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I have three novels to write, all different styles, and I'm worried they bleed into each other, as would whatever I'm reading - but none of them are SF, so I'm going to read the EDAs from the start, as a palette cleanser as I go along. First up - the 8 Docs, which I remember as being shite.

On to Vanderdeken’s Children by Chris Bulis, never a writer I was very fond of at the time, but this starts with one of my favourite things - a bloody great mysterious object floating in space (shades of Rendezvous with Rama or Greg Bear’s brilliant Eon, though on a far smaller scale!).

I honestly can’t remember how the plot of this one goes, which is both worrying (how dull must it be) and great (nice to read an EDA as though for the first time!)

Bit of an odd one, this. It reminds me of Asimov, in the sense that it's by no means a great writer, with at best 2D characterisation, but with a plot that's never less than interesting. It's nearly excellent in fact, with a fascinating setting and plenty of well constructed surprises.

But it loses a couple of marks for having far too many characters, many of whom named from a book of Terry Nation Space Names, and because Bulis isn't good enough a writer to make his ideas clear to the reader. (or to this reader, at least - maybe others read the word salad and nodded sagely).

And it then loses a ton more for (a) having two different instances of one of the good guys calling suicide 'the easy way out' (f*ck off), (b) for having, if not a hero, at least an Everyman react to being angry with his wife by breaking her nose and jaw and knocking several of her teeth out