THE SKINNER

Here's the US cover of The Warship - book two of Rise of the Jain.

It can be difficult reading old SF because not only do you have to achieve the usual suspension of disbelief required for reading it, but...

I watched the first season of this all the way through. It was enjoyable so I give it that. However, I couldn’t help but feel that the whol...

I’m rapidly turning into a fasting bore. I get these enthusiasms and tend to learn as much as I can about the subject in hand. Thus far, ov...

I’m repeating myself here but, quite some weeks back I took some text I’d extracted from one of my previous books and began to rewrite, wit...

Okay, I’ve been doing some fasting over the last two weeks. Monday and Tuesday each week I ate bugger all, and on each Wednesday did not ea...

I did some lengthy fasting last week then in the ensuing days and the weekend didn’t eat vast amounts. The most I had was on Sunday when I ...

Structured a bit like Hyperion with a group of travellers heading towards a McGuffin and telling their stories along the way. In Hyperion ...

Here’s a Facebook post from Tuesday: Noting that, despite the weight training two to three times a week and the walks of twenty or so mil...

A little while ago some complained to me that this trilogy was not available on Audible in the UK. Bella Pagan investigated this and now te...

I do like historical dramas because I often learn something I never knew before, either watching the thing itself or because it piqued my ...

I recently quit Twitter or, rather, I deleted it from my computer and Ipad so as to remove that temptation. My Twitter account is still li...

Having dived back into reading (I’ve read more books this year than in the previous 5) I reckon it’s been a month since I turned on my te...

It’s interesting returning to the kind of stuff I used to read rather more years ago than I care to think about. Some writers are now jus...

This one was a no-no right from the start. Two reporters on a space ship, one of them turning a dial to tune in the radio, gave me difficul...

After Syzygy (previous post) and a failed attempt to read With a Strange Device by Eric Frank Russell, I resorted to one who has never disa...

Syzygy by Michael Coney was first from that stack of second-hand books I picked up in Hastings. I immediately found it a little disappoint...

When I was in my 10s, 20s and 30s I used to read huge numbers of books. Over some early years it averaged out at 10 books a month. Maybe ...