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A discussion about chainsaws in Star Trek, elicited by a recent Enterprise episode:
“Historically, the most often raised Star Trek technology issue has involved bathrooms. Burning questions such as:
“How many bathrooms? And where are they located? What are the fixtures like? Did Starfleet adopt the hideous American ‘low flow’ design? Or like most patriots, do they [...]

Continuing the Trek theme (don’t worry, it won’t last forever), here’s a list of funniest Voyager quotes. Believe me, they’re funny! Well, I think so, anyway.

Whee! Next Thursday (24th October) Neal Stephenson, one of my favourite SF authors, will be coming to speak at Trinity College about Newton vs. Leibniz. This would be good enough news on its own, but on the same night Queens College film society will be screening Spirited Away (known in Japan as Sen to Chihiro [...]

Some interesting rumours about the future of the Star Trek franchise. Could Jonathon ‘Riker’ Frakes head a new Star Trek series? Will they cover the Fall of the Federation? Does anyone apart from me care? Find out next week in the astonishing conclusion to…

Back in the 80s, there was a science fiction series directed by Stephen Spielberg called Amazing Stores. Aside from its intro sequence, which was rather impressive for that time, most episodes were pretty uninspiring and dismal. There was one episode that it seems everyone (including me) remembers: The Mission.
‘The Mission’ was by all accounts a [...]

Ack! Vernor Vinge has done it again! His Hugo award-winning novella Fast Times at Fairmont High is not merely an excellent story (what else would you expect from the Vingester?) but it throws out some wonderful ideas about the future of entertainment and the singularity.
The quality of SF writing has increased drastically recently, in my [...]

View from the left Banks - another interview with Iain Banks (better than the Guardian one). “He played Civilisation 3 for a month recently, then wiped the files and binned the CD.” Ah, a man of my own heart.

Once again, Metafilter has me worried. Far be it for me to predict the imminent demise of one of the Internet’s most popular and well-known weblogs when it has confounded the predictions of countless others, but this time I think there’s a real problem.

Having just read three novels, I’ve come up with a theory about the quality of books. Namely, if a book withstands rereading at least once, it’s probably good. Additionally, if a book that reads well initially does not lend itself to rereading, it may not be as good as your initial impressions gave it.
I say [...]

I’m in the middle of reading Lobsters by Charlie Stross and while it’s very enjoying (a kind of superpowered MacLeod without the communism - okay, that doesn’t make any sense, but still) I can’t help but think - does anyone actually talk like this?
“I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined [...]