little bits of everything

  On the occasion of my 60th birthday, I, like so many before me, created a 16 page zine printed newspaper style by newspaperclub.com . The subject is mostly me, so modesty forbids I publish the whole thing online. However there are some things which are about the year of my birth. So here are three pages from Threescore , lightly edited to avoid controversy (maybe you can guess the edit).

This was my third visit to the BSFG , the second IRL, as the previous one was on Zoom with an author in the US. Antony Johnston  writes in several genres and media: SF (of course), murder mystery, espionage, video games, graphic novels and non-fiction. He was interviewed and in answering the questions gave fascinating insights into how those different media work. He said that for graphic novels there's no set way that writers deliver their words to the artists, but he chose to do it in a screenplay format. That was handy when one of his works, Atomic Blonde, became a film. The process from start to finish was 5 years, which was, he found out, actually quite quick for the industry.  The process of writing for videogames has similarly no set format and varies between studios and even different games with the same set of people. That process is a lot more iterative than others. I learnt a new term - vertical slice. That describes how when a game is being prototyped the creators c...

  It seems a contradiction if I say I listened to an old album by one of my favourite artists recently. The truth is, I'm not a very good music fan.  I did think of talking about music that I liked, and then I realised I'd reinvented radio. I could do a reaction video on YouTube, "old man listens to old music", but I'm really a text person at the moment so I'm going to write about it. Here's an aside: a young adult asked me what my favourite music was. I reeled off a list of old artists: Genesis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush. Then I mentioned a modern one, expecting that he'd heard of them: Elbow. He hadn't. Then I realised that they'd won the Mercury music prize when he was probably two. Not so modern really. So here's the start of a new series: Listening to Us by Peter Gabriel for the first time I listened to Peter Gabriel 2 (aka Scratch ), a while back. 1 and 3 (known as Car and Melt ) even though that's not written on them) ...

View this post on Instagram A post shared by A.Y. Chao 🇨🇦🇹🇼🇬🇧 (@ay_chao) Last night I visited the Birmingham SF Group . Due to a problem with the meeting venue we decamped to a cosy room in a nearby pub. The guest was A. Y. Chao, author of Shanghai Immortal. As well as talking about that she read some of her new book Paris Celestial  to us, and answered questions. It's due to be released on the 26th March 2026. This was the first time I've been to this group, and I found them to be a friendly bunch. It's been going since 1971 and there was a couple there who'd been there since the beginning. Although I hadn't been before, The Organisation APA  which I wrote about a while back, was originally APA-B, set up by the Brum SF Group. So I have some common history with the group. Would I go again? Definitely.

Five years ago Colin Ross did something extraordinary. He had a couple of successful books set in his Jewel Galaxy universe. The first book had been made into a film, and there were clearly plenty of story lines to come. Then he gave it all away. He announced that he was giving up the copyright on the texts. He wasn't claming IP rights over the characters. He welcomed people writing their own stories, creating their own merchandise, making their own films. When asked about loss of income he said that he had enough money from the books and the film to keep him going for a while. Fan fiction and cosplay isn't something new, but with an endorsement like that, there was an explosion of creativity. The difference with what emerged from that compared with fan fiction is that there was very little canonical storyline. We were only just being introduced to the characters, and there were quite a few. So the new fiction went in all different directions. Even if you're not a fan, you...

Last night I went to the cosy little bookshop Books on the Heath in King's Heath, Birmingham . Marc Burrows was speaking about his new book Mistletoe and Vinyl - The story of the Christmas No. 1 . I've been getting Marc's newsletter since 2019. The Twitter algorithm served up a tweet in which he said he was writing a book about Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors, and of course I subscribed. He's been touring various bookshops, libraries etc. talking about this new book. He spoke for almost an hour, off the cuff, entertaining and engaging. The importance of being a number one at Christmas for an artist is a uniquely British phenomenon. He took us back to when Jesus' birth celebration was moved to the 25 December in 336, during the reign of Emperor Constantine. This was so that it was the same time as the cultures around were celebrating some sort of festival in the depths of winter. Singing and drinking are a part of all these celebrations. Fast forward to...