The Life and Opinions of Andrew Rilstone

First Contact? by Hugh Walters The latest instalment of my occasional series looking back on a series of science fiction novels you almost d...

Previous Section  What on Earth or Uranus does Hugh Walters think he is doing? I don’t think the God-talk can be written off as window dress...

Previous Section Chariots of the Gods (published in 1968) set out to debunk religion. Primitive Man saw spaceships and aliens and mistook t...

Previous Section  If this were an adult science fiction novel — and I fully grok that it is not — I think we would expect it to develop in ...

Previous Section On page 89 of the book old “Whiskers”, the comic relief ex-Battle of Britain duffer tells Lord Benson, out of the blue “I t...

Previous Section   The boffins have detected peculiar signals coming from...Planetty MacPlanetFace. No-one can listen to the signals for ver...

Previous Section Science fiction is about opening doors and looking at things from new angles. I remember the first line of 2001: A Space Od...

Strange noises are coming from Uranus. The boffins decide they want a very close look at Uranus. Because no-one has ever seen Uranus before....

Book-Enjoyers Bingo Have you done any of these slightly amusing things in the context of a book?  If you can answer “maybe” to at least seve...

The Wolves of Eternity by Karl-Ove Knausgaard People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-l...

The Mohole Mystery Hugh Walters Sooner or later, it had to be faced. Chris Godfrey spent four whole books exploring the Moon; but he whizzed...

Spaceship to Saturn Hugh Walters In 1775, a Dutch American named Rip Van Winkle had slightly too much to drink. He woke up, twenty years lat...