THE SKINNER

Science Fiction Singularity

2012-01-30T08:50:00.000Z

I had gone off Horizon programs because of how dumbed down they’ve been, how so often they were lacking in content – what content they had often being spread over an hour when, if you cut out all the pointless camera shots, they might have filled twenty minutes – and by the frequent righteous environmental preaching. However, I did record one called ‘Playing God’ (a title that put me off straight away), and enjoyed it immensely.

This was about synthetic biology – essentially genetic modification – and how far advanced it is now. In the program we see the spider goat – a goat that produces a useful spider silk in its milk – and a pre-production plant for making diesel from GM yeast as simply as alcohol is made from the normal kind. The advances are coming at an ever increasing pace what with people being able to do this stuff in home labs. They can buy ‘bricks’ which are chunks of DNA that express certain characteristics, over the Internet, and mix and match them. For example, a bunch of enthusiasts pasted a jellyfish gene into e-coli to make luminescent bacteria – this in the kind of lab any of us could put together in a garden shed.

This is massive; this is a game changer. As the presenter noted this is like Bill Gates putting together a computer in his garage.

Of course the presenter had to whiffle on about the ethics of it all and whether it should be done. All the objections were based on either the Abrahamic religions or the ones springing from the Church of Environmentalism, and of course the terror of change they like to stir up. However, it is far too late to put this one back in the box.

It has been said (well by me at least) that nothing dates faster than science fiction, and this program brought it home to me. In science fiction there’s a lot of talk about various kinds of singularity. It’s usually related to the creation of AI and is seen as an ‘intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict’. It occurs to me that science fiction itself is facing its own singularity of exactly the same kind. We’ve reached the stage now where between writing a book and it being published, part or all of the content of that book can go out of date. Of course with e-books the gap between writing and publishing can be closed but, in maybe just a little time, we’ll reach the point where even as we speculate or extrapolate we will be going out of date, then the point when we’ll simply be well behind the curve.

There has been (for a very long time) much talk about ‘the death of science fiction’. Maybe that will occur when the need for sensawunda, which we all look for in SF, is supplied by the news every day, or even in our day-to-day lives. If that happens I’m not sure I’ll be particularly upset about it.

3D printer and living "ink" create cartilage

2012-01-29T14:52:00.000Z

Excellent stuff.

Loony Tunes

2012-01-27T15:55:00.000Z

Bloody hell, it’s pouring out of me. It’s 3.25PM as I write this and I’ve done my 2,000 words despite having taken an 8-mile cycle ride and despite twittering like a canary. I think this might be due to the constraints I had to write under with The Departure, Zero Point and Jupiter War. In those books I was writing about the near future and necessarily had to limit myself to technology that was a few steps back from A C Clarke's Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Further constraints of course kicked in with the later books because they had to relate to the previous ones. The whole story was set in our solar system too so I couldn’t let myself go with weird ecologies nor could I march in any acid-spitting monsters, or creatures with multiple stages of life, or giant tentacled fish.

Now it’s different. Now I have the feeling I experienced most with The Skinner, in varying degrees throughout the other books (the next one I felt it most being Brass man). That feeling is fuck it, I want to get really weird, I don’t want constraints, I’m going stick down every bizarre idea that comes to me, run with it and try to weave it all together. This is why Tuppence, Dr Whip and Harriet are now on the scene. These are, respectively, the captain of an ancient prador cargo-hauler who we see in avatar form but who is also something … monstrous; a pale tall doctor who was once adjusted by Penny Royal and who never takes off his sunglasses; and an exotic dancer who has transformed herself into a troodon dinosaur, and likes eating people.

Feeling a bit loony today.

Maldon Prom

2012-01-26T07:45:00.006Z

We took a little walk around the Maldon prom a couple of weeks ago. Here's a few pictures:

Maldon on the mud.

Thames barges.

This is where they have the Maldon mud race.

More boats.

HSE haven't found this yet.

View back towards Maldon from the prom.

The prom lake, which used to be a swimming lake that thousands visited every summer until some berk dived in (ignoring the presence of 'No Diving ' signs), smacked his head on a post and died. Subsequent involvement of the HSE and a compensation claim closed the lake to swimming. Congratulation all round.

The statue of Byrhtnoth a 10th century leader under Ethelred whose claim to fame is getting spanked by the Vikings. Erected in honour of council leaders who were wondering how next to blow a silly amount of money.

Steam boat.

Him again.

I needed chips. It was bloody cold.

16th century pub, with a parrot.

Maldon high street.

Open Thread

2012-01-24T15:52:00.001Z

Many other blogs have open threads and I've been thinking about having the same here. In fact this is one. People often want to comment (or vent) about something that is not the subject in hand so this will give them the opportunity to do so.

I'm using this picture for this one but, if people do come and avail themselves of this open thread then maybe later someone can come up with some sort of design for which I'll provide some sort of prize...

Stem Cell Success

2012-01-24T09:10:00.001Z

Hitting the sack last night to read for a while I did not get to see the 10.00 o’clock news (probably a good idea) but I did hear some mention of a stem cells success. On Twitter this morning I picked up on a story about two people, who were losing their sight, being treated with embryonic stem cells. One of them, a 51-year old graphic artist who was ‘legally blind’ i.e. could read nothing on an eye-chart, and a 78-year old suffering from macular degeneration.

A week after having cells derived from a days-old embryo injected into her eye, the graphic artist could count fingers, and after one month she could read the top five letters on the eye chart. She can see more colour and contrast, has started using her computer, and for the first time in years can read her watch and thread a needle. The macular degeneration patient recently went to the mall for the first time in years.

There’s some about the possible dangers of using stem cells in the article, how they can differentiate into the wrong sort of cell. I read a story somewhere (which might be apocryphal) of someone being treated for Alzheimer’s and ending up with bone growing inside their brain. Then there are the moral issues. Being an atheist myself and more inclined to the idea that intelligence is more to be valued than species this is not an issue to me. And isn’t it also the case that adult stem cells can now be used and that ways are already being found to multiply them?

This from 2006:
Researchers of the Whitehead Institute have discovered a way to multiply an adult stem cell 30-fold, an expansion that offers tremendous promise for treatments such as bone marrow transplants and perhaps even gene therapy.

"A 30-fold increase is ten times higher than anyone's achieved before," says Lodish, senior author on the paper.

Perhaps any biologists here or those who have read up on the subject can elaborate?

Storm brings snow to Sahara Desert

2012-01-23T11:58:00.001Z

I bet you didn't realize my short story was so famous. Hur hur.

Errors in the Books

2012-01-23T10:08:00.000Z

I’ve just been told by the nice lady who deals with the copy-editing on my books that they can and do correct mistakes in the books after publication. I have in fact asked if it would be possible to supplant all instances of ‘whilst’ in The Departure paperback with ‘while’. Now, can any of you come up with any errors in the books that you’ve spotted? I know that there was a typo in the first pages of Line War and one or two other errors have been pointed out to me, but these are buried somewhere deep in this blog.

If you do come up with any mistakes, please let me know exactly which issue it is of the book concerned – whether it’s the hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, and which cover – since the page size and spacing may be different with each. An error on page five of the hardcover might appear on page four of the paperback.

Short Stories and Stuff

2012-01-23T09:49:00.000Z

Well, it looks for sure like Piper’s Ash, who published Runcible Tales, has closed:

After some 40 years promoting new authors, we regret to say that we are now closing down our business. We wish new authors every success in the future with new publishers.

This means I now have a handful of short stories to go towards another collection: Always with You, Blue Holes, Dragon in the Flower, The Gire and the Bibrat & Walking John and Bird. Other stories that could be made part of a collection include Shell Game, The Cuisinart Effect, The Rhine’s World Incident and perhaps some others sitting in my files that are unrelated to the Polity (as most of these are) or Cowl (the Rhine’s World one). The thing about The Gabble was that Peter Lavery asked me to confine myself to Polity stories so it fitted in with the rest of the Macmillan books, so I have plenty of other stories knocking about that don’t really fit anywhere.

Meanwhile, it’s lovely to discover that I’m right-wing (and probably a fascist) and that my writing is ‘a bit moronic’ and the ‘political anvils’ I drop into my work are naïve. This of course means that all of you who enjoy my books were too stupid to notice my obviously deep desire to stomp all over you with jackboots as opposed to, say, always protesting about big autocratic government. I never realized, but now it’s been made clear to me I will of course be off to get a swastika tattooed on my forehead. Surely it was clear that all the Polity books described the fascist state I wished we all lived in?

And meanwhile I’ll get back to Jupiter War, the last book in this Owner trilogy. I ask what I consider to be some serious questions, but these books are completely irrelevant. In failing to conform to correct political thought and not loving big state socialism I’m obviously as dumb as a box of spanners.

Writing Update

2012-01-21T14:44:00.000Z

It didn’t take me very long to go through the copy-editing of Zero Point. There were a few questions asked to which the answers ranged from, ‘Yes, do it,’ to, ‘No, leave it alone’. What would you think the answer should be, for example, to changing EMR and EMF to EM radiation and EM field? The rest of it was all about house style. I had a momentary worry when I thought they might be deleting all my ellipses until I was informed they were supplanting them with just a more widely-spaced version. I also learned something about enquire/inquire (as used by Macmillan). The former is for general usage, the latter is used more for asking for information as part of a formal investigation. I really should have known this since the distinction is in their dictionary definitions.

Perhaps it’s time for me to pick up and read again Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Incidentally another much simpler book to read about this sort of stuff is Bill Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, though in this case it doesn’t happen to make the distinction.

After finishing with Zero Point, also writing the acknowledgements and dedication, I was undecided for a while about how to proceed. I really needed to look at Jupiter War again, but was reluctant to get into another boring read-through when I was having so much fun with Penny Royal. I decided on the boring read-through, since it wasn’t going to just go away, and it’s going quite well. Little inconsistencies and conflicts that were niggling at the back of my mind it turns out I had already nailed, and the reading is easy. I’m now more than halfway through it and when I’m done I’ll print it up, hand it over to Caroline, then later go through it myself again, backwards.

Then it’s back to Penny Royal.

Super Massive Black Hole Power Plant

2012-01-20T17:38:00.001Z

I just love this kind of thinking...

The structures of the power plant basically revolve around the central SMBH in Keplerian motion to form “Dyson Shells.” In an advanced case of Type II, the central star is almost fully covered to form “Dyson Sphere”. Here we discuss the case of structures partly covered, or the Dyson Shell type, and call it a Dyson Sphere. Unlike a stellar environment, or Type II Dyson Sphere, there are complex structures like relativistic jets, accretion disk and accreting matters, rapidly rotating stars, etc., and hence it would be very difficult to construct a fully covered structure, like a system studied by Birch over a large gaseous planet (e.g., Jupiter). However, it is not easy to set numbers of power plants with similar distance orbiting around the central SMBH. Hence, it would be a possible solution to set the power plants on a solid framework, something like structures studied by Birch. Some areas should be kept uncovered to yield emanating jets and accreting flows.

More on the Departure

2012-01-19T13:56:00.000Z

Having gone ‘ouch’ a few times after daring to venture a peek at the bad reviews on amazon and elsewhere, I’ve been having a little think. One of the main criticisms of The Departure seems to be the ‘political diatribes’ (or in one case ‘Thatcherite propaganda’) in my chapter starts. Admittedly I should have attributed them rather than let them stand, since some of them are from subnet bloggers and some from govnet bloggers. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I decided to do a little experiment with one of them by just changing a few words. This first one is directly from The Departure (shortened a little):

Once the Committee had firmly tightened its grip on Earth, it distributed wealth only on the basis of its own survival. In the beginning, ‘zero asset’ citizens received just enough to keep them fed, clothed and housed, whilst ‘societal assets’ could receive considerably more, calculated on the basis of their use to the Committee and how much more of a contribution could be derived from them by allowing them more. But the Committee itself sucked up the bulk of world wealth through building the infrastructure of utter control, and by maintaining its upper executives at a level of luxury never before witnessed on Earth.

And here’s another version:

Once the corporations and bankers had seized control of Earth from democratically elected governments, they distributed wealth only on the basis of their own survival. In the beginning, unemployed citizens received just enough to keep them fed, clothed and housed as a ‘labour pool’, while those employed in the corporations could receive considerably more, calculated on the basis of their usefulness and how much more of a contribution could be derived from them by allowing them more. But the corporations sucked up the bulk of world wealth through building the infrastructure of utter control, and by maintaining their upper executives at a level of luxury never before witnessed on Earth.

It would take me at best a week, mainly using find-and-replace, to completely flip this book over into the realms of ‘acceptability’. Sad but true.

Secret Offshore Forts - a history and a visit

2012-01-19T09:02:00.003Z

Ever since seeing these 'Maunsell forts', while on a fishing trip, I've been fascinated by them. They've put in an appearance in Cowl and now, sort of, in The Departure. They came up in a chat on Twitter about that book (about the stinking reviews on amazon). In the book they aren't there but in their place is Maunsell Airport ... in fact Boris Island Airport. Thanks to David Hutchinson for the link to this video clip.

Writing update

2012-01-17T10:37:00.000Z

Macmillan emailed me the copy-edited version of Zero Point, along with a list of questions from the copy editor and also a request that I supply acknowledgements and a dedication. They want all these sorted and returned by the 31^st which shouldn’t be a problem, though I will wait on the hard copy so I can sit down with paper and pen to work through it. It’s noticeable how, in the email version, they’re now using a marked-up PDF document and I reckon on that becoming the way things will be done in the future i.e. a saving will be made on printing and postage. I don’t suppose it will take me very long to get used to that.

As for the acknowledgements and dedication, they ask earlier on if I would like a couple of pages saved for them. I tend to say yes, even when I’m not sure who I might acknowledge or who or what I might dedicate the book to (and also be in danger of repeating myself) because I suspect they are a case of ‘use them or lose them’. I also feel that just going nah, I won’t bother, is a bit lazy.

So, Penny Royal is on 32,741 words and I’ll soon be abandoning it for a while to turn my attention to this editing. When I return to Penny Royal I’ll have to deal with a growing feeling of ‘time to introduce another character or twist’ – time in fact to do what Raymond Chandler did when he felt things needed ramping up. His approach was to walk in a man with a gun. My approach has structural similarities to that but might be ‘time to bring in a massive brass android with a penchant for ripping off people’s heads’ or ‘time to bring in the ancient and thoroughly unpleasant Golgoloth’.

It’s something I’ll have to ponder.

Neal Asher Video Clip 15/1/2012

2012-01-16T17:44:00.001Z

Here's the latest. As always, further questions in the comments section below.

Borgen

2012-01-16T09:45:00.000Z

The other night we watched two episodes of something Caroline had taped – Borgen – then went on to watch another two episodes shown on Saturday night. It is a political drama set in Denmark and surprisingly, since it involves politicians, I’ve been enjoying it. Stuff like this perfectly illustrates how successful politicians will compromise their idealism to the point of non-existence so as to get their noses in the trough. We’ve seen this sort of stuff before in dramas like State of Play and House of Cards and in what can only loosely be described as a parody: Yes Minister.

The female who rises to the position of Prime Minister is an idealist politically-correct twat of the kind we know well from Labour’s years in power here. This being TV, which is dominated by lefty twats of a similar stripe, her initial portrayal couldn’t have been more saintly if she’d walked around with a CGI halo hovering above her head (I should also add that she was unbelievably naïve for someone so high up the greasy pole). Of course the good guys always want more welfare spending, love Islam and immigration, want to piss money away on International Development. Equally, those depicted as conservative or to the right are racist authoritarians with horns growing out of their heads.

However, I’m hoping this is not going to be too simplistic. Already our saint is finding it necessary to lie and cheat as she scrabbles for power. Quite possibly this will be a riff on the ‘power corrupts’ aphorism, or maybe even something more adult about how idealism fails when it impacts with reality. I will watch it to the end.

25 Years!

2012-01-15T13:50:00.003Z

Someone bought me a journal for 2012 with a blank page for every day. I had been filling in such journals for many years until a couple of years ago, when I asked for hardcover notebooks without a date on every page because I was getting behind (and bored with the daily recording of my life) and most of my ‘warm-up’ writing started to go here on this blog. This morning, getting behind as usual, I waffled on back-filling empty pages and, while doing so, realized something: I’ve now been self-employed for 25 years. When I muttered something about this Caroline said, ‘Where’s it all gone?’ but I don’t feel like that. The last 25 years have been quite eventful.

I started paid work while still in school – at the weekends – and when I left school at age 16 I went straight into a full-time job in a factory making steel furniture. From there I progressed through various firms, acquiring a college certificate in ‘Mechanical and Production Engineering’. I worked for an aluminium boat and house window companies and a couple of other engineering companies, mainly using milling machines, but in the early eighties I was getting bored with that and broke away for a disastrous stint in a building company (it went skint owing me £600 in wages). A brief spell of unemployment was followed by me being seconded by someone to help clear up storm damage in ’87 and, thereafter seeing the financial possibilities and freedom of working for myself, I went self-employed.

Throughout all this I was writing of course, working my way up the small press ladder, taking an English A-level to prove a point just to myself, and gradually becoming more successful. I ran my own business cutting both domestic and council grass, cutting hedges, trees, laying concrete, building fences, repointing houses … the list is a long one. I occasionally worked for builders, delivered coal and skips, did bar work, rebuilt and sold a few motorbikes and cars. I met Caroline and moved into her flat (I wrote The Skinner in my first year there) and we then moved together to a bungalow (I have to wonder what people thought of the Sherpa truck parked outside) and then, in 1999-2000 by synopsis and sample chapters of Gridlinked hit at Macmillan.

I continued with the grass-cutting etc. for another year (or two?) then went over fully to writing. Since then we’ve bought a house in Crete, and I did a lot of work on it myself. I’ve had about 20 books published, now live in Crete for 7 months of the year and have had both enjoyable and traumatic experiences throughout the whole process.

Looking back to ’87 I see that figure in some woodland in the pissing rain cutting up fallen branches with a bow-saw. He just had no idea…

The New Space Opera

2012-01-14T12:39:00.001Z

I do have a bad habit with anthologies I’ve been published in. I tend to receive them then stick them on a shelf as eye-candy yet, of course, they probably contain lots of stories I would like to read. The other day I changed that habit by picking up The New Space Opera edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan. It contains a story by me called Shell Game, and has been sitting on my shelf since 2009. I did enjoy this and out of the 19 stories enclosed there were only two I didn’t finish and maybe only a couple more I finished with a ‘meh’. Particular highlights for me were the stories by Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Watts, Kristine Kathryne Rusch, Jay Lake, Sean Williams, John Meaney, Elizabeth Moon and John Scalzi.

Follow Friday, Apparently

2012-01-13T17:21:00.001Z

So, I just passed 30,000 words on Penny Royal (having been slowed up over the last two days by feeling crap). The backstory I previously mentioned is now at about 29,000 words and looks likely to turn into a book by itself. What more can I say? Nothing. I don’t want come-backs of the, ‘But you said so-and-so was going to happen’ kind. Everything is up in the air at the moment and I’m just writing where the fancy takes me.

People have been recommending me for a ‘Shorty Award’ on Twitter. After contemplating getting my stilettos out of the wardrobe I realized that this is for ‘producers of the best short content on social media’. Since this is Twitter I’m wondering about the redundancy of the word ‘short’. I went over to the site concerned where there was a questionnaire for me to fill in. I don’t suppose they wanted the kind of answer I gave to their question about a hash tag thingy I would like to see more of: #facesICouldNeverTireOfPunching. Today I’ve discovered that #FF means ‘Follow Friday’ wherein people recommend other people to follow. What a strange introverted place the Twitterverse can be.

Another social media site I’ve signed up on is Google+, but with a sigh, desultory attempts at posting and swift fuck-off flashes of irritation when I encountered problems. I think I’m suffering from social media fatigue #SMF … or something.

Video Clips

2012-01-12T10:11:00.000Z

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of those video clips. I’m told by various people that they like them but, unfortunately, I’m not getting enough questions. Here are the questions in the comments of the previous clip:

ChrisW: You've probably answered this before somewhere, so feel free to ignore, but, what's up with "The Departure"(the HB not the eBook) not being available/published in the USA? Is it going the way of "The Line of Polity"?

Still annoys me that when I look at my Asher shelve that there is no Line HB. Bloody publishers! :)

Spaceoperaghost: Will you ever expand on the story of The Quiet War?

Taylor Preston: When you write, do you revise/edit as you go or do you just hammer out the first draft before you put pen to paper and start making changes? I know you've said before you don't normally outline, so I'm wondering how much revision you end up doing and how you go about it.

Huan: What size are Amistad and Sniper?

arj209: Have you reached the lofty heights of stardom of being recognised in the streets?

Friso: Your Wikipedia article mentions "runcible" is an homage to ansible. Is that how you intended it?

Thezzphai: In an interview you talked about your next Polity book possibly being called "Penny Royal". Can you already tell something about the content (pretty please) and when it will be released approximately? Are you already working on it or is it just an idea for the time being?

The last one here has been answered and is being answered on the blog but I suppose I can go over it again a bit, and the first one here is just a ‘don’t know’ but I guess I could waffle on about the subject for a bit. But I could do with some more questions. Please append some in the comments below. Oh, and I’m saving this one from the last post for the next clip too:

Chrish: ‘I’m finding the writing ridiculously easy (which is worrying)’. I'm puzzled, why worrying?

Writing Update

2012-01-11T15:31:00.001Z

I’m starting to get the feeling that Penny Royal is struggling to turn into something larger. I started out by jotting down backstory involving the prador/human war and some later events concerning my main character. Then I moved on and wrote a piece of the ‘present day’ story. Next returning to the backstory I began filling it in, also having some ideas concerning hooders that were just too juicy to resist. The ‘present day’ piece is just over 1,000 words long while the backstory is 25,000 words long. Ahem.

That backstory has also grown because of the necessity for conflict, and has grown in much the same way as the ‘B’ plotline for Gridlinked. Let me just revisit that for a moment:

I submitted a sample and synopsis of Gridlinked to Macmillan at the end of 1999 and received a request for the whole book shortly afterwards, which I sent by email. At the time Gridlinked was 65,000 words long and I knew it was too short for present day publication requirements. I suggested, by email, that I could expand it – maybe put in more about the doings of the villains in the story. Meanwhile that email crossed one on the way back with a reader’s report from Simon Kavanagh (now an author’s agent): it’s too short and maybe I should expand the B plotline i.e. the story of the villains. I did as requested, expanding Gridlinked to 135,000 words in, I think, about two or three weeks. Peter Lavery at Macmillan expected a load of padded crap, what he got instead was Mr Crane (who wasn’t in the original version).

In Penny Royal I’ve been concentrating on a villain – someone who encountered Penny Royal during its time in the Graveyard. I’m finding the writing ridiculously easy (which is worrying) and am starting to contemplate the idea of introducing other characters like her (Isobel Satomi), who have experienced similar encounters with Penny Royal. I can’t really say much more than this … well, I can add that prador and hooders have joined the cast, along with second-child ship minds, shell people, a heavyworlder thug, Jebel U-cap Krong and Sylac (who some may remember from Gridlinked and Prador Moon).

I’d like to get back to work now, but again I’ve got a sty in my eye and feel like crap. Concentrating on a screen ain’t helping.

It's Mild Today

2012-01-11T09:27:00.001Z

It's always a good idea to remember that though we are havng a mild winter, thus far, this is not a global phenomenon.

That in the eyes of Chris Huhne if you criticise wind farms that apparently makes you a terrorist.

That in the eyes of intellectual giants like Michael Mann, Freeman Dyson is apparently an idiot.

That the miracle of shale gas is still being ignored by the ignoramuses in charge of our country.

That ‘ocean acidification’ is a crock.

And that, unbelievably, some common sense is at last being reasserted.

Dreams and Nightmares

2012-01-10T09:30:00.000Z

Damn but I wish I had dreams, and nightmares, more often. Last night I was chasing sheep off a vegetable patch I had in my parent’s garden whereupon I came upon a really tough cobweb made by a large green spider. When I cut the web it collapsed into a powerful spring. When I showed this spring to Steven Spielberg he didn’t believe me, so I threw part of it at him and told him to get it analysed. Next I was in a toilet in which the urinals and toilet bowl folded out from concealment, which was good, because they were filthy. There I found another web and another spider, though this spider was larger and covered in flowers. The spiders then made a perfectly natural transformation into worms I kept in a pencil packet and thereafter things got a bit chaotic…

Why do I wish for more dreams and even nightmares? Consider a nightmare I had many years ago. I was on an island covered in jungle, stepped onto a bridge over a stream and saw what looked like trout in the clear flow of water. Then one of the trout lifted its tubular thread-cutting mouth out of the water and I realized it was a leech. Retreating to the beach lying before a wall of jungle I saw long spidery blue hands reaching out and grapping someone (it might have been me – you know how jumbled nightmares are). Later this person was found, still alive, without his skin… I think you can work out where this one went.

Another nightmare involved being trapped in a cellar. The floor of the cellar was mud I was fighting not to sink into, and while struggling I realized the mud was actually alive. Next, out of the darkness came something moving like and ape. It turned out to be the still living body of a man, headless and chopped off at the waist. But he was okay because I knew he was there to help me. This nightmare I turned into a story called The Halfman’s Cellar which got me ‘honourable mention’ in the ‘Writers of the Future’ contest in 1991 and was published in a magazine called Scheherazade in 1994.

So what do I need to do, eat more cheese or something?

Brass Man

2012-01-09T09:59:00.004Z

Thanks to Geoff Utley for this picture. It seems that Barnes & Noble might be a little bit behind the curve, but nice to see this anyway.

Brass Man on Amazon, Kindle & Book Depository.

The knight errant Anderson is hunting a dragon on the primitive Out-Polity world of Cull, little knowing that far away a man has resurrected a brass killing machine to assist in a similar hunt that encompasses star systems. When agent Cormac learns that an old enemy still lives, he sets out in pursuit aboard the attack ship Jack Ketch … whilst scientist Mika begins discovering the horrifying truth about that ancient technology ostensibly produced by the alien Jain, who died out five million years ago.

On a planet roamed by ferocious insectile monsters the people of Cull must struggle to survive, while they build the industrial base to reach their forefathers’ starship still orbiting far above them. An entity calling itself Dragon assists them, but its motives are questionable having created genetic by-blows of humans and the hideous local monsters, before growing bored with that game. And now Cull, for millennia geologically inactive, suffers earthquakes…

Meanwhile a brass killing machine seeks to escape a bloody past it can neither forget nor truly remember. It mindlessly continues its search for sanity, which it might find in an instant or not for a thousand years…

Microbots

2012-01-08T11:18:00.001Z

Now this is why I don't just go for that SF buzzword prefix 'nano'. It's great for 'technology indistinguishable from magic' but with just a little thought you soon realize that microscopic robots should come first and will be very useful. For example, dealing with cancer doesn't have to be a nanoscale operation unless you actually want to repair the DNA faults responsible. Microbots in the body should be able to nip in and zap the relevant cells.

Journal of Applied Physics - Precise manipulation of a microrobot in the pulsatile flow of human blood vessels using magnetic navigation system (3 pages)

There are many other researchers working on bloodstream robots but we are still about 3 to 5 years away from clinical use because of the regulatory timeline.