Planet Carefully

My latest column, about solar and planetary religion, is now up at Surefish.

Reading it back, I'm startled by how incoherent it is. At the time I could have sworn I was more or less making sense. Sorry about that...

Dr Acula, Ph.D.

The reason it's been three weeks since I last updated this blog thing is that I've been up to my throat in writing this vampire novella, the day job's been really busy and B. and I have been away every weekend and faffing about with stuff most evenings. Some of these are perfectly pleasant things in themselves, but taken together they've tended to engender a large amount of stress and busytude.

Life's been so hectic recently I've barely had time to update my Facebook status, let alone write a blog post. Sadly, B. and I have had to turn down a party in London tonight as being just that one thing too many for the maintenance of sanity.

The novella's coming along nicely, though, you'll be pleased to hear -- I now have around two-thirds of it written, at a little over 20,000 words.

I realise that I've not said much about Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Vampire's Curse here, except to praise my co-authors and to drone on about writing the thing. At this stage I know little of Mags' and Kelly's stories, and they're not mine to talk about anyway. My third of the book (originally entitled The Predator Principle, which proved to be rubbish, and now called, still rather tentatively, Predating the Predators) is about the First Interdisciplinary Conference on Vampirology, which is first infiltrated and then gatecrashed by a coven of vampires.

It's a blending of genres -- as a vampire novella, it's obviously a horror story, and as the umbrella title suggests it has a certain schlocky Hammer vibe. I also decided to go for the authentic Gothic flavour of Dracula and its ilk, by building the narrative out of letters, journal entries and excerpts from secondary documents. It's also inevitably a campus novel[la], and equally inevitably (given that it's part of the Bernice Summerfield range) it's S.F., taking place in Benny's space-operatic galactic milieu.

Being me, I felt that those weren't really enough genre referents, so I've also introduced a Jesuit priest wrestling with an apparently intractable theological problem on a remote planet, thus tying nicely in with the rarefied but venerable S.F. subgenre of "Jesuit priest wrestling with an apparently intractable theological problem on a remote planet" stories[1]. In a revolutionary twist, mine's called Imogen.

In short, it's an allegorical-epistolary-gothic-horror-pastiche-campus-space-opera -- not quite on the scale of a a detective-ghost-horror-whodunnit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic, but not bad at only a little over 30,000 words.

I've also written my monthly column for Surefish, gone on a training course which may entitle me to do some Thought for the Day slots on BBC Radio Bristol, and am now working on a short piece for a kind of collaboration which is altogether new for me, though sadly neither earth-shakingly high-profile or notably paid (come back in late August for more on this).

Coincidentally, it's about something vampires are afraid of, although admittedly there seem to be quite a lot of objects that applies to.

[1] S.F. novices who feel disinclined to believe in this as a bona fide subgenre may wish to investigate Anthony Boucher's "Balaam", Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star", James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Philip José Farmer's Father John Carmody stories, the 80-page segment "The Priest's Tale" in Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God. S.F. initiates who can spot any I've missed should feel free to chip in.

Discuss

Ah. My latest column's up at Surefish. It's a bit meandery and mentions vampires, which accurately reflects my state of mind recently.

A point of discussion which you may find it interesting to comment on here:

I sometimes try to imagine a scientific discovery which would persuade me that my faith was spurious. As yet I’ve come up with nothing.

What do we (and by "we" I mean "you", given that I wrote it) think of this? If you have a religious faith, can you think of a potential scientific revelation about the universe which would convince you to become an atheist? If you're an atheist, what revelations (actual or hypothetical) do you think should so persuade me?

Or do you think the question's a meaningless one?

Patagonia of Tiny Feet

OK. I'm not going to make a habit of this, you understand, but while I'm slavishly copying other people's ideas, Simon Guerrier has rather eccentrically requested me to select an S.F. book of my choice, turn to p123 and record the fifth sentence here.

Predictably perhaps, but also because I can reach it without getting up, I've chosen Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which says:

"It became the party's most sacred object, for it kindled in every mind the strong parental disposition so characteristic of Patagonians."

So there you go -- Patagonians like having babies. You heard it here first, unless of course you've read Last and First Men at any point during the past 78 years.

Because I don't really do "memes", I'm not going to oblige anybody to continue this. If you think it would be fun, feel free to link to this post and say I told you to.

I'm still trying to write vampires today, although I've also sent off another Surefish column. As usual I'll mention here when it's been put up.

I'd normally be writing tomorrow as well, but I seem to be obliged to turn up here and learn to cook tapas instead. Saturday I'll be attending festive Midsummer nuptials in Oxford, which will be fun.

Planetary Romance

That review I mentioned of that book about these books is now up at Surefish. It may be more informative and persuasive than my earlier witterings, or of course it may not. Ignore the big pull-quote about feminism [ETA: now fixed], which appears to be from another review altogether.

In theory I should be having a column up this week as well. I'm not sure whether Andy's going to hold off on that one.

[ETA: Yes, the column's up too. It's about vampires.]

"Well, Narnia and barmier don't rhyme, to begin with."

I've only just noticed that my column for this month is now up at Surefish. In retrospect, I may have got a little carried away with the S.F. theology towards the end.

This is slightly unfortunate, as I'm now writing a review for Surefish endorsing this book, which claims to have discovered a "secret imaginative key" to C.S. Lewis's Narnia septet, based around the tenets of medieval astrology.

And yes, I know how that sounds, but in point of fact Michael Ward's argument is so well-informed, persuasive and -- if you actually know anything about Lewis's thought -- downright reasonable, that I can't imagine not endorsing it. And as someone who reads Fortean Times religiously every month, I have some experience of evaluating dodgy arguments. (Actually, "religiously" sounds wrong in that sentence. In fact I probably read Fortean Times secularly every month.)

If you don't believe me, that's probably fair enough, but if you find Lewis's work interesting enough to be open to new perspectives on it, do give the book (or even this summary) a read before dismissing it. Perhaps you'll decide I'm less insane than the readers at Surefish are now likely to believe.

Otherwise, I've been grindly slowly onwards on the reading front. River of Gods is still huge and difficult to fathom -- I'm perhaps two-thirds of the way through now, but it's slow going. I'm finding that McDonald's use of local (Indian) vocabulary goes way beyond scene-setting and into the realms of deliberate obscurity. The book has an "If I know this, why don't you?" air, which might seem reasonable (if smug) if its target readership consisted of Indians and indologists, but is only going to irritate the average western reader. There's a glossary, admittedly, but it's hopelessly sketchy.

In other respects it's a pretty good character-driven S.F. novel, although there are a hell of a lot of characters. Perhaps a cast list would have been more useful than the glossary.

I think the only other things I've read are a couple of Doctor Who books, The Pirate Loop (mindless fluff, nothing like as good as the author's capable of) and The Many Hands (immensely better, but still suffering from its curtailed length).

I'm also halfway through Reginald Hill's A Cure for All Diseases, which as a police procedural set in modern Yorkshire suffers rather from being closely based on an unfinished Jane Austen comedy of manners set in 18th-century Sussex. Crime writers are weird.

Do Ordinands Dream of Electric Priests? ...etc.

To accompany today's (ahem) fortuitously-timed news story about the first automated church minister package, my latest column on the spiritual dimensions of artificial intelligence is up at Surefish.

As the pantheist said...

My God: it's full of stars.

(My Arthur C. Clarke obit, now up at Surefish.)

Goodness, has it really?

As long as that? Blimey.

I'm actually having grave trouble writing anything at all at the moment, not just posting here. Possible reasons for this might include:

• natural idleness
• extended post-Christmas lassitude
• busyness at work
• mild depression
• my caffeine dependency reaching the point where coffee no longer has any actual stimulant effect.

I suspect the last of those, myself -- it happens occasionally, and generally requires a two-month detox so I can start feeling the benefit again -- but the others may also be playing a part.

This is why I'm rather glad I've managed to spend today writing a column for Surefish (and on only three coffees, too), even if it does retread some rather familiar ground for anyone who's heard me witter on about my thesis. It isn't this one about TV's Heroes, which as it happens has just gone up today -- some editorial rescheduling at Surefish has meant that that one's been waiting in the pipeline a little while. (I didn't really need to write the next column today at all, in fact, but since I seemed to be making actual progress with it I thought I ought to press on.)

So what else have I been doing recently? Well, consuming various bits of culture, pop- and otherwise, in diverse media. There'll be too many to list, but they include:

• Alan Moore's brilliant and hilarious The Black Dossier -- the latest in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series -- which is about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, spying in post-Big-Brother Britain in the 1950s.
  
• Kim Newman's clever and mildly disturbing Andy Warhol's Dracula -- a a follow-up, though not a particularly recent one, to his Anno Dracula series -- about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, hanging out with Andy Warhol in New York in the 1970s.
  
• Paul Magrs' very fine and splendid Something Borrowed -- the sequel to the equally fine and splendid Never the Bride -- about multiple characters from different fictional universes, including that of Dracula, meeting up at a B&B in Whitby in the present day.

(These three are surprisingly different from one another, to the extent that I might try comparing them in detail here, if I manage the time and energy. The Black Dossier is the best, I think, but I'd be more likely recommend the camp Hammerology of Something Borrowed to the casual reader. It's fab.)

• Newtons Sleep, the sixth (or seventh, or eighth, depending how you're counting) Faction Paradox novel and the first from new publishers Random Static. Which is just great, and which I should probably also say more about here soon.
• Iain M. Banks's Matter, which is fun so far, although if you've read the previous Culture novels it's rather noticeably more of the same. Still, there's a lot of incredibly detailed and imaginative worldbuilding, which it's always worth reading Banks-the-S.F.-writer for.
• Cloverfield, which is very clever and interestingly done, but not actually all that entertaining to watch, which is a bit of an oversight. It's rather lucky that they do keep the monster offscreen for most of the time, because when you actually see it it's a bit rubbish. (It also gave me terrible motion sickness, which has been happening more recently. I suspect this is the current cinematic trend towards low-tech verisimilitude, rather than my advancing age, but if it carries on I'm going to have to take travel-sickness pills before going to the cinema, which is silly.)
• Penelope. Christina Ricci -- whom the plot requires to be repulsively ugly -- is sexier as a pig-faced woman than I'd have imagined possible.
• Ashes to Ashes. That Keeley Hawes really isn't John Simm, is she?
• Torchwood, which, while more consistent this season, will have to do an awful lot of arse-gearing before I start feeling it's actually worth my while watching it. (That said, and presumably just to keep me paying attention, the episode Adam was blindingly good.)

And a bunch of other stuff as well.

I also, last weekend, met up with a cluster of friends whom I love a great deal and get far too sentimental about, together with assorted partners and a baby, to eat food, drink too much and talk random nonsense. Sadly B. was working at the weekend and couldn't come. The whole thing was thoroughly lovely, though, and put me in a far mellower mood after the weekend than I was at the end of last week. Or, unfortunately, this one.

I've also been listening to the Walkman I acquired at (though not for) Christmas. Now I've got over the "My god, it's the soundtrack to my life!" response which comes from stalking about the place with non-diegetic music sounding in your ears, I'm finding it's a good way of consuming the CDs of random audio drama I have lying about the place, as well as discovering quite how limited my music collection is. Recommended.

The Elseworld, the Flesh and the Devil

Yes, sorry, that last entry was a bit dull, wasn't it? I've been rather dim-witted at work this week as well.

I'm still trying to persuade my brain and body that Christmas is over, and that I really am expected to be functioning as normal at the moment, rather than lounging around reading, sleeping and watching TV. Also that there are no mince pies or chocolate decorations left, because I've eaten them all.

Never mind. Surefish have put up my latest column, written back in December, about alternative history and what it might tell us about christianity. Read it and let me know what you think.

A slightly more interesting allotheological question than the one I ask here, "What if Jesus had never been crucified?" would (unless, of course, you're a boringly conservative penal substitutionary atonement fan) be "What if Jesus had never been an adult?".

Infant mortality in first-century Palestine was shockingly high, not to mention that a successful conception is absolutely no guarantee you'll end up being born. Many doctrines of the atonement hold that Christ's incarnation, with an optional side-order of death and suffering, were sufficient for the salvation of humanity -- but what if this happened and no-one knew about it, because the saviour had perished from diphtheria, saving the world in the process, while two weeks old?

Er. That probably won't be of much interest to most of you, but it's the kind of thing I sometimes think about (along with "What if Jesus had been born Persian, say, or indeed Roman?", "What if Jesus had used his powers for evil and become a supervillain?" and "Mm, I could really do with a mince pie".) This doesn't necessarily mean anyone else has to take any notice, at least until I put it in a novel or something.

...and now, inevitably, I'm imagining what that middle one would look like as a comic, with rival Roman and Jewish teams of superheroes (The Centurion and Kid Caesar, Simon Magus and the Wandering Jew) vying for the privilege of taking down Messiahman and his Disciples of Doom. I need to go and clean my brain out now.

Oh look, a badger!

Bard Humbug

I've spent some of today writing a short story for B. and me to send out with our Christmas cards. I started this tradition in 2006, and last year's story (a midwinter fantasy called "Sol Invictus") should be appearing at my website at some point between now and Christmas itself. I may as well post it here as well.

If you need entertaining in the meantime, you can always read my latest column about dystopias at Surefish.

Today I've also been scouting out Christmas presents online, including the latest Arden Shakespeare for our goddaughter E.'s collection. We've been giving her a play every birthday and Christmas since she was born, making (Antony and Cleopatra) her thirteenth (and E. herself, of course, six). We calculate that, including the poems and sonnets, there's an adequate supply of Shakespeare to last her until her twentieth birthday, following which we can make the whole library redundant by giving her the Complete Shakespeare for Christmas 2021.

Obviously we're having to be judicious about this. On the one hand, we want to be able to give her some of the interesting plays when she's old enough to appreciate them. On the other hand, when she reaches an age to take an interest in a long-dead verse playwright, we don't want her to look through the selection she's got and realise that most of them are frankly rubbish.

With the best Will in the world (ho ho), not many teenagers these days read Timon of Athens or Pericles, Prince of Tyre for pleasure, and the few who do are probably as disturbed by the obsession with father-daughter incest as amused by Pericles' Pythonesque description of fish as "the finny subject of the sea".

So, we've been trying to alternate the interesting (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra) and less-interesting (Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry IV Parts One and Two, Pericles, The Comedy of Errors) plays, as well as keeping up a vaguely even balance of the genres.

We have two lists, of Good and Not Good plays, each title colour-coded according to whether it's a Tragedy, a Comedy, a History or the one of difficult-to-categorise Last Plays. (Identifying Good Histories has been a bit of a challenge, of course. Once you've done Henry V and Richard III you're a bit stuck.)

She may, of course, have to study some of the plays at school or college, which might mean we have to alter our plans. Some plays we're keeping back for specific life-stages: Hamlet is obviously an ideal gift for a moody teenager who hates their parents, while Titus Andronicus -- a cheerful tale of murder, rape, revenge, mutilation and cannibalism -- seems ideal for her Goth phase.

I wonder slightly whether I should be revealing future plans for presents on a blog which is archived indefinitely. While a six-year-old is unlikely to be browsing the web in search of people she knows, a sixteen-year-old might well be.

On the other hand, I rather suspect E. will have better things to do in 2017 than reading ten-year-old blog posts by her 46-year-old godfather. As for 415-year-old plays by a 450-year-old playwright... well, the jury's still out on that one.

Webfondlings

Meanwhile, my indefatigable attempts to colonise an ever-decreasing percentage of the exponentially widening world Web have resulted in the following:

• My latest Surefish column, about Future Church History. (I'm predictably pleased with the sub-headings, although I'll admit to stealing one of them from here.)
• A sympathetic review of Nobody's Children, which ends by imagining me as part of a progenitive parenting threesome along with Jon Blum and Kate Orman. I don't know which of us should be more disturbed at that.

Oops

I see it's been nearly a month since I last posted here. A combination of two weekends spent away seeing family and friends, and starting a more senior job at work, have left me playing catch-up during my spare time. (And all the Facebook Scrabble probably hasn't helped either.)

Proper updates should be emerging in the forthcoming days. In the meantime, my latest Surefish column continues some of the musings from nearly a month ago, especially those here.

Sorry.

Final Greenbelt Roundup

I'm not away any more. In fact I've been back for over a week, but things have been a bit busy. Sorry about that.

Greenbelt was enormous fun, and surprisingly relaxing this year -- in previous years when I've been doing stuff I've ended up getting rather stressed, but this time around I was able to incorporate my Surefish blogging into my daily routine quite happily.

I just want to tidy up by mentioning a few things which that reportage didn't have the space to cover...

Daliso Chiponda's comedy slot (which I went to after filing my last day's copy) was good in parts, but lacked structural unity. Despite the "Attack of the Colonies" title, and although some of his best material was political ("There are good things about living in a dictatorship. When you have phone sex, it's always a threesome."), the show as a whole was a stream-of-consciousness ramble through jokes about relationships, family life and -- rather archaically -- how white men can't dance, which never really came together.

I didn't blog about how much time I spent in the beer tent, which was rather a lot in the end. There were a couple more beers than last year, which I appreciated, although they could still do with expanding their range for next year. The tent was often very full indeed, I suspect partly because they'd relaxed the "No Under 18s" rule (not for drinking, obviously, but for being physically within the bounds of the licensed area).

I enjoyed a rather spendid worship installation which combined gigantic paintings of Christ's hands with a piece called "Prayer of the Heart" by John Tavener, incorporating multilingual Kyries sung by Björk. It was very powerful, weird and visceral music, which would have had substantial emotional punch without the spiritual content. At first I found the noise of the festival all around the room rather distracting, but after a while I was able to imagine it incorporated into the music itself. Which was also kind of weird. I don't tend to get much time for meditation, and this was a good experience. I went back a couple of times.

That said, visual art at the festival generally had dropped off compared with previous years. The emphasis seemed to be on art as a process, with several visual artists creating artwork around the site, but the gallery-style displays of previous years were prominently lacking, which was a great shame.

I enjoyed visiting the animals. I always miss my cats when we're away, and there's something very comforting about physical contact with other mammals. Plus there was a hen who could fit up to seven chicks under her wings at a time.

I bought Billy Bragg's book and the interesting-looking The Gospel According to Science Fiction. The former was sold to me by a very professional eight-year-old girl, which I found a little unnerving.

I have some photos which I need to upload at some point, although Lord knows when. Some are of some very exciting (and huge) kites being flown in the shapes of fish and lizards and things.

That's about it, really. Next year I really must get organised about speaking again, before everyone forgets who I am.

Philip Purser-Hallard Is Away

Saturday 25 August: I'm at Greenbelt.

(And I wrote "Arse", not "A*se".)

Sunday 26 August: Still here.

Monday 27 August: And still.

(I'm back now, though.)

Project Pope

What with one thing and another that's been happening recently, I haven't mentioned how enormously I'm looking forward (as usual) to this year's Greenbelt festival, or to encourage you to read my daily festival blogs when they appear on Surefish.

(If you don't know what I'm talking about, click here to check out my previous years' enthusings on the subject.)

In the meantime, also at Surefish, my column for this month has appeared (with some subtle editing by Andy to make my predictions about August's weather look less blitheringly idiotic). This one's artfully designed to look lazy and summery and as if it wasn't any work at all. In fact it took me nearly a day to put together... which hopefully won't be the case for the Greenbelt writeups, or I'll have nothing to write up.

As a special bonus feature (exclusive to this blog!) here are the five runners-up for that "Top 5 Science Fiction Popes" list:

6. Innocent XIV (Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling). After experimental rejuvenation treatment, Innocent pioneers the sacramental use of hallucinogens and becomes the figurehead for an artificially youthful global gerontocracy.
7. Hadrian XI ("The Futurological Congress" by Stanislaw Lem). This Hadrian is constantly beset by Catholics -- some armed with specialised "papalshooters" -- hoping to make a martyr of him.
8. Crocodylus I (Futurama by Matt Groening et al). The reptilian Space Pope is known to disapprove of mixed human-robot relationships.
9. Eleanor I (The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton). Eleanor excommunicates all users of biotechnology in 2090, creating an acrimonious rift between human cultures. You see, that's what happens when you let women become pontiffs...
10. Amen I (St Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman by Walter M. Miller Jr.) The former hermit is installed as a puppet Pope by the machiavellian Cardinal Brownpony, in the former U.S.A. a millennium after a nuclear holocaust.

To be honest, some of those are reaching a bit -- I wouldn't recommend St Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman to anybody, particularly not to anybody who'd read A Canticle for Leibowitz and was expecting a worthwhile sequel.

If I hadn't been so fussy about using the Popes' regnal names, I would have included the unnamed Bishop of Rome who sends a young monk out to search for the body of a robot saint in Anthony Boucher's "The Quest for St Aquin" and the clone of Cardinal Richelieu who siezes the Papal See (but whose ex officio name is never revealed) in the Doctor Who novel Managra. It just wouldn't have looked as good.

Largely Random Observations

Or, What I'd Be Blogging About If Only I Had The Time

1. I must stop mentioning the weather in my Surefish column. When this month's number goes live it's going to start "Gosh, isn't it marvellous that summer's finally started after all that miserable rain we were having earlier?" Aargh.

2. B. and I have been married for eight years as of today. Hurrah for us! Eight years is Sodium, if I recall correctly.

3. Thanks to the aforementioned balmy summer weather, I spent today wandering about the office in:

• wet trousers.
  
• a wet shirt.
  
• a wet tie.
  
• wet underpants.
  
• no shoes, because they were wet.
  
• dry socks, because I keep a pair at work.

It's amazing how much difference dry socks make to your comfort levels. I'm beginning to think I should keep a pair of pants at work too, and possibly an entire spare bedroom.

4. Trisyllabic words that should rhyme but don't: "kilobyte" and "trilobite".

5. When I was growing up in Worthing, my parents had a lean-to shed which they referred to -- in an act of 70s middle-class pretension which Margo Leadbeatter would have baulked at -- as "our loggia". It was only when I read A Room with a View that I realised that what I'd always heard as "losure" was an Italian word, rather than being short for "enclosure".

6. Heroes is -- so far, at least, which from our point of view synchronises with BBC3's advance showings but not with The Sci-Fi Channel -- pretty great.

7. Cryptic crosswords are surprisingly difficult, though. I've been making a vague effort to start doing them regularly, given that sources as diverse as B.'s granny and Toby off The West Wing inform me that they keep your brain supple well into old age. I'm finding the bastards almost impossible, though, suggesting that I've already descended too far into senility for any non-miraculous intervention to be effective. Oh well.

8. I can't work out quite why anyone would want to visit Ashton Court for the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, given that there are better places across Bristol's multiple hills for watching the launches and flights. On Saturday our preferred vantage point (and that of around 2,000 other people, most of them under the age of six) was up the cliffs near Clifton Observatory, where the balloons pass pretty much overhead. (Sometimes they dip right down into the Avon Gorge first, which apparently is Just Showing Off.) It seems particularly perverse to drive to Ashton Court just as some godblighted football match is finishing at Ashton Gate Stadium, which is what the entire population of Southern England bar those 2,000 were doing an hour or so before the launch.

9. The other day I read an ancient Dilbert strip which included the words "Now I have to hug this guy so it won't seem awkward." Five minutes later I had "Purple Haze" going through my head.

10. After nearly nine years of very occasionally killing mice or other small vertebrates, then sitting and watching the corpses in the forlorn hope that they'll start moving again, Mulder has finally worked out what being a predator is actually about. Or so the mouse B. found on the living-room floor last Wednesday would suggest... if it had any front half left to squeak the news with.

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.

The Sound of Voodoo Drums

If you've been wondering what I've thought of the latest season of Doctor Who, the term I'd use would be "mixed", or more accurately "very mixed indeed, so much so as to generate whiplash when watched back-to-back". Some of the early episodes were very, very bad; the run of episodes from Human Nature to Utopia was the best New Who has ever been; and then the whole thing fell apart semi-disastrously at the end.

Ah, well. At least they haven't done anything perverse and idiotic like shunting Freema Agyeman's appealing and charismatic Martha off to Torchwood while bringing back bloody Catherine Tate as the full-time companion for Season Four. Oh, wait.

If, as is quite likely, you're more interested in knowing specifically what I thought of Season Three's treatment of religious themes, then by a mind-boggling coincidence my latest column for Surefish dwells extensively on that very topic.

In other news, those of you mourning the premature and sad demise of the Faction Paradox novels may well be interested in seeing this. Daniel O'Mahony is, I think I'm safe in saying, the most talented writer to have worked in the Faction Paradox arena, and to have a full-length novel from him set in the Faction universe will be a rare treat. I only hope that this is the first of many from Random Static.

Publications

With luck and a prevailing wind, I should be posting a proper update on what I've been doing later today. In the meantime, may I draw your attention to the following:

1. My latest column is now up at Surefish, on the spirituality of aliens. I'm slightly disappointed that they've toned the title down from my original "I Baptised a Monster from Outer Space".

2. Dave Stone's novel The Two Jasons, which reprints (and is partly a sequel to) my short story "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants", is out now.

3. Big Finish have announced a few more details of my next-to-be-published project, Nobody's Children -- to whit, the titles of the three novellas in the collection. They're "All Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Kate Orman, "The Loyal Left Hand" by Jonathan Blum and "Nursery Politics" by me. No cover as yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.