So – finally I get back to the blog.

My old PC is dead and gone and I’m currently running a cheap pile of junk until I can save up enough pocket money to properly upgrade… I’m gradually working my way back through recovered email – if I haven’t got back to you, I’m getting there. Still enough of my problems.

Or not.

I clicked on Forgotten Worlds website today, just to check whether anything was going on and to get the email address to chase up when they intended to publish “Be Aware” – a story of mine they’d promised to buy and print. And the message there read: Read more »

Posted February 10, 2008 Comments(0)

You can read my review of The Maker’s Mark: Remnants now at The Fix.

If nothing else, it’s marginally shorter than having to read the whole book.

Posted December 5, 2007 Comments(1)

So, two good pieces of news for those who like Joss Whedon’s work (and hey, if you don’t, I don’t want to hear it).

First, I picked up the first collection of Buffy season 8 today from Forbidden Planet (one of the advantages of my job is working around the corner from the UK’s greatest comic shop and Forbidden Planet isn’t far away either). It collects issues 1-5 of the Dark Horse series and it’s really rather good.

Then I get home and find out that Fox (yes, Fox!) have commissioned not just a pilot but seven episodes of a new Whedon TV show – Dollhouse – that will star Elisha (Faith from Buffy) Dushku. When we’ll get to see it – given that not only is the US film & TV industry facing a writers’ strike, but the Directors’ Guild and the actors’ union also have big negotiations coming up that could lead to a perfect storm with all three unions out either consecutively or all at the same time – is still up in the air. But on the whole this is good news.

Posted November 2, 2007 Comments(0)

So Blade Runner is getting re-released in a very shiny new print and redone director’s cut on DVD (which is great, but you know for those of of us old enough, surely the original cut will always be the finest so thanks for that at last Ridley on DVD) but, even more exciting, it’s going to get released in cinemas – from 23 November.

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Posted October 27, 2007 Comments(5)

One of the wonderful thing about the Internet is the way that random blogging leads you first to the insane and then to the utterly sublime.

Take today, I discovered the “Interrobang” through Digg. Which might be one of the most awful ideas I’ve ever seen.

 But then, through the wonders of Wiki, I discover that there’s a whole world of alternative punctuation out there. And then I discover the “Irony Mark” which, in this email age, might have saved me causing offence to dozens, perhaps thousands of people. Why isn’t this in every font?

And I don’t want anyone suggesting it’s because the Americans would never work out how to use it, understand?

Posted October 26, 2007 Comments(0)

Well I’ve got a new review up at The Fix of the CrossTIME Science Fiction Anthology Vol. VI in which I am probably unnecessarily rude about the stories of a bunch of non-professional writers who’ve done nothing more to deserve a kicking than enter a competition and hope their stories were good enough to win.

On the other hand, people as high and mighty as Warren Ellis have been offering their thoughts about how we can “save” the SF short fiction scene. I think Ellis is absolutely right, by the way, about magazines as objects of desire. I lust for well designed magazines. I will buy magazines on subjects I’m not interested in if they look good. I also think he’s right about the dreadful presentation of American magazines being a reflection of their fundamental conservatism.

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Posted October 24, 2007 Comments(2)

If I could be anywhere else this week, I think it would be at Sitges, the seaside town near Barcelona where the Sitges International Film Festival of Catalonia starts tomorrow (October 4) and continues for the next week. Think of it, sea, sangria and a whole host of fantasy, horror and sci-fi movies all on the one doorstep… Beats a wet week in Blackpool with a load of Tories, I can tell you.

Some of what I’m taking to be the highlights include:

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Posted October 3, 2007 Comments(0)

Frankly I’m too knackered to do a proper post today so here’s a lazy list of links that pale in comparison to the useful list of links that some other, better bloggers, do.

Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
It’s a beautifully moving passage – a kind of secular Sermon on the Mount – by Carl Sagan, and it’s been set to music and pictures in all sorts of fabulous ways on the net. God bless YouTube.

The crass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

The obvious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-aX4kT_N9c&mode=related&search=

The minimalist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M&mode=related&search=

And the brash:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47EBLD-ISyc&mode=related&search=

Iron Man
Okay, so the second half of this trailer is your bog standard action movie malarkey – but the first bit… Is it possible they might get Iron Man right?

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/ironman/

Sci-fi futures
An amusing little article but, given that somewhere between a third and a half of the planet’s population are already living in approximations of numbers eight and six, I think there are people who might argue with the title: “8 most common sci-fi futures and why they won’t happen”

http://www.cracked.com/index.php?name=News&sid=2373

o:p>

You are a plaything of the corporate media!

Proof, if any were needed, of the way in which DRM and the corporations that espouse its use do so to manipulate their positions in a way that takes no account of the position of the citizen. Universal deliberately break their music so that it can’t be played on the world’s most successful MP3 player…
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/09/17/1927212.shtml

And finally…
Mysterious thing falls from space, strange emanations from crater, people get sick… It’s starting. It’s starting! WATCH THE SKIES! WATCH THE SKIES!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/space/article/0,,2171920,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Coming soon…
I might get round to telling you why John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is an absolutely vile tract full of deeply unpalatable politics that you should avoid like the plague if it weren’t for the fact that it’s one of the most fun sf reads I’ve had in ages – I literally couldn’t put the book down, read it in one day and had an absolute blast. Then went and ordered the sequels. And all the time I was giving myself a stern telling off for indulging in such hopelessly reactionary bollocks.

Posted September 18, 2007 Comments(2)

Well the Hugo winners have been announced.

I’m surprised but not disappointed that Vinge’s Rainbows End won (I assumed one of the fantasy novels would get the nod even though I haven’t read either) I just finished reading it yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it as an adventure story and as an extended riff on the future of communications technology, I rather wish it had existed when I was 18, I think it would have blown my head off. I did, however, feel that there was something essential missing, though what that is, I haven’t yet decided, I might post a fuller review when I’ve had a chance to think about it properly. Still, I think on balance Rainbows End edged out Glasshouse and I didn’t get on with Blindsight at all, so it looks like Hugo voters got it right this time.

The most annoying thing about Rainbows End, though, is that it is the first Vinge I’ve read and now I’ve found another author I’m going to have to play catch-up on.

I liked Robert Reed’s winning novella A Billion Eves, but I preferred Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian – again I thought the two were pretty close – can’t see how the Swanick story Lord Weary’s Empire was better than the Wilson though. Not at all.

Given the choice I’d have had to split the award between Ian MacDonald’s The Djinn’s Wife and Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (fantasy) by Geoff Ryman so nice to see them sharing the top spots for best novelette. I have no argument with the decision.

I thought the shortlist for short fiction this year was a disgrace. If those were the best five short stories published in the time period then I’m a friggin’ Dutchman (no offence Jetse). Reed’s “Eight Episodes”, the only one I remotely liked came third, proving that I konw nothing.

For once the best dramatic presentation awards, long and short form, went to the right choices too. I thought Dr Who was over represented on the shortlist but the right episode, “The Girl in the Fireplace”, won while I’m gobsmacked but delighted that Pan’s Labyrinth saw off the more obvious (and non-subtitled) opposition in the long form category. It is worth noting, giving the discussion that’s been going on about the future of sf film that this year’s shortlist was a pretty high-powered list of movies – The Prestige, Children of Men, V for Vendetta and A Scanner Darkly might all have won on another year.

The rest of the awards I have to concede I have no real interest in, but hey, well done Japan, that’s a pretty good set of winners.

Posted September 1, 2007 Comments(3)

Ridley Scott is an accomplished film-maker – a man who has managed to transfer a practically obsessive desire for visual verisimilitude and a god-complex into commercially stellar and critically respected career. In terms of his films the brilliant claustrophobia of Alien, the enduring beauty of Blade Runner and the fantastic scale of Gladiator all stand out as movies anyone would be proud to have on their CV. Add to that Thelma and Louise and the most convincing portrayal of modern warfare yet to grace celluloid in Black Hawk Down (while not ignoring the problematic elements of that film) and it’s a history that can encompass the occasional stumble (Black Rain, Kingdom of Heaven, A Good Year) without losing any of its gloss.

What do we make of it, then, when the man responsible for two of the greatest genre films of all time argues that sf as a film genre is so tired and unoriginal that it may be going the way of the Western in today’s The Times.

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Posted August 30, 2007 Comments(6)