What I read in 2010

I saw a similar list on the blog Worlds in a Grain of Sand, and couldn’t resist. These are the books I read in 2010, in the order I read them. The Victorian Chaise-Longue (Marghanita Laski, 1953) A young mother recuperates from tuberculosis in 1950s London, lying upon a Victorian chaise-longue, and dreams, or perhaps [...]

The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham, 1951)

The Day of the Triffids is often cited as the first and archetypal ‘cosy catastrophe’ novel. The hero, Bill Masen, is one of the few not to be blinded by the sights of a green comet storm as his eyes have been bandaged in hospital – in the first and most memorable scene he experiences [...]

Cosy catastrophes

The term ‘cosy catastrophe’ was coined by Brian Aldiss in his science fiction history Billion Year Spree. Cosy catastrophes are stories involving a sudden non-violent event wiping out most of civilization; the cosiness refers to the conceit of a band of survivors left to rebuild society in relative comfort. Aldiss originally used the phrase to [...]