little bits of everything

When I finish a book I'm always straight onto the next one, so I'm writing about this book having started it recently. It's 2312  by Kim Stanley Robinson. Here are some linked thoughts on it. It's set two centuries into a future where the solar system is being colonised - planets, moons and asteroids. This is not a new theme, but I've read another book? about this recently so from that unrepresentative sample, it appears to be a popular topic. When I was younger happily read books about hyperspace and faster than light travel, and although I can't remember for sure, I probably assumed that someone would invent a way of doing it, or maybe I didn't care that it was actually impossible. Now that we're well into the 21st Century and physics has got pretty deep into the atom, and far back in time, it looks like nothing's going to happen on that front anytime soon. Travel to the nearest exoplanet is approaching feasible (conference on charlie stross...

Tomorrow's World (along with Top of the Pops) made Thursday evening the best TV evening of the week (in fact the best evening of the week, but that's another story). We would be shown some really cool new inventions, many of which had great potential to change things. I don't remember many of them appearing in normal life though. When I worked for a small electronics company I understood about how much is involved in bringing things to market, and making them on a big enough scale to make enough money to make more. I remember when the Walkman was first shown, something which did change how music was listened to. My memory of the way it was presented, which many be flawed, was that the revolutionary part was not the small tape mechanism, but the headphones. The inventors had found a way to get good quality sound from a tiny speaker, because after all, who wants to walk around with a big pair of headphones on? I also remember when the digital camera was first shown. Al...

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...

Listening again to the Ninth Wave suite on Hounds of Love, and inspired by xkcd's graphs I drew this based on searches on allmusic.com. Those slightly wiggly lines are drawn with more skill than it looks. Raw data for those really interested. 1 132227 2 105959 3 75735 4 119380 5 71926 6 67014 7 108539 8 74096 9 64234 19 69869

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...

My writing ability is not good enough to convey the excitement I felt when I first watched Star Wars at age 11. Since then it has been a small part of my life in many ways, which I may document at some point. The reason I'm writing now is to say that I'm 15 MILES FROM STAR WARS Day one at @PinewoodStudios . #StarWarsVII pic.twitter.com/bIleOi44Dn — Star Wars (@starwars) May 16, 2014 Episode VII is being shot very close to where I live. I am excited.