A couple of weeks ago at a party, in the midst of a conversation about the divide between sports and science, I said “Every true geek can remember where he was when Isaac Asimov died.” One of the guests thought he was still alive, but further questioning proved that he was actually thinking of Arthur C Clarke. Asimov had been gone since 1992 and despite my proclamation, I don’t actually remember where I was when I heard the news; I only remember a vague impression of writing down how I felt. Last night, of course, was different.

More...

Well, fame was almost mine. I’d been wondering for years if SFX would even pick up on this little movie that we were doing. OK, so I could have got in touch with them at any point, but that would have been a little presumptuous. (Also they might have laughed and that wouldn’t have done me any good!) I’d kind of had a long-standing ambition to get the remake of Hired Guns in there as the best SF game of the year, but that didn’t happen… So now there’s SciFiNow having joined the ranks of SF magazines for almost a year now and, hey, there was a request for an interview! With Nick.

More...

As of about 7pm a couple of Sundays ago, I had no idea that Bob even existed. Bob is a third cousin of mine, assuming I understand the arcane nomenclature of genealogists. I’d always assumed that third cousin, twice removed, was the kind of description that only had a reality in friend-of-a-friend stories. You know, the ones where a friend’s cousin’s barber’s parrot’s personal trainer had seen a ghost pirate carjack a hummer and drive it upside down into a river. i.e. possibly a tad more fiction than hard nosed fact. But Bob is a real person, living in the USA, and was a topic of family discussion because no-one had heard from him in twelve years. Not that he was missing, exactly, just that no-one on this side of the Atlantic had any idea where he was or any means to get in touch.

More...

I’m aware that when I write about the Intrepid moviemaking, I’ve leapt straight in with no preamble. Unless you’ve checked the links below, you’ll probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Where there’s a Sea is a short Star Trek fan film which myself and some friends are making as a follow up to Heavy Lies the Crown which we released back in January.

More...

Well, so much for all the planning. By some horrible co-incidence on Thursday, the very first day of the eagerly anticipated competition to write a novel in a month, my laptop decided that it’d had enough. Pausing for a half-minute and then a minute between coming out of standby and doing anything useful had now got a little worse. A minute became two minutes and then on Thu, indefinitely. So of course I blamed windows and got as far as wiping the whole lot before discovering that it was a hardware problem that could be fixed by, um, taking the laptop in both hands and flexing it slightly.

More...

I’ll do better this time… Last year I entered the National Novel Writing Month competition and managed to rack up 19000 words or so before the deadline expired. Since that was a little short of 50000, it was a fail. On the other hand I’ve rarely had so much fun committing words to paper. I’ve decided to continue on the same novel as before, only this will be a fresh 50000 to add to the existing ones. After all, I seem to have a problem beginning writing and then seeing it through. Last year was also a tad problematical in that I was supposed to be doing a lot of other stuff. Actually, the same applies this time, but I don’t feel so guilty! I was planning on writing, just not writing something else.

More...

Nobody seems to know anymore. A recent poll conducted by the BBC drew much comment on our own forums, because of the twenty or so favourite SF shows (as voted for by the public), it seemed to us that just a little over half of them were actually SF. Admittedly, there seemed to be a sliding scale of ‘SF-ness’ with the usual suspects of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica flying the SF colours, then shows with a strong flavouring of SF and then… hold on a second. A sliding scale of SF-ness? If the poll was to be believed, the public – astoundingly – considers Twin Peaks to be Science Fiction!

More...

Two consumer oriented posts in a row… I must be getting old and fogeyish.

More...