Bowie. Funny, I never used to think I was a Bowie fan. I listened to the music, of course, but... fan? Then one day I looked at just how many of his albums I had. And I reflected on the films he'd been in I'd seen (I made sure, I remember, that I got in to see The Man Who Fell to Earth at the GFT the first chance I got), and acquired in various ( Read more... )

I actually started writing this a month or more ago. Other things got in the way, including some health problems (sinusitis so I couldn't really read well didn't help).
Dysprosium, this year's Eastercon, was at Heathrow in a hotel I hadn't previously been in.  It had a slightly odd layout, but was friendly and comfortable enough. The con was fun. I ( Read more... )

The English translation of Stanisław Lem's Solaris that's on sale everywhere is widely known to be not very good. (Lem himself was not happy with it.) Hardly surprising when it's a a translation of a French translation from the Polish that's apparently not brilliant. A guy called Bill Johnston has produced a new translation, more faithful to ( Read more... )

Earlier, at my mother's getting my stuff together after accidentally staying overnight (sounds better than saying I fell asleep in the chair and woke up at 4a.m.), she had the TV on while they were getting ready for the Grand National. (She wasn't watching it, in fact she was asleep, I think, which is pretty common these days). There was a list of ( Read more... )

I like LJ less and less, though using Firefox on my usual boxes it's OK, because that's adblocked to the gills. When I have to use another browser or even FF on another machine, which occasionally happens, the experience is bloody awful. In fact, the last time I did I gave up because the site was unreachable behind an ad layer that wouldn't go away ( Read more... )

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If you missed it, there's an interview with Ken MacLeod (at Odyssey) on the Morning Star's website.

It's been interesting, this election. I'm not surprised at the impact that the debates have had, or that Nick Clegg has made a bit of an impact now he is actually getting airtime on an equal footing. I have been surprised at how comfortable Gordon Brown looks in the debates, and astonished at how rubbish David Cameron has been. Whatever one thinks ( Read more... )

This week's New Scientist apparently comes with an SF special (well, they call it a Sci-Fi special, but that term always makes me shudder; it's Irene Handl's fault*). Anyway, the special's guest editor is Kim Stanley Robinson, who says that SF tells the stories of now, says very complimentary things about British SF and that, really, SF novels ( Read more... )

A little while ago I asked if anyone recognised a book, with desertification, WWIII and aliens. Success!
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