Super Super-Capacitor

I just picked up on this on Singularity Hub. Game Changer?

The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

What if you could charge your phone, tablet, or laptop in 30 seconds and have it work all day long? That’s the promise presented in a short film titled The Super Supercapacitor that profiles the work of UCLA inorganic chemistry professor Ric Kaner, whose research focused on conductive polymers and next generation materials.

Sob!

Well, I can tease my readers with hints about what I'm writing but some readers can strike back:

'To donate to charity or not donate to charity, in this post-Kindle world... That is the question...' says Paul Clarke on Twitter. He obviously wants to see a grown man cry.

Lavender Nightmares

We’re now coming to the end of our temperance month which, according to ‘health professionals’ is not such a good thing because it might encourage people to think that once the month is over they can pour down the booze willy-nilly. I stopped listening to health professionals long ago when I realised that in their efforts at self-promotion they were contradicting each other every week. All I do know is that a month off the booze gives my liver a rest, proves to me I’m not an alcoholic, and is just one sign of my increasing disinclination to drink alcohol. In fact, as this month draws to a close I’m not at all anxious to go find a corkscrew. But anyway, that’s beside the point I’m aiming at.

One of the effects of foregoing the booze is better sleep. I’m finding myself sleeping for 7 to 8 hours a night and the only time I get up is to stumble to the toilet, usually because of the excessive amounts of tea and cordial I’ve drunk. This good sleep I’m finding increasingly important, as it is for many as they get older. In the past I’ve had trouble and one solution I tried was dripping lavender oil on my pillow beforehand. Last week, while in a chemist, I spotted a bottle of the stuff and on impulse bought it and tried it out again. The result was heavier sleep – I’m now mostly sleeping right the way through to the morning – and some lurid dreams and nightmares.

...

I have, this week, burned the living head of Hitler, along with his chopped up body; been swimming with both my parents, though slightly puzzled about the presence of my father since he was dead; been involved in a car crash; and at one point had artichokes growing out of my bottom until I delved inside to remove the large chunk of root from which they were sprouting. Weird shit, so to speak, and the first time I’ve remembered dreams for many months. Time to put a notebook by my bed I reckon, since story ideas might be available. Though I’ll probably give the story about anal artichokes a miss.       

Writing Update

I’m now back on track writing 10,000 words a week and Penny Royal III has now passed 30,000 words but, better than that, I’ve written myself back out of a hole. It happens like this sometimes: you’re telling the story you have to tell but it seems to be dragging a bit. It needs some spice, some danger, some apparently random element introduced to knock expectations off kilter. Raymond Chandler’s method was to walk a man with a gun into the room and, with a science fictional slant, that’s exactly what I’ve done. Well, the man isn’t a man, the room extends across light years and the gun happens to be a modern Polity dreadnought. This is now leading to me writing a lot more back story, some of which, it seems highly likely, may end up being implanted in the previous book. It’s also likely that a portion of the stuff I wrote before introducing this character might end up being either hacked out or hacked down. No matter, I’m sure there’s stuff there I can use as the basis of a short story, as I did with an 8,000 word plot thread in the first of these three books.

Moving on… For those of you who want to get into this writing profession here’s a few writer’s tips provided by various Tor authors over on the Tor Books Blog. Whether or not this is going to become a regular feature I don’t know. Also, while buggering about on Twitter I came across The Editor’s Blog which I’m finding quite handy. I particularly like this Cut The Flab – Make EveryWord Count which reminded me somewhat of an excellent book on that subject: Write Tight by William Brohaugh.   

Necropath - Eric Brown

I remember Eric Brown from Interzone back in the eighties, with his short story The Time-Lapsed Man being a particular highlight. Like many other writers I enjoy now his name stuck in my mind (Alastair Reynolds, Ian M Banks) but haven’t really read any of his books. So, walking into Waterstones and seeing his name and this cover I just picked up Necropath and bought it. I’m glad I did. Here we have the void ships of his short stories, the massive Bengal Station space port, intrigue, murder, an alien monster and a telepathic customs official whose outlook reminds some of Silverberg’s Dying Inside – everything the hardened SF addict wants. Time now for me to a take a look at all the other books he’s written which, for some inexplicable reason, just seemed to have passed me by. Recommended.

Zero Point USA

It seems they're using a slightly different cover for the US version of Zero Point, but it's still a Jon Sullivan picture so good stuff as ever. However, they seemed to have screwed up: it's 'Owner' singular...

Update
Jeremy Lassen informs me: That was an early version of the cover that made it into the wild before we fixed the plural thing. The actual books are right, and the incorrect version currently at amazon is hopefully being overwritten this week.

Night Shade Books are publishing The Owner Trilogy in the US and have scheduled The Departure for publication Feb 5, 2013 with Zero Point following May 7, 2013 and Jupiter War  September 3, 2013 (catching up with publication of that last book in Britain). Nicely keying into that my short story The Other Gun will be appearing in Asimov’s April/May issue that year with, of course, mention of these books in attached biog. It should be an interesting year with those three books slamming into the American market in rapid succession. In essence this should work as quite a profile-raising exercise.

Meanwhile here's a Walker of Worlds review of the book:

Asher doesn't fail in making this second volume of the Owner trilogy a step up from The Departure, adding in plenty to keep the pages turning. For those familiar with his Owner short stories there are some nice treats in store, and for those that haven't.... well, what are you waiting for? In short, Zero Point is well worth reading, and I will be very much looking forward to Jupiter War!

Waterstones Romford

Nice picture here sent in by Spencer Van Schevensteen of the shelves in Waterstones in Romford. So thank you to whoever is doing the ordering there!

Books Read

I haven’t written much in here about what I’ve been reading so I’ll catch up a bit, just sticking to everything after January. Okay, after Christmas I finished off Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris. I wasn’t sure whether I’d read this book when it was handed to me but the moment I dipped into it I knew I hadn’t – I was just remembering the film. It was a good easy read and worth a look for fans of the good Dr Lector. I did however have one or two doubts about it because it is a justification of him, and explanation of him, which I don’t think I either wanted or needed because the mystery that was Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs was a large part of his appeal.

City of Fire by Robert Ellis was one I picked up from Macmillan a few years ago and has been sitting on the shelf ever since. This is set in Los Angeles with bush fires burning and the Santa Anna wind blowing – hence the title – has a nasty serial killer creeping about, a bit of a family mystery and a spicing of police corruption. I like a good murder and police procedural and this was intelligently told and ticked every box for me. Recommended.

The year before last in Crete we were loaned some historical novels by Simon Scarrow concerning Wellington and Napoleon. Though I enjoyed these books I did find the battles getting a bit repetitive, but then, that was probably the reality then: ‘Okay guys, I want you to stand in neat lines while the enemy tears you apart with cannon, then walk slowly towards them.’ I then found out Scarrow had written a series about the Romans and thought I’d give those books a try. Briefly looking in a second-hand bookshop in Chester I found the entire series and thought what the hell and bought the lot. These I left stacked up on my bedside table during out return to Crete but have started on now we’re back. 

The first, Under the Eagle, I read in November. This was easy enjoyable reading focusing on minor characters in the Roman army, with plenty of intrigue, enough variety in the battles fought and plenty of interesting historical detail. I’ve now just finished The Eagle’s Conquest, which I again enjoyed and recommend, though I suspect that these books are of the kind that need to be read spaced out with other books otherwise they might begin to pall.       

Hair Cell Regeneration

Well, after years of working with noisy machinery - up until 2001 I had operated milling machines and lathes for many years then, when I went self-employed, I used mowers, chainsaws, hedge cutters and strimmers - I'm often finding myself mentally replaying stuff that people have said because I didn't hear it properly. At some point, probably in the next ten years, I'm going to need a hearing aid, but damn I would much prefer the damage repaired at its root:

...

In the Jan. 10 issue of Neuron, Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School researchers demonstrate for the first time that hair cells can be regenerated in an adult mammalian ear by using a drug to stimulate resident cells to become new hair cells, resulting in partial recovery of hearing in mouse ears damaged by noise trauma. This finding holds great potential for future therapeutic application that may someday reverse deafness in humans.

This is the kind of article that undermines my usual pessimism.

Steam Punk Zeppelins!

Here's a little taste of what some fans get up to when you're not keeping a careful eye on them. I've been asked to name a starship simulator and to provide some tongue in cheek names for some airships, which I'm glad to do. The starship simulator could so easily be Schrodinger's Box out of The Engineer (esp. when you look at that caravan). I'll hand over to Paul Mackay now:

HMAS Absence of Gravitas is a 1969 Carlight Cassetta caravan with a ‘victorianised’ interior. We have used a back projection system to project from outside onto the interior front windows so it actually looks like you are in the gondola of an airship with the horizons:

 

The control linkages use miniature potentiometers to feed control inputs into the sim which runs into a PC running Flight Sim 2004 with an airship mod. There is a navigator’s station (uses a real map as location is real world correct and can plot routes using it). The engineers panel has 4 separate throttles which can all be set independently, useful if you want to chuck in a failure or fire scenario. The helmsman controls the nose pitch and engine angle (as they rotate up and down in modern airships). There is usually a captain as well.

Big brother is moving towards constructing a second sim that will be able to run several different software packages – i.e submarine, starship or airship. The problem with the caravan sim is that we can’t bring it indoors whereas the second sim (that we would like you to name) comes in collapsible sections that can be erected in pieces. 

The second will run a package called Artemis http://www.artemis.eochu.com/ which is a multi station starship bridge simulator hoping you might be able to come up with a name for the starship sim. (see diagram above, its only half finished).

As I said earlier, we we run a gift shop at shows...we make and sell merchandise related to the sim – mostly my steampunk jewellery but also things like pewter cast airship keyrings, badges etc. We are also hoping to commission a poster of lots of scale drawings of various ‘ships of the line’ – all imaginary airships as if we had this whole alternative historical backstory, with the ‘Absence of Gravitas’ as just one of the fleet. We were wondering if you wanted to give us a few tongue in cheek bombastic airship names as well – think I might have to call one of them ‘Penny Royal’ if you don’t mind.

Anyway, just thought you might be interested in the sort of stuff your fans get up to when we aren’t waiting for the next book.

We have some masters getting 3D modelled in Holland at the mo, then we make silicon moulds from them and use them to cast models in pewter to sell to punters. The sims have to pay their way in the diesel etc. to get it to shows, we don’t profit much but it pays its way.

Regards and can't wait for more writings

Paul

The Hobbit (Part One)

Well, we went to see the first film of The Hobbit yesterday. I was a bit worried about it being a bit of an over-extended franchise but I shouldn’t have been. Converting a single book into a single film can be a bit dodgy because there’s always more in a book than in a film, and some of the best films have been made from short stories. I also shouldn’t have been concerned because it was Peter Jackson doing this. Some may have complained about the extended ending to the last Lord of the Rings film but Jackson was only being as faithful to the books as he had been all along.

I sat there for the best part of three hours utterly riveted. It was visually gorgeous, great fun, I enjoyed it immensely and, of course, Martin Freeman was excellent. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because Tolkien played a large part in my formative years. In junior school I remember a teacher reading The Hobbit to us and the first book I picked up on my first visit to a library was The Two Towers, and after that I read LOTR maybe five or six times. Is it only readers of that stuff that get slightly choked up when elves first put in an appearance or when Galadriel pays a visit? Probably, but Caroline, who has read none of these books, very much enjoyed the film too. Highly recommended. 

Writing Update

Okay, that’s sorted. Before Christmas I received the version of Jupiter War, edited by Peter Lavery, along with some helpful structural/character notes from Bella Pagan. Peter was the editorial director of Pan Macmillan and Tor who originally took me on. He’s now retired from Macmillan, but continues doing what he loves, which is using his scary pencil to puncture inflated writer’s egos, while Bella is a senior commissioning editor for Tor/Pan.

Peter’s editing I am accustomed to. It is generally along the lines of ‘this is a clearer way of expressing what you want’. He also picks up on repetitions and grammatical errors, selects out sections he designates ‘unnecessary?’, and returns a typescript in which I never find a page lacking corrections. After I’ve gone through his stuff the word count has usually increased by a few thousand words. But I have to add that what I take on board is completely down to me. When, many years ago now, he first returned the typescript of Gridlinked with pencilled-in corrections, he also sent an eraser – my choice.

Bella’s notes I looked at with a slight sinking sensation in my gut because structural changes can be sticky, and a simple note concerning the behaviour of a character can involve checking the same throughout the entire book. However, I’m well aware of the danger of authorial arrogance. An established author can think he knows best and the result of that can be big fat books full of boring waffle. I therefore took the bit between my teeth and dived in. She was right, of course, and I made many of the changes she suggested.

Now it’s time to get back to Penny Royal. I was on book three before Christmas but have now gone back to read through from the start of book one, correcting and altering along the way. I need to add some stuff concerning a black hole, I’m considering shifting two sections at the start of book one to the beginnings of the ensuing two books, but mostly I need to sink myself back into the whole thing and remind myself where I was at. Having gone this route before, I know that I won’t read all the way through. At some point, within the next few days, I’ll get bored with that and leap ahead to start writing afresh. That’s all for now.

The Windy Moon

I caught a bit of Who Wants to be a Millionaire last night and really wish I hadn’t. The question I heard was, ‘Which of these do you find on Earth but not on the Moon?’ and the choice of answers was: sunlight, gravity, craters and wind. I stood there with my mouth hanging open listening to two ‘celebs’ debating whether or not the Moon has gravity, then one of them stating quite firmly that there was wind up there. In the end they made the sensible decision not to commit to an answer and take the money and run.

Now, I really don’t expect people to know the names of the main moons of Jupiter or to even be able to recite the order of the planets in the Solar system, but a little basic scientific knowledge would be good. But then, I was showing a lack of basic scientific knowledge too because they couldn’t hear me while I was shouting at the television.   

Get Fracking!

Boris Johnson is here speaking some sense about fracking.

The extraction process alone would generate tens of thousands of jobs in parts of the country that desperately need them. And above all, the burning of gas to generate electricity is much, much cleaner – and produces less CO₂ – than burning coal. What, as they say, is not to like?

 I do love his view of the eco-doomsters:

In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news. Beware this new technology, they wail. Do not tamper with the corsets of Gaia! Don’t probe her loamy undergarments with so much as a finger — or else the goddess of the earth will erupt with seismic revenge. Dig out this shale gas, they warn, and our water will be poisoned and our children will be stunted and our cattle will be victims of terrible intestinal explosions.

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Ambulance, Police, Burglar...

So, I had my second encounter with Essex Police yesterday…

Let me start with my mother. She’s 85 has a lymphoma and is undergoing chemo therapy. She lives alone in the stupidly large family home which she can just about manage. The week before last she called me to say she needed to go to the hospital. I shot round to find her suffering from the shakes and a stomach ache, for the former of which she was, apparently, supposed to go straight to hospital since it could be a bad reaction to the chemo. She had phoned for an ambulance and was waiting for a call back from some medical professional. This person did call, asked a long series of questions about her symptoms, then sent the ambulance, which arrived pretty quickly.

The ambulance staff came in, asked the same series of questions while hooking her up to some equipment. By then her shakes were waning and they couldn’t find anything seriously wrong with her (well, besides being 85 and having cancer). However, after a phone call to the Oncology Department they decided to take her in to Broomfield hospital. I followed the ambulance there, stupidly expecting it to take the easy back roads route to the hospital. It didn’t, it instead went right through the middle of Chelmsford during the rush hour. I tried to keep on its tail but with various sets of traffic lights and about five roundabouts to go through I was beginning to lose sight of it. I had also completely forgotten how to get to the hospital via this route and at some point I must have run a red light.

At the hospital I spend about twenty minutes driving around in a two-storey car park searching for a spot to park, then I went into Accident & Emergency where my mother had been taken. There she had an X-ray, blood taken for testing, that list of questions asked again, and frequent checks on her BP etc. The upshot was that a doctor would see her but she could go home. We waited and waited for a doctor but none came, so in the end just checked out and later.

Promptly, a few days after, I got my traffic violation letter from Essex Police. I filled in the form and wrote a covering letter explaining the circumstances. I didn’t expect any leniency.

Maybe a day after this the same thing happened again with my mother: bad shakes, inability to sleep or keep still. I suspected something related to her depression (yeah, she has that too). Sometimes, if you get a bad panic attack it can feel like you’re dying. Phone calls ensued but I baulked at the idea of calling an ambulance again, especially as the shakes were waning again, and in the end took her to the emergency doctor. This quite sharp Asian lady examined her and checked over her reams of prescription sheets.

Apparently she had been prescribed another lot of anti-depressants because the chemo had dragged her down. Now, either the doctor concerned neglected to notice she was already on one lot of pills, neglected to tell her to stop taking them, or my mother failed to take in that she should stop taking the first lot. ‘You don’t take these together,’ said the Asian lady, looking puzzled and slightly alarmed. She told my mother to stop taking the second lot and prescribed diazepam for the shakes and instructed her to see her doctor. This she did and the upshot is that her problems were caused by mixing the anti-depressants.

I next got a phone call from the Essex Police and spoke to someone who wasn’t officious and was quite pleasant. After she got some detail from me she told me they were dropping the charges against me. I subsequently received a letter telling me this along with the line ‘not in the public interest to prosecute’. Well I guess that’s right. The last time I was ever told off by the police for a driving offence was when I was 18 and wasn’t displaying my L-plates correctly. So that was my first encounter with the Essex Police…

On diazepam every day my mother improved enough to go on an outing she had booked some time ago to Thursford. She went this Sunday with a friend, stayed overnight and came back on Monday evening. Shortly after her return I got a phone call. Her house had been broken into. I told her to call the police and then Caroline and I went round. Someone had smashed a back patio door then opened it with the key. This person had rifled through some cupboards and drawers, opened her jewellery box, but beyond the smashed door made surprisingly little mess. He’d (I’m guessing it was a ‘he’) found about £150 she’d kept in a drawer but otherwise seemed to have taken nothing else. I guess he was quite disappointed by the lack of laptops, mobile phones, family silver and by the costume jewellery.

A cop turned up quite rapidly from South Woodham Ferrers and checked out everything. Shortly after he arrived a fingerprint lady turned up (SOCO?) but could find nothing but glove smudges. After she had finished I boarded up and secured the broken door while the cop sat with my mother taking down details and telling her what would happen. Let me add here: pleasant big reassuring bloke and exactly the kind of guy you want turning up. And that, then, was my second encounter with the Essex Police.

Surprisingly, and perhaps sadly, though my reaction to this was, ‘Bastards!’ I didn’t feel hugely irate. This is because a break-in like this is almost a fulfilment of expectation. There are loads of shits out there with no respect for other people’s property. But really I should be very very angry. Back when I used to cut grass and hedges etc. for a living an old lady who was a customer of mine found a burglar in her bedroom. He didn’t harm her then and just fled. However, she died just a few months later and the opinion of her neighbours was that the incident just sapped her will – effectively killed her.

Today’s jobs: sort out a glazier and take a look at some burglar alarms on the internet.

Note: If you go out take the keys out of the inside of your double glazed doors. This won’t stop anyone smashing the glass and getting in, but the burglar will have to knock all the glass out of the door and go through it, increasing the likelihood of him being cut and dripping some blood somewhere. The police like blood.        

Exhausted by Doom-mongers.

I watched the TV series The Secret of Crickley Hall – last episode last night – and though I enjoyed it I couldn’t really engage with it. I got the same feeling watching it as I got from watching Woman in Black, which is that though it was entertaining I could not suspend disbelief. When I was younger I could watch this sort of stuff and feel a little bit spooked – two that spring to mind are The Haunting (the original version) and The Entity – but my opinions about the supernatural have hardened over the years and now I simply cannot believe in ghosts. The films and the fiction haven’t really got any worse, if anything some have got better, but I have changed.

By this route I come to those who keep launching assaults on science fiction. I’d call it self-flagellation because often these people are ‘in’ the SF world, but for the fact that many of those attacking don’t actually write the stuff. Science fiction is dying or dead, it’s no longer relevant because of the accelerated pace of technological change (how could it not be more relevant?), and the latest one ‘science fiction is exhausted’ - based on some Best SF collections so generalizing from the specific and ignoring Sturgeon's Law.

Moving on to the stuff about it being relevant in the rapidly changing world: How can someone read recent books like Windup Girl or Quantum Thief and dismiss them as irrelevant? Who says a requisite of SF is that it has to be relevant? The job of a writer is first to write books and then to sell them. The main requisite of the latter is to make them entertaining, and for them to be that, for an SF reader, requires a good story that can suspend disbelief, world building, the zing of technology and science and that essential sensawunda. 

Now let’s go back to ‘science fiction is dying, or dead’ (yawn). I’ve been here before with this here, here and here  but the neatest way of putting this in perspective is via a link provided by Gary Farber in response to my, "I'm betting there was some plonker declaring the death of SF the moment Sputnik beeped or just after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon."

Who Killed Science Fiction? won the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine in 1961. The Fifties were rife with talk about the death of science fiction, and Earl Kemp's symposia of so many sf pros and prominent fans summed it all up.

If science fiction was dead back in the 50s and 60s, why does it still seem so mobile now? If it was dying back then why isn’t it dead now? And really, science fiction is nowhere as near as exhausted as the perpetual wanking on about its decline.

Let’s have a little list: Iain M Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F Hamilton, Adam Roberts, Ted Chiang, C J Cherryh, Peter Watts, Gary Gibson, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Ken McLeod, Neil Gaiman, Paolo Bacigalupi, Jeff Noon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Egan, Hannu Rajaniemi, Stephen Baxter, Sheri S. Tepper, Elizabeth Bear, Paul J. McAuley, Ian McDonald  Greg Bear, David Brin, Orson Scott Card, Cory Doctorow, John Meaney, John Scalzi, Kristine Kathryn Rusch … I could go on. Now, as far as I know these are all still alive (though I don’t keep up with my Ansible obituaries) and are still producing stuff people want to read. Whether or not they are exhausted I don’t know, whether or not the fiction they produce is dying, exhausted or dead I leave to you to decide.

All these attacks on science fiction are utterly subjective and ultimately pointless because, in the end, they tell us more about the one writing than the fiction they are writing about (much like many reviews). Perhaps they loved science fiction once and could suspend disbelief, and now, just like me watching Crickley Hall, it simply is not pressing the right buttons any more. Maybe they have changed.

Because you feel you have read it all before doesn’t mean others have and equally, just because you might have become more discerning and sophisticated doesn’t mean others are. Just because you are suffering ennui and have lost the credulity and optimism of youth doesn’t mean others have. Just because you are inured to wonder, and can no longer find that vital sensawunda, doesn’t mean it has disappeared, dried up, been exhausted.

Maybe the next time somebody feels the urge to write something about the terminal decline of SF, they should consider that the 'crisis' is in the eyes that behold, and take a long hard look at themselves first.  

Comments

I’ve been noting how over the years the number of comments I get here has been steadily waning. I could, if I was sufficiently paranoid, put this down to a steady decline in my fan base, readership, popularity or whatever. However I know by my stats here that the number of people visiting this blog has been steadily increasing so, unless they’re stopping by to see how the road accident is progressing, something else must be going on.

Are people commenting less because of the time I spend away from the internet in the summer; because they won’t be getting a quick reply from me? That’s one possibility but there are others. The social media on the internet is always changing. Message boards went through their high season and waned. The likes of MySpace had their time in the sun then sloped off into the shadows. Is it that blogs are now, in internet terms, a bit antediluvian? Are all those who commented on message boards and blogs now using Twitter? Yeah, I reckon it could be a bit of that too.

Then there’s how people access the internet now. Mobile devices have been on the rise and no matter how wonderful they might be or how many thousands of apps they might have they do not have the utility of a pc, at a desk, with a chair. It’s my contention that the lack of response here does not equate to a lack of readers, but the lack of the simple ease of a keyboard.

What do you think?  

Minimum Pricing on Alcohol

So, Cameron is a nannying statist who wants to stick a minimum price on alcohol per unit. What on Earth is he thinking? Does he think that this will result in fewer pavement pizzas and fat slags crying in the gutter on a Saturday night? Does he think there’ll be less violence on the streets after chucking out time on a Friday and less chaos in A & E over the weekend? If he does think that then he’s an idiot because the people responsible for that drink in bars where the price is already way above his damned 45p a unit.

...

Does he think that £2 on the price for a bottle of vodka is going to stop an alcoholic buying it? Does he think that ‘problem drinkers’ are going to alter their life styles because their weekly booze bill has gone up by ten or twenty quid? Well, maybe they will, maybe they won’t be getting the latest X-box, flat screen TV or maybe their kids will start outgrowing their clothes because, you can be damned sure that habitual drinkers will sacrifice other spending rather than the habit. Does he think that banning supermarket deals on wine, like three for a tenner or three for the price of two is going to do any more than piss off people who drink at home and cause no trouble at all?

Does he not realize that black marketeers – the same ones most smokers buy their tobacco from now – will be rubbing their hands together in glee? Has he, with his wonderful Eton education, not heard of Prohibition? Or was he too hung over after a night out getting pissed and trashing restaurants with the Bullingdon club to take that particular lesson in?

Really, it’s about time Cameron found his natural home in the Labour Party. There’s a place for him there, since that party doesn’t have a leader. Not that he’s much of a leader but I’m sure they could always find room for another advertising executive.  

Penny Royal III Started

Well, checking my journal I see that I began writing Penny Royal II on the 19^th of July and finished it to first draft on 27^th November so, four months, one week and one day. Of course I haven’t completely finished it just as I haven’t completely finished Penny Royal I. Right now I have to go back to that first book to write in some stuff about a world due to be swallowed by a black hole to make some other stuff in Penny Royal III work. I also have alter a particular character all the way through – in this case an assassin drone fashioned in the shape of a prador parasite (I’ve mentioned Riss before – this drone looks like a translucent cobra with a third eye on top of its head, small limbs underneath that head and an ovipositor in its tail). Similar alterations will ensue as I write Penny Royal III (I’m a thousand words in at the moment) and thereafter will come loads of editing before I send these books to Macmillan, then a couple of more rounds of editing after I get it back.

This picture is here because this is what Penny Royal sometimes looks like. I was going to tray a mish-mash of this and the Curiosity Rover confronting each other, but don't have the time. Hey, if anyone fancies mucking about with an art program I’d love to see a picture of Penny Royal in some alien landscape. Just to help in that respect (and to tease you all):

The buy was going down, badly, because the shits involved had decided that their large amounts of weaponry gave them a bargaining advantage. It was all about to turn into a nasty fire fight when the other side’s repairman turned up, and then it turned into a nightmare. The meet had been in a valley on a heavy gravity world where plants grew iron hard and close to the ground and where most humans wore motorized suits. Blite, as he prepared himself to give the order blow the sled the thrall tech sat on, and open fire, had looked up. On the ridge above, a flower had bloomed: a giant black thistle head atop a stalk of braided silver snakes. He stared at it in shock as, like a slow black explosion it came apart, its individual spikes turning as they sped away to point down into the valley, all settling to hang still in the air – a wall of daggers woven through with silver lace.

‘Penny Royal!’ one of the opposition called, gazing at Blite with a superior smile.

                                                           

But before all of that there’s other work to be done, like going through the copy edits of the Night Shade Books version of The Departure. And, of course, here’s a reminder  

Night Shade Books are publishing The Owner Trilogy in the US and have scheduled The Departure for publication Feb 5, 2013 with Zero Point following May 7, 2013 and Jupiter War  September 3, 2013 (catching up with publication of that last book in Britain). Nicely keying into that my short story The Other Gun will be appearing in Asimov’s April/May issue that year with, of course, mention of these books in attached biog. It should be an interesting year with those three books slamming into the American market in rapid succession. In essence this should work as quite a profile-raising exercise.

So, where was I going with this? Oh yeah: it may have taken me just over four months to get Penny Royal II to first draft, but please don’t start expecting me to produce 3 books a year. In fact, if I do start finding myself at a bit of a loose end I’ll be producing more stories like the one in Asimov’s above, or maybe taking a look at my old fantasy trilogy. Or I may even take a holiday!