I’m Hutch. Zone Six is my sci-fi and fantasy blog, and it has been going long enough that there are more than 600 posts in the archive. That is either impressive or a diagnosis, depending on how you look at it. The short version is that I read a lot, I watch a lot, and I have opinions about all of it. This is where they go instead of at whoever is standing near me at a party.
Doctor Who is the biggest thing here by a nose, with Marvel right behind it. After that it’s a happy mess of whatever I keep coming back to. Dune, the Wheel of Time, BattleTech novels almost nobody else seems to have read, LitRPG, and comics going back to the ones I bought off a spinner rack. If it has spaceships, giant robots, a Time Lord or a man in a cape, odds are decent I’ve written something about it.
What you’ll actually find here
Mostly reviews, and mostly of the “I just finished this and here’s what I thought” variety. I’m not a critic and I have no ambition to become one. I don’t grade things against some perfect version that only exists in my head, and I’m not interested in being clever at the expense of something people worked hard on. What I do is tell you whether I enjoyed it, why, and where it lost me. If I give something five out of five, I say so and skip the paragraph about how it isn’t perfect. If it dragged, I say it dragged. You should be able to cover up the score on one of my reviews and still know what I thought. The number is shorthand for the tone of the piece, nothing more.
A lot of what’s here is rewatch and reread material, because that’s how I consume this stuff. I’ll go back through a run of Doctor Who a series at a time. I’ll work the Dune books in order and find out which of my teenage opinions survive contact with an adult. I’ll pick up a BattleTech novel I first read in paperback and check whether it holds up. Some do. Some really, really don’t, and those are usually the more fun posts to write.
Every post is dated as close as I can manage to the day I finished the book or watched the episode. I try to put as much of my opinion into each review as I can. Where it helps, I link posts to each other, because so many of the books, shows and films I like have a lot in common.
Threads, and why I bother with them
The other thing you’ll find is threads: ordered runs through a franchise where I’ve picked the route and put it in sequence. Story order, watch order, whatever the right order is for that particular thing, never publish date. If you land on part three there’s a part four waiting and a part two behind you.
Beyond that it’s the same instinct that made me start the site. I’d rather hand you a route through a hundred Doctor Who posts than dump you at the top of a category archive and wish you luck. One post should lead to the next one worth reading. If you came for a single episode review and left four posts later having got into an argument with me about the Time Lord Victorious, the thing did its job.
The person doing the typing
Canadian, two kids, and a golf handicap of 11 that I’ll defend more aggressively than any opinion on this site. The reading habit came first and never really went anywhere. I read Leviathan Wakes when it came out in 2011, enjoyed it enormously, put the series down after book three like an idiot, and picked it back up years later when the show turned up on TV. That’s a fairly honest summary of how I operate across the board.
I write here because I like writing here. Nobody is paying me to enjoy things and there’s no schedule I’m answerable to, so when a post sounds like I got carried away about a mid-season two-parter from 2008, it’s because I did. That’s the whole product.
If that’s your kind of thing, stick around. The Fandoms menu up top is the fastest way in, Latest Posts will show you what I’ve been on about recently, and if you think I’m wrong about something, good. Tell me.