In a review of Dalek, I Love You, a memoir by Dr Who fan Nick Griffith that should be appearing sometime soon in Vector I wondered whether the book represented a Nick Hornby moment – a time when a boyish hobby/obsession (in Hornby’s case football, in Griffith’s case wobbly sceneried tv science fiction) stumbled out of the musty bedroom of secretive geeky pleasure and into the sunlit uplands of general acceptance.

It seems I was not alone in my speculations that we might be on the verge of a different era in the perception of science fiction by the public and by critics.

Television science fiction is going through a bit of a renaissance – BSG is as good a space-based sf tv sho as has ever been broadcast, Heroes is entertaining and smart, Lost – at least in it’s early incarnation – felt startlingly different, and given the different structure and smaller audience of modern television, Dr Who is probably as popular as it has ever been.

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Posted June 30, 2007 Comments(4)

The latest news from the round of LA Screenings highlights where some of this season’s new American sf shows will find their UK home (for those of you without the broadband to bittorrent them…)

 ITV has bought Bionic Woman and Bryan Fuller’s Pushing Daisies (and extended the ITV2 run of Supernatural by two more seasons).

Channel 4 has bought Reaper, a comedy about a “21 year old slacker” who is recruited as Satan’s bounty hunter. This is most interesting because Kevin Smith directed the pilot.

Sky One has bought Journeyman.

Virgin Media TV (probably Bravo and eventually Ftn [probably new freeview channel Virgin 1 - which is going heavy on the Star Trek too] has bought The Sarah Connor Chronicles (for £400,000 per episode, which may well be the station’s entire budget).

Posted June 29, 2007 Comments(0)

This review originally appeared on the extremely short-lived “Scalpel Magazine” site.

Since that’s all ended in acrimony, and the review no longer seems to be available from there, I thought I’d repost it here.

Gradisil – Adam Roberts
Gollancz, London, 2006, 458pp, £18.99, h/b, ISBN 0-575-07587-2
Reviewed by Martin McGrath

Gradisil is a novel of undeniable ambition. Adam Roberts has constructed a cast of complex, difficult characters and worked them into a dense plot that curls and twists itself around a set of intricate and challenging ideas. From one angle it is a novel about politics, from another it is a generational novel about a dysfunctional family, while from a third it is an adventure stretching across decades.

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Posted June 23, 2007 Comments(2)

So Lyle Hopwood was kind enough to point out to me after I wrote this post about Apple, iTunes and their educational initiative that MIT provided lots of their courses online.

This got me wondering and wandering around the web, looking for places where I could find some brain candy – especially since intelligent, challenging and learned documentary television seems to be so totally out of fashion (have you seen what they’ve done to Horizon!).

And the good news is, there is stuff out there.

Fora TV
Perhaps the most technologically sophisticated and slickest of these sites, with a really wide-ranging scope and a pile of content drawn from recordings of think tank events and public discussions. Although the site claims to draw material from all over the world, there’s a pretty heavy US bias – which makes the politics and much of the arts stuff less interesting to me. Europeans (and Australians) might twitch to discover the three top stories in the “Europe” section were an address by Aussie PM John Howard, George Bush on “democracy and security”, and a thing on the Middle East. There’s plenty of meat in the science and health channel though.

RESEARCH CHANNEL
The Research Channel (with it’s UK equivalent) draws on academic sources to provide their material. There’s some great panel from the University of Southern California and Robert Lawrence Kuhn (I particularly enjoyed one with Marvin Minsky and Francis Fukyama) and another with David Brin, Octavia Butler & Michael Crichton on “Is Science Fiction Science”. Sadly the specifically British content isn’t as good – it’s much shorter and less wide ranging. Video quality on these sites is variable (and it’s never particularly high) but there’s content is intelligent. The better programmes are those that don’t try to be so slick.

UNIVERSITIES
As Lyle pointed out, there’s a broad range of material available at MIT’s site and other universities, such as Princeton, Cornell and Imperial College London also have material available to stream or download.

BBC
The BBC have a lot of archived radio stuff on their site. By far my favourite – and perhaps the best thing the BBC does – is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” the Radio 4 panel discussion which can transform a dreary train journey and costs me a fortune in books about subjects I really didn’t think I was interested in. Unlike most BBC programmes, In Our Time has an extensive archive of programs covering an extraordinary very wide range of topics in science, religion, philosophy, history and culture and it remains the least dumbed down thing on television or radio. You can stream or download. Also good are the collected Reith lectures going back to 1999.

See, there can be more to the Internet than flame wars and pornography… now if only the Open University would transfer their old television programmes to the web!

Posted June 23, 2007 Comments(0)

I’ve said before that, for a genre that so often finds its writers dealing with big political ideas, relatively few science fiction authors demonstrate any sense that they have a clue about how politics really works. This leads to things like the sci-fi revolution and improbable conspiracies (sci-fi governments are good at keeping secrets, real governments are crap – politics is a career for people who love talking) and half-arsed characterisation.

For someone who has been a political activist and worked on the edges of politics, uninformed ranting about politics sometimes makes me despair.

Not, of course that sf writers are alone in this. Politics is one of those things – like music, art and sport – where the fantastically incapable, the never-bothered-trying and the wilfully ignorant feel perfectly happy in putting forth opinions that the expect to be taken seriously and pass judgements on those who have devoted time and effort to developing skills and experience in the area.

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Posted June 22, 2007 Comments(1)

Coming back from holiday gave a chance to catch up on three episodes of Doctor Who – and it was absolute treat.

The last part of Paul Cornell’s excellent “Family” two-parter managed to combine an excellently scary foe (those scarecrows were classic Who) with a poignant story that managed to bring something new to the Doctor. I didn’t quite buy the Kiplingesque “King and country despite it all” stuff – but I did think it worked well within the story. And then the ending… I like the Doctor most when his alien side shows, and the cold cruelty of the way the Doctor finally dispatches his enemies, was superbly handled.

Then there was “Blink” Stephen Moffat’s absolutely fantastic stand-alone story that managed to make an absolute virtue of being a small budget piece using relatively limited resources to deliver what must be amongst the best single episodes of television science fiction ever committed to tape. Moffat just gets Doctor Who – the mix of scariness, sentimentality and humour was spot on. The sequence where the male character had to try and keep staring at the statues was excellent, the tricking of the statues into trapping themselves, and the neat resolution of the story’s hanging threads all really worked and added up to a fine forty-five minutes entertainment.

Finally this weekends “Utopia”- without a shadow of a doubt the best episode of Doctor Who that Russell T Davies has so far written, a frantic and thrilling piece of misdirection that delivered a twist in the final third that left me with an enormous grin on my face. The only downside is that now Derek Jacobi and John Simm will never be able to play the Doctor.

And it proved that at lease somewhere in the heart of the Doctor Who crew there are still those that recognise that there is scope for Captain Jack to be an exciting, charismatic, roguish character – not the dull, slightly spoddy, authority figure that they’ve made him in Torchwood.

I’ve heard people grumble about this series of Doctor Who. Personally the Daleks in New York two-parter didn’t work for me (not least because I thought they threw away the chance to make some interesting historical points and the human-dalek thing was just silly) and the “Lazarus Experiment” was too knowingly smug – Mark Gatiss just annoys me – but I liked the first three episodes (especially the genuinely funny “The Shakespeare Code”) and the last five (from “42” onwards) have been golden. That’s a pretty high strike rate for any show.

Now if they can just carry us through to the finale with a bang then this might be a classic Who season – the best of New Who (Nu Hu! yuk!) certainly. And up there with the glory days of Douglas Adams, perhaps?

Posted June 19, 2007 Comments(0)

Anyone who has seen me in the (more than ample) flesh, will be entirely unsurprised to discover that my idea of a holiday does not involve white water rafting or hiking across unspoilt wildernesses.

No, all I want is a reasonably quiet, well lit room and a stack of reading material.

It must be inside – no reading on the beach, I’m Irish, I start blue and go straight to lobster red if I spend more than twenty seconds in sunlight.

Of course, with a young daughter and a wife whose grew up in a family whose idea of a holiday was a forced march across the Andes, my quest for peace and quiet (or outrageous laziness if you believe those who stare at my prostrate, somewhat less than mercurial form and sigh in disbelief) is often forlorn.

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Posted June 19, 2007 Comments(0)

Waiting for me on Saturday morning was the latest edition of Nemonymous. Number seven – “scriptus innominatus” – is a very handsome paperback book and I can’t wait to get to read the stories.

As far as I know, I’ve never met Des Lewis but his quirky online presence has always made me smile and I’ve admired Nemonymous both in concept and in execution ever since I first came across it. Des has produced a run of very beautifully produced magazines that look great and contain excellent stories that transcend the publication’s core conceit – that the stories are published “anonymously” with the authors only identified subsequently.

For a history of Nemonymous – and an insight into the truly unique nature of Nemonymous 6 – the planet’s finest collectable – check out the wikipedia page

This sort of brave, idiosyncratic, high quality publishing really does deserve the support of the whole sf community.

So go on, pop over to the Nemonymous website and get a copy.

I know the website looks complicated – actually it looks slightly mad, it’s a myspace page and it’s very confusing – but the quality of the publication bares no relationship to the quality of the website and ordering via PayPal is actually quite straightforward.

I recommend picking up the back editions of Nemonymous.

Des also sells his stuff via Ebay, click here.

Another interesting project that’s just landed on my door is the first Postcard from Hell – actually it was preview – the first issue is due soon. Postcards… is a neat little idea – a series of short-short stories mailed out over thirteen weeks in postcard sized format (actually it’s a double-length piece of paper folded over with the story printed inside with cover art and the “postcard” part on the outside). The little horror story that’s part of the first “issue” is “Dark Wine” by Paul Lewthwaite. It’s a little gothic for my taste and there are a few glitches (I’m pretty sure he meant the “screech of crones” rather than “cronies” for example) but the last paragraph’s a good ‘un. And this sort of thing should be encouraged. It’s clever publishing.

Posted June 18, 2007 Comments(3)

I have been on holiday – far from broadband, wi-fi or any of the things I take for granted – hence the prolonged silence on the blog. Not dead, just resting.

I went back to Ireland for my cousin’s wedding. And a fine time was had by all.

There are lots of clichés about Ireland – greenness, friendliness, drunken beeriness etc. – and like most clichés there is both crude generalisation and accuracy in all of these.

The latest in that long list of clichés – but, in my opinion, by far the best – is the burbling from ex-pats returning home and marvelling about how much things have changed.

We visited Belturbet – which is the village where my mother grew up. My memory of the town – based on my last visit in the mid-80s – was of a place where the description “sleepy” would have been a serious exaggeration. Comatose might have been closer. There were few jobs and precious little to do anywhere in the town. I remember it being a pretty bleak place.Today things seem far friskier. There’s a good selection of restaurants opening around the town, there are holiday cottages being built all over the place, there’s a new marina and the River Erne has become a big tourist attraction for anglers and the boating crowd. There are big hotels and – perhaps it’s because of the wonderful, wonderful smoking ban – but even the pubs seem happier, lighter places.

And my home town, Dungannon, is almost unrecognisable. Though sadly part of that change has been to drain “The Lines” – the big, muddy field across the road from where I lived where I spent a lot of my boyhood playing, catching frogs, dodging Army patrols and annoying cows. There was a moment when I almost said “I remember when all this was just fields…”

While we were in Ireland I saw Dara O’Briain interviewed on Parkinson. He said that the new Ireland – north and south – was the perfect antidote for nostalgia. Things might be changing fast, but there wasn’t anyone who looked back at the changes and wished things could go back to the way they were.

There was, also, a fantastic science fiction moment during our trip. I was sitting in The Seven Horse Shoes watching the ould fellas at the bar and thinking about my grandfather – who probably stood there many times wearing the same uniform of Irish men of previous generations (a smart jacket and respectable trousers- maybe even a suit - shirt and tie, a pair of shiny black shoes (always well polished) and a tweedy flat cap – and I almost found myself feeling nostalgic. Maybe not that much had changed afterall?…

Then one of those ould fellas pulled out his ultra-thin mobile phone and starts thumbing away a text message.

And welcome back to the twenty-first century, amadán!

Posted June 18, 2007 Comments(0)