Hauling Like A Brooligan

Stephen Gallagher

Author: Steve

  • Eleventh Hour USA

    I was encouraged to hear that Eleventh Hour Executive Producer Cyrus Voris told the Television Critics Association last week that “We’re trying very hard to ground our show in the real world. There was a CBS press release that described the show as ‘five minutes in the future.’ I don’t even know if it’s even…

  • That’s One Bad Horse

    If you haven’t caught up with it yet, today’s the day to catch all three parts of Joss Whedon’s online musical Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, with Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day. It gets off to a slow start but it’s witty, glorious, and sweet. After tomorrow it’ll be taken down and you’ll…

  • The Thirty-Nine Steps

    I recently went back to John Buchan’s novel The Thirty Nine Steps, the template for all modern on-the-run thrillers from The Fugitive to 24 to the entire Jason Bourne trilogy. The re-reading confirmed my remembered impressions. The book has terrific narrative velocity. It also falls apart to an utterly unmemorable end, and the story doesn’t…

  • What the Filk

    Got to share this… Every now and again I used to walk 200 yards up the lane to my village local where I’d meet with a bunch of fannish mates who, once a month and in a more central venue, constituted the core of the Preston SF Group. PSFG meetings were open to all; the…

  • Plots and Misadventures

    Thanks to Ellen Datlow for the heads-up this morning, telling me that my second book of short stories has been nominated in the Fiction Collection category of the IHG Awards. “The International Horror Guild Awards have been presented annually since 1995. Based on public recommendations, the juried awards recognize outstanding achievements in the field of…

  • Thomas M Disch

    I’m sad to hear that the death of Thomas M Disch has been reported. Tom Disch was my first real-live author, by which I mean the first one that I met and talked to in the flesh at my first convention – that was Yorcon 2 in Leeds in 1981, where he was the Guest…

  • Eyes Without a Face

    On that trip to Paris a couple of weeks back I gave myself an excuse to browse the stock of the Bouquinistes, those riverside bookstalls along the Seine, for a copy of the source novel of one of my favourite films. All I knew of Les Yeux Sans Visage was that it was written by…

  • Step Aside, Mister Bond

    If ever you needed someone to save the world, I was your guy. Mind you, I was only nine at the time. I think it was an ad in one of the Man from Uncle tie-in novels that gave an address where you could write in and be recruited as an UNCLE agent. The card…

  • Granada

    Good Dog mentioned a couple of classic series and broke a memory… I was a Presentation trainee in Granada’s Manchester studios when they were making The XYY Man, and one of our control room monitors was hooked to the studio feed. So I saw everything the studio cameras saw, both during and between takes. I…

  • Man in a Suitcase

    I just finished working my way through the boxed set of the 1967-68 ITC series Man in a Suitcase. It’s taken me longer than I expected it to, and it’s provoked some mixed feelings. It’s a show that I was enormously impressed by, the first time around. And I still am, but in a qualified…