and makes friends with Venusian Necrobabe Viva Venera, and John Twist, her half-dead cowboy boyfriend. The story is set in Tombstone, a version of the Wild West, which exists in perpetuity as part of a Venusian plan to save humanity from the dangerous technology acquired as a result of interplanetary contact.

Frenzetta, Lord Soho, and "Zarzuela" by Richard Calder
reviewed by David Soyka
Whereas Cytheria posits three "realities" that begin to bleed into one another, Frenzetta takes place at a time in which the connections between these realities has been severed. The bizarre results are twofold: much of humanity has mutated into "the perverse" -- beings whose DNA have become entwined with other animal forms -- and much of human technology has been rendered useless and a sort of retro-18th century ethos prevails.

Malignos by Richard Calder
reviewed by Rich Horton
This novel is an entertaining and baroque work, with a wonderfully imagined "journey to the centre of the Earth" as its centrepiece. It is full of action, full of weird landscapes, full of unusual characters, and it is fast-moving to boot.

Cythera and Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things by Richard Calder
reviewed by David Soyka
The story goes that in rejecting J.G. Ballard's automobile-erotic novel, Crash, an editor commented that the author should seek psychiatric help. If that editor ever read Richard Calder, he would undoubtedly recommend immediate institutionalization.

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