Mssv

Today was my last full day in Melbourne. In a vain attempt to try and buy some non-tacky souvenirs, we went to Victoria Market in the city. I did actually manage to buy two souvenirs that didn’t fall into the general category of ‘koalas and other Australian miscellaneia’ although it did take some time. To [...]

A friend, who shall rename nameless, once told me that she’d been recommended to read Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Shadow is a ’spinoff’ book that occurs during the events of the classic Ender’s Game novel, but from the perspective of Bean. If you haven’t read Ender’s Game, please read it now - [...]

Never mind the Beagle 2, the Sci-Fi channel is producing a miniseries based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars novel for late 2004. They’d better not screw it up…

The steam-powered drum machine - an astonishing extract from a journal written in 1894 about a steam-powered drum machine and a 19th century rave (yes, it’s a joke). Via the Culture List and spawned, in part, from the demented mind of Brendan Nelson.

This article about the science of the Matrix (from /.) is interesting enough from a fan-fiction ‘well, it could work!’ perspective, but it is way off on some of the hard issues, namely the whole ‘quantum mechanics microtubules’ nonsense. It might be convenient to explain away consciousness because of magical quantum ‘fairy dust’ interactions, but [...]

Pride and Extreme Prejudice - possibly the funniest thing I have read this year. A couple of SF authors have come up with the idea of a Terminator/Pride and Prejudice crossover on rec.arts.sf.written and are current writing it piecemeal, to the delight of the newsgroup regulars. It should, nay, must be published as a full [...]

Sci-Fi channel’s new lineup of shows - does Sci-Fi lack a rubbish filter, or perhaps any sense of judgement? From the looks of their new shows, the answer seems to be yes; with the exception of a few, they all sound terrible (and they’re all fantasy, not SF). I mean, ‘Dead Lawyers - lawyers [...]

Browsing through my website logs and stats, as I am wont to do when there is nothing else going on, I’ve just discovered that the most searched-for term for my website is “Neal Stephenson”; other such irrelevent terms as “Adrian Hon” come in a distant fifth. Of course, this is because Neal Stephenson is a [...]

Geeks With Books - a nice little article about what it’s like to work in a used SF bookstore. “I never count on having Philip K. Dick books. They tend to stay around for about twenty minutes. When I shelve his books, I worry about losing a finger since they sell so fast.”

The Borg To Appear On ‘Enterprise’ - a lot of fans have been wailing and gibbering about this development, but I’m actually quite optimistic. Enterprise has seen quite a lot of average and below-average episodes so far, but I’ve also seen some pretty decent episodes as well, and they’re only halfway through the second season.
This [...]