After a bit of a break, here's the latest illustration for The Little Toy Soldier. It owes something to the great Jane Simmons. That's a Lesser Water Boatman on the soldier's right!
Rob Maslen
@profrmaslen.bsky.social
Fantasy books, films, anime, comics, Early Modern Literature, life. He/him. I blog at The City of Lost Books. Come and see! https://thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/
Utterly delighted by the Scottish movie The Incomer, which plays hilarious and touching riffs on folk horror on an isolated island. Gayle Rankin’s performance is magnificent, and so is the music and the script!
I loved this very strange story from the 1980s, which is about the weirdness of everyday life in downstate New York. Filled with bizarre and inexplicable events, it persuades you they are no more bizarre or inexplicable than the experience of living in a middle-class suburb…
A new post in The City of Lost Books: Ursula Moray Williams, Adventures of Puffin (1939). It has everything, including information for trainspotters and planespotters. And of course puffins. thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/fantasy-1939...
Fantasy 1939: Ursula Moray Williams, Adventures of Puffin
Moray Williams’s most celebrated books, Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse (1938) and Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat (1942), take place in an imaginary location corresponding to somewhere in Northern…
thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk
There's a new post at The City of Lost Books: Mervyn Peake, Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948). An oblique look at post-war post-imperialism, invoking the doomed explorers of the British Empire! thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/letters-from...
Mervyn Peake, Letters from a Lost Uncle (from Polar Regions) (1948)
The art of Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake, married writer-artists who moved from house to house many times in the course of their lives together, had a tendency to burst out of formal spaces (studi…
thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk
I loved the French TV show Les Sentinelles, based on a comic, about a group of super soldiers in WW1. Well plotted and beautifully shot and acted. It’s on BBC iPlayer right now, if you have access to it!
Another strong recommendation, this time from the always wonderful Frances Hardinge. What a writer she is! Nobody else could ever hope to wear her hat.
I'm going to be giving a talk on Selkies for this online course on The Folklore of the Ocean from the always-excellent Carterhaugh School. There's still time to join....
The Carterhaugh School | Folklore, Fairy Tales, Everyday Magic@carterhaughschool.bsky.social · 3mo agoThe Wine-Dark Sea: Folklore of the Ocean is open for enrollment! Selkies and mermaids, ghost ships, underwater cities, sea monsters, lady pirates, and Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey to close it all out! courses.carterhaughschool.com/p/ocean-folk... #TheCarterhaughSchool #OceanFolklore
I loved Sam Neill’s films, but the one I loved most - unmentioned here - is Dean Spanley, in which he plays a spaniel reincarnated as a Church of England cleric; it’s based on a wonderful but little-known novella by Lord Dunsany. Watch it if you can find it!
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2mo agoSam Neill, star of Jurassic Park films, Peaky Blinders and The Piano, dies aged 78
RIP the great Sam Neill. I loved all Neill’s films, but the one I loved most is Dean Spanley, in which he plays a spaniel reincarnated as a Church of England cleric; it’s based on a wonderful but little-known novella by Lord Dunsany. Watch it if you can find it!
Latest illustration: the soldier sits and thinks. Can you name the vegetation and the insect?
On Mervyn Peake's birthday, why not listen to our podcast about Titus Groan, one of Anthony Burgess's favourite novels? Our guest was the brilliant @profrmaslen.bsky.social. www.anthonyburgess.org/podcasts/nin...
Ninety-Nine Novels: Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake - The International Anthony Burgess Foundation
In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fi...
anthonyburgess.org
#Glasgow One week today, join our Neil Williamson and Rhiannon Grist for Chilling Tales! Expect spine-chilling chat on Neil's new collection, Hand-Me-Downs, plus Rhiannon's new novel Home Sick. Ticket link below: @waterstonesargyle.bsky.social @neilwilliamson.bsky.social @rhiannonagrist.bsky.social
Glasgow SF Writers' Circle@gsfwc.bsky.social · 3mo ago#Glasgow Join our Neil Williamson, Rhiannon Grist and Rebecca Wojturska and celebrate Neil's new Horror collection Hand-Me-Downs (PS Publishing). Get your tickets below and we'll see you at @waterstonesargyle.bsky.social on 14th July! @neilwilliamson.bsky.social @rhiannonagrist.bsky.social (1/2)
This piece makes me wonder about the relationship between illustration and comics. How do they speak to one another? Are they different arts or branches of the same one? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The Guardian view on the UK’s first centre for illustration: visual literacy, and the sheer joy of images, matter | Editorial
Editorial: A national institution for this overlooked artform shows it is finally getting the recognition it deserves
theguardian.com
THE CITY WE BECAME is the NYPL's first "Big Summer Book Club" pick! All summer long, UNLIMITED borrows of the ebook or audiobook for any NYPL cardholder! And for a finale, a NEW STORY in the Great Cities world will be performed at the Delacorte Theater in Aug! www.nypl.org/summer/2026/...
nypl.org
(not sure how much of that they kept in!) @profrmaslen.bsky.social is in it too, and so is @ellenkushner.bsky.social! IMDB link: www.imdb.com/title/tt3946... It is available on Amazon Prime in the UK, apparently, and I hear it’s available on Hoopla in the US. 2/2
imdb.com
Off to Edinburgh today, to give a talk about Tolkien, and was just alerted that a documentary I was filmed for ages ago has aired. Haven’t seen it yet, but I remember talking about Middle-earth, Narnia, the Harry Potter series, and fantasy’s roots in myth and legend. 1/2 @uofgfantasy.bsky.social
A new post in The City of Lost Books. What says April better than the ever-spouting inventions of William Heath Robinson? His epic picture book Uncle Lubin gets the treatment. thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/william-heat...
William Heath Robinson, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902)
Some of my blog posts begin in one place and end somewhere completely different. This is a case in point. I started writing with the intention of talking about Mervyn Peake’s picture book Letters f…
thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk
Toy soldier struggling through long grass while dawn breaks
Another April and another day with all the seasons in it, with lapwings falling out of sunlight into rain… —James Aitchison, “Landscape with Lapwings” in The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, @edinburghup.bsky.social 2005 #poem #poetry edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edi...
Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans@astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 6mo agoOh #Edinburgh - you've excelled again. Only 45 mins later and we're right back to summer again 😎 #AlwaysPackYourAnorak
Thrilled to have contributed to this lovely book, 'Brian Froud's Green Women', along with many distinguished writers, some of whom are friends. It'll be published 6th October this year, and fans of Brian Froud will love it - as will anyone who loves fantasy. More at Brian's website: bit.ly/4cOoxUT
At The City of Lost Books today: a long-gestating post on R.F. Kuang's Babel. thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/r-f-kuang-ba...
R. F. Kuang, Babel (2022)
The peculiar properties of colonial space Fantasy was born in Oxford. There the mathematician Charles Dodgson devised the adventures of Alice underground, the precursor to Alice in Wonderland, as h…
thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk
My latest illustration for the Little Toy Soldier saga. The mood darkens!
A new post over at The City of Lost Books: Karel Čapek's War with the Newts (1936), an essay by my mother, Elizabeth Maslen, with help from my father, John Maslen. Will appeal to all who love the Slavic fantastic! thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/karel-capek-...
Karel Čapek, War with the Newts (1936)
[This essay-review by my mother, Elizabeth Maslen, was published in the journal Science Fiction Studies in 1987. My father worked on it with her, as linguistic adviser for Czech, Polish and Russian…
thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk