THE SKINNER

It's pretty picture time again. Here first is the original cover of The Engineer published by Tanjen. ‘A thought-provoking operatic r...

Ah, and there's another one I neglected to mention: Karl Schroeder. Try his 'Sun of Suns' http://www.kschroeder.com/

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ll do the same again here. This year has been pretty good (to me) for new SFF. The first is Blindsight...

Global sea-level rise … apparently, over the last 18,000 years since the peak of the last Ice Age, global sea-levels have risen more than 1...

Sir Richard Branson wants to turn Virgin trains into the greenest in Britain by running them on biodiesel rather than pure diesel – 15% fro...

Moving swiftly on, here, for reader interest is the Polity chronology I'm presently working with: 2050 – 2250 Expansion into the sola...

It was amusing, shortly after publicising this blog, to receive an email containing this from another SF writer: "A sci-fi writer ad...

Check Elastic Before Jumping my 'SF short' is appearing in the 22 June issue of Nature . Funny, the envelope I received the magazi...

I have ranted on about this sort of thing before, but with recent news stories it bears repetition. I confess that I am a smoker, that I ch...

Max Since it is a good idea, I feel, to add variety to a blog (and not be too political all the time), here's a shaggy dog story... ...

It is illegal for anyone in Britain to carry a knife with a blade over 3 inches long, so of course the arsehole who breaks into your house ...

I wandered up the pub yesterday to meet a chap who lives on the other side of Maldon. He was in at the start buying a first edition of Grid...

Global warming skeptic, that’s me, or rather an AGW (anthropogenic or man-made global warming) skeptic. Why? Because Mars is warming up too...

Oh dear, head poised on the edge of a really good throb, eyes feeling like I've spent too much time with a set of binoculars pressed ag...

Ah, so Princess Margaret's tiara was bought by a female buyer who flew in from China. What's the betting she is either the wife of a...

Okay, time for a pretty picture. This being an author's blog I'll start with my most recently published book. And now the blurb: ...

Stepping onto the learning curve... Here we go, my first ever blog entry. To be honest I was a bit unsure about starting this since I was...