tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61343162008-07-19T13:09:32.181+01:00Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comBlogger511125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-87619446114334007892008-07-19T10:19:00.004+01:002008-07-19T12:50:03.504+01:00

The reason it's been three weeks since I last updated this blog thing is that I've been up to my throat in writing this vampire novella, the day job's been really busy and B. and I have been away every weekend and faffing about with stuff most evenings. Some of these are perfectly pleasant things in themselves, but taken together they've tended to engender a large amount of stress and busytude.

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-63627494462474338922008-06-26T18:59:00.006+01:002008-06-26T19:08:14.121+01:00

Ah. My latest column's up at Surefish. It's a bit meandery and mentions vampires, which accurately reflects my state of mind recently. A point of discussion which you may find it interesting to comment on here: I sometimes try to imagine a scientific discovery which would persuade me that my faith was spurious. As yet I’ve come up with nothing.What do we (and by "we" I mean "you", given that

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-81580938094429640392008-06-25T17:39:00.004+01:002008-07-19T13:09:32.269+01:00

With apologies for the delay, here are the actual answers to last week's pop quiz:1. "I have a dream, a song to sing to help me cope with anything."      ABBA, "I Have a Dream" (Gold) 2. "I returned a bag of groceries, accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date."      They Might Be Giants, "Dead" (Flood) 3. "Here I stand, looking out to sea, where a thousand souls have prayed and

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-8010009610312782302008-06-19T17:16:00.009+01:002008-06-19T17:34:06.343+01:00

OK. I'm not going to make a habit of this, you understand, but while I'm slavishly copying other people's ideas, Simon Guerrier has rather eccentrically requested me to select an S.F. book of my choice, turn to p123 and record the fifth sentence here. Predictably perhaps, but also because I can reach it without getting up, I've chosen Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, which says:"It became

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-91803706395636199032008-06-18T14:33:00.005+01:002008-06-18T17:25:52.588+01:00

I'm suspicious, frankly, of my Walkman's ability to select songs with anything resembling actual randomness. Usually I'm too much of a control-freak to listen to music on shuffle mode in case a song I don't like comes up (although as you'd probably expect I'll listen to such songs all the way through if they come up in the correct play order on an album, because skipping them would be wrong).

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-45534591026254628852008-06-06T12:02:00.008+01:002008-06-06T14:18:58.557+01:00

Note to the National Blood Service: you'll generally find me rather more sympathetic to a call for donations than I was yesterday. It's just slightly unfortunate that, when you phoned me, I was in the middle of writing a story about vampires, and therefore rather sensitive to the topic. (But I love the fact that their website is at www.blood.co.uk. Perhaps they should let "Blood, blood,

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-25639880636600689932008-05-30T14:10:00.009+01:002008-05-30T15:20:38.010+01:00

The second of the year's weddings (well, the ones I'm invited to, at any rate -- I imagine there must have been others) happened last Sunday at West Quantoxhead in Somerset[1]. It was another thoroughly pleasant affair -- the weather put a rather literal dampener on the proceedings (and the vows were amusingly heralded by an ominous squall), but the rather large indoor venue was ample to contain

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-48740739769368412622008-05-30T12:35:00.004+01:002008-05-30T12:54:45.336+01:00

I keep getting spam with the subject line "Your soft", which seems to distill two of the most pervading themes of the unwanted junk I receive down into one succinct phrase of two four-letter words. Is it referring to some item of software which I might -- in that ethereal imaginary netherworld from which these messages emanate -- have notionally purchased? Or is it instead discussing my

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-83691325473833305022008-05-22T19:26:00.009+01:002008-05-22T19:59:12.826+01:00

The new regime at Big Finish's Bernice Summerfield product range (his name's Eddie) obviously believes in getting announcements out quickly. The new writing project I was being secretive about just the other day is out in the open now. It may now become slightly more obvious why I've been thinking about vampires this week. It's another three-decker novella collection, much the same as Nobody's

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-56973409380599062012008-05-20T18:01:00.007+01:002008-05-23T10:41:46.267+01:00

That review I mentioned of that book about these books is now up at Surefish. It may be more informative and persuasive than my earlier witterings, or of course it may not. Ignore the big pull-quote about feminism [ETA: now fixed], which appears to be from another review altogether. In theory I should be having a column up this week as well. I'm not sure whether Andy's going to hold off on

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-56132806417816975012008-05-17T12:23:00.006+01:002008-05-17T12:42:22.664+01:00

Since I've owned up to still writing poetry occasionally... a while ago, for a (not especially hearty) laugh, I wrote this: Limeraiku A verse can conform to one well-known form or more, but one is the norm. (I want the "or" and "more" to kind of cascade at the end there, each being on a subsequent line but at the appropriate alignment for the line above, as a compromise between the limerick's

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-50409206741518791382008-05-16T14:36:00.013+01:002008-05-23T10:41:59.021+01:00

Hmm. So the Vatican's official astronomer has finally got around to outlining what James Blish predicted 50 years ago would be the Catholic church's position on the spiritual implications of extraterrestrial life[1]. (Admittedly he misses out the "sentient creatures without souls" category, but it's difficult to imagine that one catching on. Unless the aliens in question were militarily naïve

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-4517822334708815362008-05-07T15:45:00.011+01:002008-05-30T14:11:21.706+01:00

Last Sunday Kate and Silk, of whom you may have heard me speak (almost invariably in the context of beer, to nobody's particular surprise) tied the knot and got married in the Town Hall in Oxford, where B. and I held our wedding reception many years ago. (For the usual reasons of busyness I failed to blog the relevant stag party a few weeks ago, where Silk and some sixteen other men in the 25-

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-82699398771123367582008-05-07T14:09:00.005+01:002008-05-07T14:25:01.227+01:00

Yet more fun with predictive text: "I'll get the cat food"...is predicted as:"I'll get the act done"Or -- if you remember to correct the first time but not the second -- the rather more apposite: "I'll get the cat done".

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-46407103438196895432008-04-26T12:33:00.017+01:002008-04-26T16:13:03.109+01:00

I've only just noticed that my column for this month is now up at Surefish. In retrospect, I may have got a little carried away with the S.F. theology towards the end. This is slightly unfortunate, as I'm now writing a review for Surefish endorsing this book, which claims to have discovered a "secret imaginative key" to C.S. Lewis's Narnia septet, based around the tenets of medieval astrology

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-60597339258658284812008-04-09T14:54:00.001+01:002008-04-09T15:01:36.907+01:00

Why isn't a female bulldog a cowbitch?

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-34798326188022588932008-04-01T18:57:00.005+01:002008-04-01T19:10:56.779+01:00

To accompany today's (ahem) fortuitously-timed news story about the first automated church minister package, my latest column on the spiritual dimensions of artificial intelligence is up at Surefish.

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-79930076062849033112008-03-31T19:14:00.010+01:002008-03-31T21:08:42.368+01:00

1. S.F. authors -- the unacknowledged legislators of the world. (Thanks to Geoff Wessel for the link.) My favourite paragraph: Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-12088442172987394832008-03-22T14:58:00.009Z2008-03-22T15:35:15.982Z

"Everyone knew he was gay," writes Michael Moorcock of Arthur C. Clarke. Well, it would have taken a remarkably closed mind to read, say, Imperial Earth or 2061: Odyssey Three without realising that this was a strong possibility. But as far as I'm aware, Clarke never publicly acknowledged his sexuality, and nor did his family, his ex-wife or anyone else close to him. I'm wondering why

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-19948230397624509582008-03-20T17:36:00.001Z2008-03-20T18:17:57.691Z

Hurrah, and many of them, for last Saturday, when B. and I, nine of our friends and a couple of thousand other people piled into the Brunel Passenger Shed at Temple Meads to drink 120 different kinds of beer. We all had a splendid time. At least, I know I did -- I was enjoying my beer to much to keep track of everyone else. As a particular personal triumph, this year I managed to avoid the

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-72592920360710220222008-03-20T17:09:00.003Z2008-03-20T17:13:39.106Z

My God: it's full of stars. (My Arthur C. Clarke obit, now up at Surefish.)

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-85695222718640228762008-03-20T11:42:00.015Z2008-04-26T09:19:04.973+01:00

...you know the drill. And now so do I. A BLOODY GREAT BIG DRILL, in fact, positioned a few inches from my head as the next-door house is disassembled down to its very foundations (warning: slight risk of hyperbole). I guess that writing I mentioned won't be happening today. (Disturbingly, the van at the front of the house belongs to a pest control company, suggesting that they've been

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-12719430483954704632008-03-19T20:08:00.005Z2008-03-20T12:39:13.487Z

...I really need to update this blog more often. I was expecting to be writing a report on Saturday's Bristol Beer Festival today -- I've got my tasting notes and everything, and I really need to use them before everything I drank falls out of my head. (Er, metaphorically. It didn't do that in literal terms, thank heavens.) But then Arthur C. Clarke died, and I spent this morning expecting

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-66405861583868940762008-02-25T18:43:00.007Z2008-02-25T19:08:20.730Z

Call me a shameless future-slut... but if this is the Mark of the Beast, I want to be Left Behind.The tattoo display communicates wirelessly to other Bluetooth devices - both in the outside world and within the same body. Although the device is always on (as long as your blood´s flowing), the display can be turned off and on by pushing a small dot on the skin. That is so cool. Or maybe I just

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6134316.post-26982640091593766292008-02-21T18:54:00.008Z2008-02-21T20:34:50.432Z

As long as that? Blimey. I'm actually having grave trouble writing anything at all at the moment, not just posting here. Possible reasons for this might include:natural idlenessextended post-Christmas lassitudebusyness at workmild depressionmy caffeine dependency reaching the point where coffee no longer has any actual stimulant effect.I suspect the last of those, myself -- it happens

Philiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08870980082684845846noreply@blogger.com