Inspired by David Jones’ “My Favourite Bugs”, here’s one of my own war stories.

Console video games are demanding pieces of software to write: in addition to being entertaining, they must be playable by six-year-olds and self-explanatory to adults. They must be able to gracefully handle corrupted save files. They must never run out of memory, be ( Read more... )

The Hydrogen Sonata is the ninth novel in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. It is set in the civilization of the Gzilt, which is on the verge of ‘subliming’-that is, departing the physical universe to become immortal beings of pure energy. As the big day approaches, one question still niggles: what was the origin of the Gzilt’s suspiciously well ( Read more... )

Malthusianism is a topic that many science fiction writers have tackled, but the genre can not be said to have come out looking particularly good. ( The trouble is that the conventions of the genre require that a story must not raise a problem without solving it within the compass of the narrative, by some kind of heroic action. )

Hereditary aristocrats order the building of palaces; plan colonies and wars; plot, scheme, and murder each other; all while watching for signs of rebellion among the slaves who make their life of luxury and backstabbing possible. ( But unlike in the Roman Empire, on the planet Cyteen the slaves cannot even dream of freedom. )

Imagine that you have in your hands a mysterious book titled Just Walk. ( It seems to be some kind of manual of advice on how to walk, and includes useful tips like these... )

In his last novel Fiasco, published in 1986, Stanisław Lem returned to one of his idées fixes, the impossibility of meaningful contact with aliens. In Solaris (1961) scientists studied a living ocean but found only their own preoccupations reflected back; and in His Master’s Voice (1968) the meaning of a radio signal from the stars became more ( Read more... )

Bad reviews are a basic fact of literary life, you might have thought. There are so many different kinds of literary taste, that no book can be all things to all readers. One person’s comfort reading is another’s trash, and what’s thought-provoking to one is high-faluting nonsense to another. But the essential subjectivity of taste is hard to keep ( Read more... )

Jim Chisholm asked me to write an article for the newsletter of the Cambridge Cycling Campaign about the public perception of law-breaking among cyclists, how this arises and persists through cognitive biases, and some consequences for campaigners. I think most of the material will be pretty familiar to my readers here, but you never know.

( There ( Read more... )

A list of Don’ts for women on bicycles, c. 1895 has been doing the rounds. It consists of about 20% good advice (“don’t criticize people’s ‘legs’”) to 80% sexism (“don’t use bicycle slang: leave that to the boys”). But what on earth does this mean:

( Don’t cultivate a ‘bicycle face’. )

Adam Roberts’ 2003 novel Polystom opens with a breathtaking scene: ( Polystom climbed into his biplane one morning, having made up his mind to fly to the moon. )