Christmas Opening
The shop will be open on the next few Sunday afternoons in the run up to Christmas
Hours - 12.00 - 17.00
Thanksgiving means…
… having to say everything’s at least a day late!
Shadow of Pirate Freedom
I’ve recently finished the latest Gene Wolfe hardback, Pirate Freedom. It’s a fairly easy read about a priest who decides to leave his Cuban seminary and discovers that he’s actually gone back in time somehow to the age of pirates and the Spanish Main.
It should be exciting, but his memoir drifts through his adventures very blandly with no particular sense of excitment. The time travel ‘just happens’ as he wanders down the road to Havana and he soon realises that things are radically different but he doesn’t seem to care much and whatever morals he’s been inculcated with vanish surprisingly easily.
Perhaps it’s because it’s framed as a quickly-written memoir written years later that any emotion seems to have been leached out of the telling.
There’s a twist or two of course, and a revelation, but ultimately it’s one of the least exciting books I’ve read recently…
But I’m now re-reading The Shadow of the Torturer (which I’ve not read since it first appeared in paperback) - and enjoying it a lot more than Pirate Freedom !
Maybe there are layers of meaning and relevancies in PF that I missed or didn’t consider particularly deep so I may track down a review or two to see what they say but I doubt I’ll go back to the book itself.
Or maybe I’ll leave it a good quarter of a century like I have SotT !
Badger puzzled by sheep
Just arrived!
It’s a normal sized paperback; he’s about 23cm long… there’s another picture on the Critters page.
£5.99, before you ask!
Writers Bloc event - TO THE DEVIL AN ASBO
Our favourite local writers group have their spooky halloween event on Wednesday!
Usual place, the cellar bar of the Cannon’s Gait in the High Street at 20.00
Day Off!
Please note that I won’t be in on Saturday 27th, although the shop will be open as usual…
Weather permitting, I’ll be doing something exciting, instead!
Robert Jordan
So, the wheel of time has ground to a stop.
Robert Jordan died yesterday, having lost his fight against amyloidosis.
Back in 1990 his UK publishers rep came in to the shop I was running to go through the new titles for the next couple of months.
One of them was a big new fantasy hardback, nice dj, map printed on the inside covers - looked very nice, but it was an almost completely unknown author. I ordered one copy! There was no mention of a sequel.
The next year the rep came in to sell me the sequel saying that it was going to be a trilogy.
The year after that he came in to sell me volume three of a series…
Around about then I started winding people up by claiming that a ‘wheel of time’ was obviously like a clock face and that therefore there would be 12 volumes - this seemed really unlikely back then and people assumed I was joking but now it seems like time really has been called an hour early.
Bestiary Exhibition
Well, the exhibition ended a few days ago and most of the prints, etc. have been taken down. The 10 framed photos are still hung up for the moment but I guess they’ll come down when I figure where to store them! Or you could buy one! Just click through to the Bestiary site…
The 2008 calendars are now better displayed - the wall they’re usually on had been used for the solvent transfer prints…
Winterbirth hardbacks
My supplier is temporarily out of the hardback edition; I’ll know early next week whether they are still able to supply them.
In the meantime, I won’t be taking firm orders…
edited on 22.8.o7 to add that further stock has just arrived here…. 
A Bestiary of Authors
Some of the framed photos:
And there’s quite a lot more!
Transreal Fiction
Transreal Fiction is a shop dedicated to selling science fiction, fantasy & related books, together with a limited selection of other merchandise.But really, it’s about books. Transreal Fiction opened in April 1997. The owner, Mike Calder, first sold sf & f books many years ago and has worked in the business either part- or full-time since. For years he also had a respectable job as well, but that’s another story…
The shop is named after the term coined by Rudy Rucker to describe his fiction and I thought it an apt name for a shop specialising in speculative fiction. And, in case you’re wondering, yes, Rudy Rucker was happy to allow me to use of the term as a name for my shop.
This year’s Fringe Art Exhibition was called Alien Surfaces. There’s a link to more info at the top…
