Past Programs
Books - Science Fiction - 2008
The Omega Force by Rick Moody (review) Read Transcript
23/09/2008
Rick Moody has been described as having a prodigious gift for ventriloquism and while accolades for his writing seem to trail his every word, as we'll hear, not all critics sing his praises. Rick Moody's latest book The Omega Force is a collection of three stories. Kirsten Alexander found the collection patchy terrain.
JG Ballard's autobiography (review) Read Transcript
11/05/2008
Although British writer JG Ballard has been very prolific, both as a novelist and a short-story writer, he's most widely known outside the circle of Ballard enthusiasts for two books which have been made into films: Crash, in which the characters become increasingly obsessed with the violent psychosexuality of car crashes, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, based on Ballard's childhood in Shanghai and his experiences in a Japanese civilian internment camp during World War 2.
This year JG Ballard published an autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. David Astle reviews it for The Book Show.
JG Ballard's autobiography (review) Read Transcript
05/05/2008
Although British writer JG Ballard has been very prolific, both as a novelist and a short-story writer, he's most widely known outside the circle of Ballard enthusiasts for two books which have been made into films: Crash, in which the characters become increasingly obsessed with the violent psychosexuality of car crashes, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, based on Ballard's childhood in Shanghai and his experiences in a Japanese civilian internment camp during World War 2.
This year JG Ballard published an autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. David Astle reviews it for The Book Show.
Aurealis award winner: David Kowalski's The Company of the Dead (review)
18/03/2008
Australia is well known for the calibre of its scientists -- eight of whom have received Nobel prizes over the years. What we're not as well known for is our science fiction writers. But one emerging novelist is determined to change all that. David Kowalski's debut sci-fi thriller The Company of the Dead has won two prestigious Aurealis awards. The plot involves time machines, the Titanic, and nuclear catastrophe.
ABC Science journalist Peter Lavelle has read The Company of the Dead for the Book Show.
William Gibson's Spook Country (review) Read Transcript
05/02/2008
Do you ever get the feeling that the future is already here? In the high-tech society we live in, all those futuristic fantasies and gadgets we were told about when we were growing up have become part of our everyday lives -- except maybe the fridge that does everything.
Science fiction writer William Gibson, who is known for his futuristic novels, feels the same way, so he's taken to writing novels set in the high-tech present.
His latest book, Spook Country, is billed as a sequel to his earlier book Pattern Recognition.
Spook Country is a spy-novel-cum-thriller that engages with the paranoid politics of our time and is peopled with strange characters like Bobby Chombo who doesn't sleep in the same place twice, and a Russian-speaking Cuban-Chinese criminal.
Simon Cooper reviews Spook Country for the Book Show.
