COMMENTS OFF, SPAM WINS

Posted on June 24, 2014 by

So, having discovered that one of the reasons this site was running like a dog was that it was being hit with hundreds of spam messages an hour, I’ve had to turn off comments and pingbacks on all posts and pages on the website for the time being.

Even with good anti-spam protection to load on the site was very, very heavy.

I apologise if you come across anything on the site you might have wanted to have a conversation about. Hopefully the storm will pass sooner rather than later.

Spam is a pain in the arse. Why anyone would want to bombard a site that gets a few thousand visits a month with a bajillion spam messages about knock-off handbags that nobody will ever see (or read, even if they could) is beyond me, but that’s the Internet for you.

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WORLDCON PANELLING

Posted on June 24, 2014 by

I, like lots of other people, got a bit excited when the organisers of Loncon3 sent out the draft schedule for this year’s Worldcon – but I’ve had some ongoing website problems, so it’s taken a while to get this online. But, at last, for anyone who might be interested, these are (provisionally, I think) the panels I’ll be appearing on at what looks like being an absolutely massive convention. Continue reading →

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SOME THOUGHTS ON HOW LABOUR WINS IN 2015

Posted on May 26, 2014 by

So this year’s elections are over, and lots of people are using the results as an excuse to try and shift their favoured political parties around, so I thought: “Why should I miss out?” I don’t think the European election results are either disastrous or brilliant for Labour. You can’t look at the raw figures and say this performance (25%) isn’t good enough, because since 1999 the European elections haven’t looked anything like other British national votes. UKIP, the BNP and the Greens have all made different “breakthroughs” at Euro elections that haven’t been followed up in subsequent General Elections and, if I was a betting man, I’d be willing to bet that UKIP’s vote will fall back significantly before next year’s election. It is, of course, possible that this election has “broken the mould”, but the probability is always against breaks with history. Continue reading →

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DOUBLE FRACTIONAL AWARD NOMINEE

Posted on April 19, 2014 by

specyfiction72ppiSo, the Hugo nominations are out, and there are a number of things I like and many things I have absolutely no interest in. In the end I weakened and nominated some stuff, just so I could feel properly entitled to moan at the final shortlist. I think four of the items I nominated made it onto the final list of 90 or so nominees – I’ll be expecting cash from the lucky few in the next post.

But the really important news about the Hugo nominations isn’t that some weird, slightly cultish, distinctly Tea Partyish, group of American writers have got their arses in gear to exploit the nomination process – anyone with a background in student politics will recognise the effect of organising lists in popular voting – Hackery101. It will be interesting to see if this is the start of a trend of progressive/reactionary organisation for awards. Continue reading →

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REVIEW: THE ROOK BY DANIEL O’MALLEY

Posted on March 31, 2014 by

The_RookDaniel O’Malley’s first novel, The Rook, won the 2012 Aurealis Award for best SF Novel published by an Australian and comes laden with praise from writers like Charlaine Harris, Charles Yu and Lev Grossman. I found it hard to understand why. The Rook is the story of Myfanwy Thomas, holder of the eponymous title in the secret Checquy – an ancient agency of the British government that rolls up the roles of GCHQ, the SAS, MI5, MI6 and more and is tasked with the job of clobbering anything supernatural that threatens the interests of the British state. The story begins as Myfanwy comes to her senses in an unnamed London park. She has no memories. Her only clue about who she is and what has happened comes in the form of a letter in her pocket – written by herself. Continue reading →

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SHORT FORM DRAMATIC PRESENTATION HUGO SUGGESTIONS

Posted on March 30, 2014 by

I have no interest in nominating anything for the Hugos, but people have been bemoaning the shortage of things they can nominate for the Short Form Dramatic Presentation category outside the usual television episodes. I like short movies, and think it’d be nice to see more of them recognised, so here are some short movies you could consider. I haven’t checked the eligibility but they’re all dated 2013 and all between 8-15 minutes long.

And, if you’re not interested in the Hugos either, hey, they’re still good little movies.

West of the Moon
Based loosely, apparently, on interviews with children about their dreams. This is kind of lovely, fantastic and peculiar. http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/05/06/west-of-the-moon/

 Record/Play
Time travel. It’s a familiar idea – how to change the past – but it’s very nicely done and affecting. http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/10/08/recordplay/

C: 299,792 km/s
A Kickstarted movie, and a really enjoyable one. Old-fashioned in style and production (complete with Sagan-ish inserts) it’s a pacy space story done well. http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/01/29/c-299792-kms/

Dr Easy
A robot doctor is sent into a siege situation. A Film4/Warp film with very high production values and Tom Hollander from Rev. It ends a bit abruptly. http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/06/21/dr-easy/

Expo
Unable to face the things she has lost and return home, a miner on the Moon makes a decision. A touch melodramatic and edging towards the sugary but nice. http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/05/16/expo/

Other options: I liked Cargo better than anything in The Walking Dead (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/04/11/cargo/) but it’s touch obvious; A Little Bit Behind  (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/04/23/a-little-bit-behind/) is a funny Australian effort but it’s really just a sketch;  From the Future With Love (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/09/06/from-the-future-with-love/)  has near-future cops doing stuff – should have ended after the bit in the diner; Abe (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2013/10/30/abe-2/) frankly a bit unpleasant, effectively a robot slasher movie, but undeniably well made.

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REVIEW OF THE ECHO AT ARCFINITY AND OTHER STUFF

Posted on January 17, 2014 by

the-echo-by-james-smytheSo my grumpy review of James Smythe’s The Echo is now online at Arcfinity.

I’m not normally bothered by the science being wrong in fantastic fiction if it makes the story better – that’s normally true when the author has made a deliberate choice to warp or twist reality. What bothered me by this book (and it’s prequel) is my feeling that the scientific stuff that was wrong didn’t add to the story – indeed that it distracted from it – and that the author was obviously capable of not making these mistakes.

I note that one paragraph from the review got edited out, that’s fair enough, it was too long, but it explains why I think the wrong science matters in this particular case. Continue reading →

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‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BSFA NOMINATION DEADLINE…

Posted on January 13, 2014 by

Okay, so, if I wanted this to be any use to anyone I’d have done it weeks ago, but I didn’t and there was always just one more book to try and squeeze in… And if I wanted this to be remotely interesting to anyone, I’d probably have written a long explanation as to why some of these books didn’t make my nominations – I have long and tedious explanations for the absence of both The Adjacent and Ancillary Justice from my nominations – but I didn’t have time.

The deadline for the British Science Fiction Awards nominations is tomorrow. If you can but haven’t nominated your favourites: DO IT NOW!

If anyone cares, here’s what I’ve nominated for the BSFA Awards this year: Continue reading →

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REVIEW: THE PEACOCK CLOAK BY CHRIS BECKETT

Posted on November 25, 2013 by

Peacock-Cloak-coverThe thing that I like best about Chris Beckett’s short stories in general, and this new collection, The Peacock Cloak, in particular is the rage that is bubbling under the surface and that occasionally erupts from the page.

Not all the stories grip you by the throat, “Atomic Truth”, the first in this collection, is a story in which a young woman reaches a moment of epiphany while brushing briefly against the life of a man with mental illness in a near future London. There’s little enough going on the surface, but underneath there’s a sense of something deeply wrong. Continue reading →

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REVIEW: EXISTENCE BY DAVID BRIN

Posted on November 19, 2013 by

existence-brinI did not like David Brin’s Existence. It is a book so distressingly unpleasant that it left me wondering – and this is no exaggeration – whether I had had enough of the whole of science fiction. I suppose you might say it caused something of an Existential crisis.

Boiled down to its basics, Brin’s novel is simple enough. An astronaut finds an alien artefact that immediately begins to attempt to communicate with humanity. Once the first artefact is discovered it is soon clear that Earth, indeed the whole solar system, is infested with these crystals – all containing the personalities of many different alien ambassadors, all offering radically different advice to humanity and many intent on destroying every other crystal they can reach. The overall message, however, becomes obvious. The Fermi Paradox – the fact that the sky is not ringing with the sound of thousands of alien races – is a result of the fundamental fragility of advanced civilisation. They have failed to solve the problems and threats posed by growing complexity and we probably will too. Brin weaves this basic story through a bewildering variety of, sometimes only marginally, interconnected threads.

There are many, many things wrong with Existence. Continue reading →

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