Their Russians were better than our Germans

A review of The Space Race by Deborah Cadbury and Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski Part of VL’s celebration of The International Year of Astronomy Like a good rail service, space travel is, and should be, boring, a steady sequence of predictable events with everything turning up on time and only failure drawing your [...]

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Go Nagai’s ‘Star Fleet’ (plus Giveaway)

We don’t normally go in for film/TV reviews, but as it’s Geek Week, and also rather good   timing, we thought it would be fun to let our very own manga/anime Mistress Lesley Gallacher loose on the newly released ‘Star Fleet’ DVD set – referred to earlier in the week.  This is the result: —o— [...]

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Give them Lego

A Review of Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford Of the half-witteries that have brought us to the present crisis, one of the worst is `creative industry’. This is a phrase used to describe music, television, advertizing and other pursuits where overpaid mediocrities are held up as the saviours of the nation because they can sometimes [...]

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Comics as a serial medium.

Article by John Kennedy A lot of the time, when we hear about comics these days, it’s about how they are now a valid medium, or how it’s now okay to think of them as art. How comics have proven that they can tell stories as compelling and meaningful as those in other media. How [...]

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The most unkindest cut.

Being edited out of one blockbuster science fiction movie is unfortunate. Being edited out of two must begin to feel personal – but that’s exactly what happened to regular Vulpes Libris guest Jay Benedict – and Moira (always happy to poke around in tender places) thought that ‘Geek Week’ was an ideal excuse to find [...]

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The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Kicking off GEEK WEEK, old school style. When I first read this story as a young teen for a school assignment, it boggled my mind. Of course, for someone used to non-fiction nature books to then read science fiction was a jolt anyways, but to encounter Bradbury’s usual insight to the dark and strange side [...]

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Coming up on Vulpes Libris

IT’S GEEK WEEK! It’s time to discover your inner geek. And if you thought that geeks were just sad Billy no-mates with regrettable  personal hygiene standards, zero dress sense and the social skills of an amoeba, think again. Geek is the new black.  Geek is cool. Don’t believe us?  Read ‘em and weep … —o— [...]

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Article: Brian Clegg on the Kindle

TELL ME A STORY The book world is panicking. (Again.) The latest version of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader has a text to speech function that enables it to read a book out loud. Admittedly it’s still quite computer-speaky, but the technology is better than it used to be, and is improving all the time. The [...]

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The Thirteen Treasures by Michelle Harrison

First of all Congratulations to Michelle Harrison for winning the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize with her debut novel The 13 Treasures.  I was lucky enough to have been given a copy of the book before it was released (have I made it clear how much I love my job yet???) and I raced through it [...]

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

I’ve come a little late to this book – although translated into English in 2008, Muriel Barbery’s second novel was first published in French back in 2006 – but there is perhaps some advantage to reading a novel after the popular and critical love-ins have receded. A hybrid of literary and commercial fiction that has [...]

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