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Just finished reading number9dream by David Mitchell. I bought this book over a year ago and until yesterday, it lingered on my bookshelf looking a little dejected in its garishly colourful cover. I took it with me when I went home for the 10k run and finally read it on the train back to Oxford.
As […]

In what must be a record for me, I finished Robert Sawyer’s Hominids in around three hours this weekend; that’s about 30 seconds per page. I don’t normally read that quickly, but Hominids was a particularly easy read and had several sections on the science of DNA and quantum physics, both of which I am […]

Radio 4 on SF - the Open Book series on BBC Radio 4 recently aired (12th October) a very good programme introducing people to science fiction. You can listen to the programme at the link above, which features authors such as Pat Cadigan, Stephen Baxter and Iain Banks. I was pleasantly surprised to hear a […]

Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Quicksilver, arrived on my doorstep (metaphorically speaking) some time last week. Initially I thought to myself, ‘I’m a busy guy, I don’t have time to read this 900 page book in one go, as I usually do. Instead, I think I shall read it in little chunks, perhaps a reasonable hundred […]

I try to make a point of just reading, not posting to, Star Trek messageboards; there’s some fun stuff that gets said there but I just don’t feel like I have the time or patience to get involved.
However, after I watched the latest Enterprise episode (Anomaly) - which was unusually entertaining and well done, I […]

Stephen Baxter’s new novel, Coalescent: , sounds quite promising - in contrast to his last half dozen or so books, which have uniformly disappointed. It’s the first of three novels, each telling different stories but linked by a far future viewpoint: “Earth subsumed by the evolutionary step of the hive culture in man; a far […]

Steam Trek - what a find! Some enterprising individuals have masterfully melded two classic SF genres, Star Trek and Steampunk. The result is a wonderful universe with Her Majesty’s Aether Ships exploring the solar system and protecting the United Kingdom of Planets. Long live Queen Victoria, and may her glorious reign continue as it has […]

Some excellent news - it seems that Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow is on track to being made as a movie. This is particularly good news because the studio concerned appears to actually understand the novel, as opposed to Universal, who originally optioned the screenplay and were going to hack it to pieces.

Why Kim Stanley Robinson loves the science of memory

There aren’t many authors left whose books I’d immediately buy, even if I didn’t know what they were about. I’d say that Neal Stephenson is up there, along with Vernor Vinge and precious few others. So yesterday, when I was browsing around at Fictionwise and saw that the October issue of Analog magazine had a […]