Virtuoso, that’s the only way I can describe this authorial performance!
Gaiman’s inventive range defies description. It’s not just that the imaginative conceits of each story are so shockingly diverse, nor that the plots are so totally different, nor even that almost every mood known to humankind is reflected here. It’s that the literary style of each work is unique; you would almost think each story was written by a different author (and I sincerely hope they weren’t.) You might also think Gaiman was showing off, except that he just seems to be having loads of fun.
In Trigger Warning, global phenomenon and Sunday Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman returns to dazzle, captivate, haunt, and entertain with this third collection of short fiction, which includes a Doctor Who adventure, the David Bowie-inspired The Return of the Thin White Duke and a never-before published American Gods story, Black Dog.
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains was serialised on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in November 2015.
'We are all wearing masks. That is what makes us interesting. These are stories about those masks, and the people we are underneath them.' Neil Gaiman, writing from…
I am a cultural historian, film critic, literary critic, editor, and essayist–and a frustrated fiction writer–fascinated by ‘the fantastic’ in art or in life. Answering that fascination, I wrote Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (2002), and I’ve written two books for the BFI Film Classics series on two great movies of the fantastic, Rosemary’s Baby (2020) and It’s A Wonderful Life (2023). I also edited three anthologies of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy, The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (2010) and Victorian Fairy Tales (2015), and now an anthology, Origins of Science Fiction (2022) for Oxford World’s Classics.
It was Star Trek, Star Wars, and, most of all, Doctor Who that first made me fall in love with science fiction.
Some will think it an odd choice to include this novelization of Terry Nation’s television story, The Genesis of the Daleks, but Terrance Dicks is a much-underrated writer, and this portrait of war-devastated Skaro offers a fantastic image of humanity and inhumanity. Just as much as C. S. Lewis in Perelandra, the book has the Nazis on its mind, and the bunker where Davros creates his army of autonomous half-machine warriors replays the Berlin bunker where Hitler awaited the end.
In the midst of it all, the Doctor himself stands for goodness, for good humor, for compassion–a compassion that even includes at the climax of the book, the Daleks themselves. Aged ten, the Doctor was to me an image of what it might be to…
The Time Lords have a mission for the Doctor. Together with Sarah and Harry, he finds himself stranded on the war-torn planet Skaro where the conflict between the Thals and the Kaleds has been raging for a thousand years. Chemical and biological weapons have started a cycle of mutation among the planet's inhabitants that cannot be stopped. But Kaled scientist Davros has perfected a life support system and travel machine for the creature he knows his race will ultimately evolve into - the Dalek.
The Doctor must stop the creation of the Daleks, or perhaps affect their development so they…
For many people, reading has been a lifesaver for their mental health. I didn't begin reading until my 20s. But I wish I had had those windows into other realities when I was younger. Having a difficult childhood molds our adult lives, and therefore we can still be haunted by childhood memories. Reading can help us see other worlds and other people, and it can ignite our imagination. Growing up in a small fishing town in Scotland is the perfect backdrop for imagination, with coastlines lined with dark, boisterous waters and castles steeped in battles, folklore, and intrigues of the past. All this has given way to my writing.
Not to be confused with the Doctor Who episode of the same name. City at World’s End is one of the earliest dystopian stories.
The writer, Edmond Hamilton is more famous for Captain Future and his contributions to DC comics Batman, Green Lantern, and Superman. I enjoyed this novel for its quirky characters, as well as its simplicity as a sci-fi story. It explores crowd hysteria and basic fear of change and survival. It also highlights the need for adaptably in an ever-changing society and world, that has transformed so much since the early days of science fiction.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
I grew up watching 80s Saturday morning cartoons, playing RPGs such as Final Fantasy. Those cartoons and games didn’t care about genre, they cared about telling a story, about making you care about the characters. Hence you could have wizards driving space cars, or knights battling giant robots and so on. They were proof of how wonderfully crazy our imagination can go when we threw labels away and just create stories. The books in this list allow themselves to do that and go bigger, go bolder, showing us the readers what’s possible if we let loose. I hope this list takes others on such wonderful rides, like they did with me.
Take one of Dicken’s most famous characters, give him a timey wimey mcguffin straight from Doctor Who, a ghost girl with a knack to design wonderful gadgets, a dash of snark, the good looks of John Boyega, and the personality of a young Bruce Wayne looking over the downtrodden of a steampunk London, and you get one of the most peculiar and freshest depictions of Oliver Twist committed to paper in recent years.
I love this book because it has a lot of heart, and takes an old classic, giving it a continuation that is not afraid of going bigger and crazier adding elements from different genres, be it superhero, steampunk, mystery, and fantasy. It should be made into a movie.
I’m an award-winning astronomy author, writer, and speaker who has talked to over half a million people about the universe, including schools, the public, and businesses. My eighteen books have sold more than 350,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into 21 languages. I’ve written over 200 popular science articles for publications including The Guardian, New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal, and European Space Agency.
In recognition of my efforts to popularise astronomy, the asteroid (15347) Colinstuart is named after me. I also won The Margaret Mallett Award for Children’s Non-Fiction in 2020, was a runner-up in the European Astronomy Journalism Prize and am a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
I'm a sucker for time travel stories and they don't come much more bountiful than in the long-running TV show Doctor Who. I love it, particularly the juxtaposition between the ancient Gallifreyan's boundless enthusiasm and deep emotional trauma from seeing everyone he (and now she) loves come and go over time. Over the last 60 years, the show has tackled pretty much every paradox and possibility. Brake's book weaves the physics behind the TARDIS into backstage insights into the show.
Geek out over the TARDIS, aliens, alternate timelines, parallel worlds, and all your favorite characters from the Doctor Who Universe!
Doctor Who arrived with the Space Age, when the Doctor first began exploring the universe in a time-traveling spaceship. Over half a century since, the Doctor has gone global. Millions of people across this planet enjoy Doctor Who in worldwide simulcast and cinema extravaganzas. Doctor Who has infused our minds and our language and made it much richer.
What a fantastic world we inhabit through the Doctor. The program boils over withballsy women, bisexual companions, scientific passion, and a billion…
As a child, I became enthralled with both science and history. Also, who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh? The chance to combine all three? A dream come true!
The penultimate time traveler? What is not to love here. A time lord racing through time, saving the world past and present maintaining the status quo in a phone. Adventure, romance all done with a chuckle that will warm the coldest heart. Of course, a steady diet of this might lead one to become a cosplay addict existing from one Comic-con to the next.
We live forever, barring accidents. Just like everyone else in the universe.
The Doctor travels back to the Ancient Days, an era where life flourishes and death is barely known...
Then come the Kotturuh - creatures who spread through the cosmos dispensing mortality. They judge each and every species and decree its allotted time to live. For the first time, living things know the fear of ending. And they will go to any lengths to escape this grim new spectre, death.
The Doctor is an old hand at cheating death. Now, at last, he can stop it at source. He…
I’m Australian and there’s a big place in my heart for Australian-set stories. I read mostly for escapism, but there’s a deeper connection with tales from my own backyard. I’ve also always loved speculative fiction and I’m excited when my favourite genres and setting come together. I’m the author of five speculative fiction novels with Australian settings: the four novels in The Rephaim series (urban fantasy) and The Undercurrent (slightly futuristic/pre-apocalyptic). With The Rephaim series, I wanted to put angels, half-angels, and demons in a sunny coastal Australia setting, rather than the gloomy European forests we’re mostly used to for those types of stories. It was a lot of fun.
This is a great read. It’s fast-paced, has interesting characters, and plenty of action and intrigue.
It features an Australian teen (Sadie) who finds herself caught in the middle of an ancient conflict nearing its final battle. I enjoyed the Perth setting, the dynamic between Sadie and the people she cares about, and the brilliant way Myke brings a fresh twist to some creepy ancient mariner myths.
There's a great sense of menace and mystery as this story unfolds, and the last third book is hard to put down as Sadie races to save her city—and the world.
Sadie is sixteen and bored with life. It's summer, and lazing on the beach in the stifling heat with her cousins and Tom is a drag. Then something comes out of the sea.
Sadie soon finds herself caught in the middle of an ancient conflict that is nearing its final battle, a showdown that threatens to engulf her city and all those she loves in a furious tsunami.
A rollicking, fast-paced adventure with a feisty heroine, Fire in the Sea will appeal to fans of Garth Nix and Doctor Who. Great reading for ages fourteen and up.
Even before I found Lovecraft and Stephen King and my world turned, I was raised on Doyle, Wells, Hodgson, and Robert Louis Stevenson which gave me both a love of the "gentleman detective" era and a deep love of the late Victorian/early Edwardian historical period in general. Once you merge that with my abiding interest in all things weird and spooky, you can see where a lot of my stories come from. There seems to be quite a burgeoning market for this kind of mixing of detection and supernatural, and I intend to write more... maybe even a lot more.
Lumley is steeped in both the occult detective and the Lovecraftian tradition, and it shows most clearly in this set of pulpy occult detective stories featuring his cerebral-yet-tough Titus Crow, and involving wild flights of fancy in time and space that also arguably show some influence from Doctor Who. We get a lovely creepy origin story here, and several vignettes, but the highlight is the longer tale of the mysteries of the wyrm, and festering, crawling things in an ancient manor house and its library. It fairly oozes supernatural evil and is one of my favorite things.
Titus Crow is an occult investigator, psychic sleuth and cosmic voyager. In this book 11 short stories featuring Crow are brought together. These stories were written before the "Cthulhu Mythos" novels and follow Crow as he explores beyond the frontiers where mortal man is not meant to tread.
Before becoming an opera singer, I received my Masters in Healthcare Administration and worked in various healthcare settings, from a community health center to a large teaching hospital. I learned first-hand how the best-intentioned clinicians can make mistakes, and how those mistakes can lead to unintended consequences that can harm patients. Although it’s terrifying to think about, the best defense is to self-advocate as much as possible. It’s your body and your decision. Don’t give away your power.
I read this book for background for my first novel, in an effort to understand why some physicians (very few, thank goodness) kill. What I discovered in this book is what I experienced in real life working for eleven years in healthcare: hospitals are breeding grounds for medical error and cover-ups. Physician, protect thyself, so to speak. The number of times this insane MD (Michael Swango) was allowed to continue practicing when he could have been stopped is appalling, but not surprising to those inside healthcare.
Shows how an apparently respectable young doctor murdered patients and poisoned co-workers while being consistently protected by an oblivious and dangerously secretive medical establishment.
I’m a Canadian writer with a degree in Mediaeval Studies. Even as a child, I wrote stories about characters who weren’t entirely human; they were also always people lurking on the edges of things—families, cultures, places, ways of being, even people existing only on the edges of becoming themselves. Those have always been where I found my stories and as an adult I haven’t lost this fascination and the need to tell such tales. Gods, assassins, devils, demons, shapeshifters, immortal wanderers, and ordinary people caught up in their history, vast, deep worlds, and complex characters—that’s what I do.
A classic from the eighties, The Initiate is the start of the Time Master Trilogy. (Nothing to do with Doctor Who!) A powerful young sorcerer finds refuge among the Initiates, scholar-sorcerers who serve the seven gods of Order, but the seven outcast gods of Chaos, their ancient counterparts and enemies, claim Tarod for their own. Tarod’s journey into himself is a dark one. Politics, magic, friendships betrayed, and gods you really do not want to put any faith in or reliance on taking an active part in events as Chaos tries to take back control of the world it once ruled in a reign of terror. I’ve loved this series and reread it I don’t know how many times.
The seven gods of Order had ruled unchallenged for centuries, served by the adepts of the Circle in their bleak northern castle on the Star Peninsula. But for Tarod - the most enigmatic and formidable sorcerer in Circle's ranks - a darker affinity had begun to call. Threatening his beliefs, even his sanity, it rose unbidden from beyond time; an ancient and deadly adversary that could plunge the world into madness and chaos - and whose power might rival that of the gods themselves. And though Tarod's mind and heart were pledged to Order, his soul was another matter...
