In the anthology To the Stars and Back: Stories in Honour of Eric Brown, (see post), edited by Ian Whates, from Newcon Press, published May 2024 ..read more

Cover image: To the Stars and Back I’m proud and pleased to have had a story selected for this collection, which has been put together by Ian Whates at Newcon Press in honour of the late Eric Brown who died last year. Eric was well-known and well-loved in the British science fiction world. He was a warm, gentle, unassuming man without a trace of arrogance or pretentiousness, and was an exceptionally prolific writer, not just in science fiction, but in many genres including children’s books and crime novels. Yet he’d never read a book until he was in his teens, when he first encountered the wor ..read more

I was struck by this article which showed that the carbon emissions of the top 10% by income of the global population are as high as those of the bottom 50%. The top 10% ‘encompasses most of the middle classes in developed countries’, the article points out, or anyone earning more than £32,000 ($40,000). (The article doesn’t make clear, annoyingly, whether it is talking about disposable income or gross income, but £32,000 is roughly the median disposable income in the UK. The median disposable income of the UK’s poorest 20% is £14,500.) The article makes the point that failing to allow for thi ..read more

Here I am (on the right) signing copies of the Ballard-themed anthology, Reports from the Deep End at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday. To my right are Maxim Jakubowski (who co-edited the book with Rick McGrath, as well as contributed to it), Pat Cadigan and Andrew Hook. Chemo has made me even balder than usual. I’ve even lost all my nostril hairs. (This makes my nose drip suddenly and without warning, which can be embarrassing). But I’ve had my last dose of those horrible toxins and am on the way up. I came down to London on the train which I wouldn’t have attempted even a week earlier ..read more

[This post was started in 2013 but never actually posted, but I’ve just been trimming this blog, and I thought I’d finish and post it.] When I posted my dream/story The Egret and the Gander, a couple of different people commented that it was a take on the story of Achilles (the gander) and Hector (the egret) from the Iliad.   To be honest, I hadn’t noticed this, but I see it now.  I obviously have a classically trained id, because here is another dream I had a few months ago: I dreamed I had descended to a place deep underground which was a kind of morgue with corpses lying arou ..read more

Some further, possibly not very coherent, thoughts carrying on from a previous post. In that post, I expressed my increasing dissatisfaction with TV nature documentaries which, on the one hand, mainly show scenes of predators hunting, or male animals fighting for control of females, accompanied by the kind of tense, exciting, sinister music that I associate with action scenes in movies, and on the other invite us to see nature as something fragile and vulnerable and in need of protection. Why is an orca drowned in a fishing net tragic and pitiful, but a baby seal being tormented by orcas a thr ..read more

In the Ballard-themed anthology, Reports from the Deep End, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Rick McGrath, from Titan Press. Published 7th November, 2023 ..read more

I’m delighted to have a story in this Ballard-themed anthology, which will be out in the autumn (Nov 7th) – and in some very fine company too. I’m a big admirer of Ballard, particularly his short stories. My contribution to this collection is called ‘Art App’. Ballard was an exceptionally painterly writer. His stories are not primarily driven by plot or character development, but by the accumulation and arrangement of very powerful images. I tried to honour Ballard’s attachment to Surrealist art and, in particular, to the work of Max Ernst, whose peculiar vision I only really became aware of ..read more

Thanks very much to Stephen E. Andrews for this youtube interview for his Outlaw Bookseller podcast, providing an overview of all my books. Steve is based in Bath, in Somerset, and his extraordinarly encyclopaedic knowledge of books is matched by his infectious enthusiasm. I first met him when he invited me to give a talk in Bath’s Waterstones. ht ..read more

I’ve always thought that there were two types of understanding. The first is to know, as a matter of fact, what something is or how it works (as in ‘the moon is a ball of rock: I know that because I’ve been taught it’). The second is to really feel a thing to be true (as in ‘wow, the moon really is a solid ball of rock’). I think the second meaning is close to the word grok, as coined by Robert Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land. It feels precious when it happens. But if ‘Type 2 Understanding’ were simply about being able to relate something unfamiliar to with something with which we are a ..read more