THE SKINNER

Okay, I haven’t put anything in here for a while because Caroline and I have been sunning ourselves in Skiathos. I said nothing about this ...

Max Part Three What was going to happen to Max? With Marjorie being moved into a ‘recovery home’ for an indeterminate period, he surely c...

From 800 years in the future, a runcible gate is opened into the Polity. Those coming through it had been sent to take the alien 'Maker...

My thanks to bascule for pointing me to this: http://barrybeelzebub.blogspot.com/ I'm a rank amateur compared to this guy. I've be...

Warning: political rant. I would say that in today’s Labour Party we are seeing the results of a road wreck where the juggernaut called i...

Further warnings from nanny government. Hospitals have to prepare for an influx of boiled lobsters and additional to the warnings about wha...

Nanny government has just issued a hot weather warning. We need to wear adequate sunscreen, avoid drinks like coffee and alcohol and drink ...

At last an enjoyable episode of Dr Who after two rather awful ones. The low moment came last week with that ridiculous tossing of a cigar-s...

Max Part Two. Marjorie had been deteriorating for some time, really wasn’t well, and it seemed possible she might get worse. Don’t get th...

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 ...