little bits of everything

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.

A year or so ago I did my 2018 awards . As 2019 is over it's time for this year's awards, though you'll find all the categories are different. Best Orchestral Album of 80s tunes When I heard a track from  Trevor Horn 's Reimagines the Eighties  on Radio 2 I thought it was worth seeing if the other tracks were as good, and many of them were. The first track, Everyone wants to rule the world , sung by Robbie Williams, was released as a single, and doesn't depart too much from the original. The second track, Dancing in the dark , sung by Gabrielle Apin, is a slowed down version of the original. The leisurely tempo and string arrangement really enhances Bruce's words. Seal sings Ashes to Ashes and his powerful range manages to competently handle the melody that David Bowie wrote. Matt Cardle sings The Power of love . Yes, he's still around. There are other slowed down tracks: Slave to the Rhythm and Take on me , and they manage to not...

A while ago, I forget where, I came across a link to this SFF story called Ra . Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was. And whether, indeed, she's dead at all.. It was originally written from 2011 to 2018 with new chapters appearing every so often. As it's effectively a blog, there are comments at the bottom, though I didn't delve into those too much. I read it over a period of weeks, but you can binge it now. It has some really interesting worldbuilding around magic. The storyline jumps around a lot, almost too much. I was glad I hung on to the end though as the plot gets very big; very, very b...

This isn't half bad This is actually pretty good This is actually very good They know much more about this than I do This is too short Why isn't there much longer stuff? How would I know if it's any good though before I commit to reading it?

In his (mostly) spoiler free review of Rogue One (I just typed Rouge One - that's a very different film!) John Scalzi says: In fact, for two films running the folks at Disney have produced two really top-notch Star Wars films, a feat that has not been managed in thirty-five years — or possibly ever, depending on whether you believe the original Star Wars, as epochal as it undeniably was, is actually good, which given its pastiche-heavy, merely-serviceable plot and script, and leaden acting and direction, is debatable. Picking up on his remarks on the original - yes it was pastiche-heavy, but George Lucas brought SF to the cinema, and for that I am eternally grateful. Since then we've had plenty of effects heavy SF films, but we've also had some more subtle ones - Bicentennial Man, A.I., that one where the guy is on the Moon in an all white moonbase. On TV there seem to be a number of US based TV series which involve space travel, but for a really good programme which h...

I read SF pretty much exclusively as a kid and then as I grew up I read more widely. In recent years I've read more SF than in the previous twenty or thirty or so. One of the things that I heard for the first time when I came back to SF was the Singularity , the idea that one day we'd be able to upload our brains into a computer. I heard it first being talked about on Charlie Stross's blog, probably this entry Three arguments against the singularity  in 2011 (this blog post has been brewing for a while). He also wrote a book called Singularity Sky. If you read the  wikipedia article I've linked to  then you'll see it's been around for a while, since 1958. Probably the reason that it's being talked about more recently is because as computing power increases it become more believable. As neurons are more complicated than bits you can't measure the capacity of the human brain in terms of computer storage, but there are as many networked computers as neuro...

Last Saturday I went to Comicon . It was held in the same place as Worldcon , Excel in London, so it was interesting to compare the two. It was far, far busier (over an hour queue to get in), less well organised, the average age was a lot lower and mainly all about the companies selling stuff. I wouldn't say the latter is necessarily a bad thing, as it's a good way of small businesses selling their stuff, but if you're thinking of going it's worth knowing that. It mainly consists of two of the big halls full of stands.  Costumes  Even if you don't know much about it you may have heard about the costumes. I found that the most interesting thing about it. It started on the train at Amersham. There was someone with a purple jacket and bow tie. It could have just been his normal way of dressing, but the cyberman head fastened to his suitcase was a bit of a giveaway.  The photo at the top shows one I was extremely impressed with. Not only had this person m...

Until I went to Worldcon  I hadn't done anything you could call fannish for many years. The closest thing I got was reading the blog of someone I've been following for years. I discovered them on a blog directory (yes, such things existed) when I was looking for local people who also blogged. I knew them as Coalescent  but I didn't know much about them. The blog was mostly book reviews In hunting around the internet after Worldcon I found that he, for it is a he, is Niall Harrison , editor of Strange Horizons and he lives in Oxford, which is sort of local. The Hugo Awards, voted on and awarded at Worldcon, includes entries for best fanzine. I wrote previously about how doing a fanzine  required "confidence and work". That was in the days of paper, but now we have digital publications a blog counts as a fanzine, for the winner was (look a digital link)  A Dribble of Ink edited by Aidan Moher. It has previews of cover art, guest articles, reviews, and other goo...

This particular Worldcon is called Loncon3 as it's the third one to be held in London. On the morning before I went I put a photo of my Star Wars T-shirt on Facebook and commented how it would make me fit in. Not that I needed to fit in. I saw: a large green cat like figure several top hats, some with brass goggles several Terry Pratchett hats a spoon headdress (worn by a space scientist) a Tardis dress a dragon on someone's shoulder just the one fez The breadth of the programme is amazing. It runs from Thursday to Monday. There are 600 items which means at any given time there are about ten things to choose from. All sorts of types of SF are represented: literary, film, graphic, TV, young adult, music and science too.  As well as all those items there was an art show, dealers stalls, a games tent, a library and a fan area. What I was looking forward to was seeing some authors I've read or certainly heard of, in the flesh. Like a twitcher I ticked off Cory...

A couple of hours ago I booked a day ticket (or "membership" as it's called) for the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention. I've spent the time since digging around on the internet into my past. Let me explain. I went to University in York between 1984 and 1988. From my early teens my reading material was almost exclusively SF. When I went to University I joined the British Science Fiction Association. (A while back when I was doing some vanity searching I came across an index of letters to the BSFA journal. Someone dutifully recorded that I written two letters.) I was also invited to join an Amateur Press Association , or APA, called The Organisation. If you're read the article I've linked to you'll understand how they work. What it doesn't do is explain how things were before the internet, for those who haven't experienced it. In the 80s there were three or four TV channels. There were books and magazines. There was Doctor Who and Blakes 7, and...