Apocalypse Now, Utopia Later

Oh right, yes, sorry. I was miles away.

I've been very lax in updating this blog for a few weeks now. The week before last I was (I'm glad to say) enjoying my time off too much to spend much of it staring at a computer screen, and since then I've been absurdly busy again, mostly catching up after my week off. (Such is the nature of our western society -- it's the post-christian work ethic, you know. Some days I long to live in one of those eastern post-buddhist cultures where they really know how to let their hair down and and relax, like, say, Japan. Oh.)

I've also, to be scrupulously honest, been playing rather a lot of Scrabble with people on Facebook.

But now the proofreading of Nobody's Children is suddenly horribly urgent, and I'm unlikely to get the time to update this blog with the reviews of Collapse, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and the numerous trade-paperback comic collections I've been reading in order to bump my books-per-week score back up again after the couple of months spent reading Collapse and Iron Council -- let alone the baby gorilla photos I owe you -- for a few days' yet.

In the meantime, and with what I'm rather forlornly hoping might be an endearing predictability, I'm breaking silence in order to trail my latest column for Surefish. Andy the editor has titled it "Apocalypse Now?", but I'm still rather fond of my original title -- so much so in fact that I think I'll use it here.

The piece was written after our last round of floods, and (I believe) was left by Andy on a thingy to upload automatically after he went on holiday. So I have to admit that it reads as a little out of date now.

In particular, I should apologise to His Grace the Bishop of Carlisle. I must acknowledge that Her Majesty's Government failed to heed the warning he gave us after the earlier flooding and reintroduce the death penalty for sodomy, and that the Deity (or, for the most hardened unbelievers amongst us, a complex chaotic weather system) has since responded with yet further travails -- just as the arsebrained twat predicted.

So, my apologies to him for that.

In happier news (though still bittersweet), the eleventh and (for the moment) final volume of Telos's Time Hunter series, Child of Time by George Mann and David Howe, has now been released. I've yet to read my copy, but I gather it features some characters from my book in the series, Peculiar Lives, in a prominent rôle. So that's nice.

And, as I say, it shouldn't be long now before Nobody's Children is out. I'm hoping to have something rather special to put up on my website as an extra, but that's still under wraps for now.

Mmm, wraps. Time for supper, I think.


PS: Oh -- one other thing, speaking of Japan: The Onion has one of the funnier pieces of S.F. I've read recently. Enjoy.