Station Zero

One of the stories in this collection is Leaf by Niggle, an allegorical tale about an artist in which Tolkien is plainly expressing his anxiety that his work of creating Middle Earth will never be finished and that what fragments he does manage to produce will be ignored by most people and eventually forgotten altogether. It’s quite affecting, and I suppose he never did finish it, but there seems little danger of it being forgotten, since all his notes and half-finished stories are now available as pricey books. This one, Tales from the Perilous Realm , comes with a beautiful Alan Lee painting of a hero confronting a dragon on the front, perhaps designed to nudge the unwary purchaser into thinking they’re buying something Lord of the Rings related. What they’ll actually be taking home is an anthology of short tales which were mostly available as separate small volumes when I was a young ‘un, bulked out with Tolkien’s essay On Fairy Tales . Farmer Giles of Ham is the central story, ...

There’s great excitement in the Mouse Islands, because today is the day that Otter Chaos is finally published. The   first of my new Adventuremice series with Sarah McIntyre is in UK and Irish bookshops NOW, and it’s looking lovely, packed as it is with Sarah’s beautiful watercolour illustrations. It started out as a series of nautical mouse paintings she did during the pandemic lockdowns, and you can find out more about it at our snazzy new website, adventuremice.com , which features videos, quizzes, drawing guides, and a handy classroom pack of free, easily downloadable resources for teachers . You can even read the first chapter of Otter Chaos  there for free there, to find out whether it’s Your Sort Of Thing. Several young reviewers have already decided that it is their sort of thing: here’s a very in-depth appreciation by six-year-old Jesse for Books Up North , while the discerning Peapod over at Bellis Does Books awards it an impressive ‘four hundred and eleventy hun...

Earlier this month, Sarah McIntyre and I were lucky enough to be guests at the Emirates Festival of Literature in Dubai - our third visit. There’s nothing much I can add to Sarah’s account: she’s a good journalist as well as a great illustrator, so for details of what we did and all the lovely people we met, head on over to her blog. But here are a few photos I took during our stay. One of the things I was talking about at the festival was my Railhead trilogy. I think I’d just finished the first book the first time I visited Dubai, and this extraordinary city had a big influence on the next two books. I’d sort of forgotten that, but returning was weirdly like stepping back into the world of Railhead . I really liked the architecture of the new Mohammed bin Rashid Library (the open-book-shaped building in the sunset view above). The library was a festival venue this year, and pecked with visitors when I was there to help Sarah with her Comics Workshop. But we had a nose round earl...

I’ve been watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and I’m afraid it’s done nothing to shake my firm belief that Tolkien is unfilmable. The stuff of Middle-earth can be put on screen - the battles, the cities, the monsters - but the budget required to do so means the resulting film or show has to be a mass-market, all-action fantasy, in which all the quieter, odder, and more profound aspects of Tolkien’s work are sidelined or left out entirely. But at least the Lord of the Rings films were made by people who knew and loved the books. The Rings of Power has clearly been designed and art-directed by people who know their stuff - the layers of detail in the sets and costumes of the Númenor sequences alone are quite extraordinary. But the storylines which have been invented to try and breathe some Lord of the Rings -ish life into the rather dry history of the ‘Second Age’ as told in the book’s appendices seldom rise above the level of bog-standard sword and sorcery. You might as well be ...

The original Star Wars film knocked my socks off back in '77 when I was eleven, but I've never had much interest in the various prequels and reboots, although I've sat through a lot of them happily enough for the sake of all the excellent production design. The Mandalorian was fun when it started, but gradually more and characters we recognise (or are clearly expected to recognise) from other SW things started making cameos, until the galaxy far, far away seemed to shrink to the size of a small town where you're constantly bumping into the same people. I’m sure it still thrills its target demographic, it’s just not for me. So I wasn’t planning to watch Andor, and   only stuck it on as background noise while I was working on some of the props for my own little movie . But after an episode or two I noticed the background noise was taking the form of some rather good dialogue, and I started watching it properly. It turns out to be a very intelligent, rather old fashion...

Well, almost. We spent last Friday and Saturday shooting a few last scenes for our Arthurian mini-epic : long days, but luckily the weather stayed dry again, and I think we got good stuff. Even if it something goes horribly wrong in the edit and we never get it finished, the shoot has been huge fun. It’s certainly more enjoyable and better exercise for mind and body than writing books - if only there were some way it could be monetised. Laura Frances Martin came back to be Gwenevere, and Rosanna Lambert joined us to play a mystical maiden who pops up with advice for her at a low point in her story - she’s exactly the sort of character you’re not supposed to put in the last act of films as she’s a bit of a Deus Ex Machina etc, but she’s exactly the sort of character medieval poets and storytellers did put in their Arthurian Romances, which is very much the mood we’re going for. Rosanna is studying theatre at Chichester Conservatoire and we were very glad she was able to fit us in duri...

Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild is one of my spookiest efforts, so here for Hallowe'en is a little excerpt, featuring one of the supernatural denizens of the Vale of Barrowchurch.    I’ve borrowed two pictures to illustrate it. The green lady above is by the brilliant Iris Compiet, from her book Faeries of the Faultlines, which features a host of eerie and unsettling beings. The one below is one of Brian Froud’s paintings from his 1979 book Faeries , with Alan Lee, which partly inspired the river girl and much else in Utterly’s world.  In the story, Utterly and her Uncle Will are visiting Barrowchurch as guests of his cousin Francis. Utterly's friend Egg has gone with them, and is posing as their servant... *  *  * Egg had been exploring too, although he had no guide except his own curiosity. It had led him first to the kitchen garden, and then into the large fruit-cages there, where he ate a large number of ripe strawberries and raspberries before...