Just a quick one…

Douglas Hoffman reviews ‘The Astronomer of Baghdad’ here.

I mention this specifically because Douglas has picked up on something I expected would come up sooner of later. As Douglas puts it:

One quibble: the time is the year 312, which makes mention of Isha’a (the Islamic evening prayer) a bit of an impossibility.

Unless, that is, the dates given were in something other than the modern Gregorian calendar…

Matt

Interesting article here about the original wingmen.

And just like human wingmen, they’re in danger of ending up with a fat bird. In their case, literally.

My short story The Astronomer of Baghdad is published in this week’s issue of Hub, issue 74 to be precise. If you don’t already subscribe, you can find it on their site, here.

Hub accepted this story quite a well back, but it’s good to finally see it published. On Saturday, I won a holiday to Malta, making the past few days uncharacteristically lucky ones - check back next week for news of me getting hit by the karma bus.

Matt

The current issue of Death Ray carries an interview with science fiction author, Orson Scott Card. The Death Ray interviews are always incredibly in-depth and usually free of too much waffle about their subject’s current projects, making them some of the more interesting interviews you’re likely to find. Card’s in particular focuses in large part on his political and religious beliefs. Orson Scott Card is known to be opinionated and outspoken, and people find his opinions particularly hard to tackle due to what is often perceived to be an inherent contradiction in them – he opposes the death penalty and gun ownership, for instance, but supports the war against terror and many of (now former) President Bush’s policies. He is also a Mormon.

I’ve never been particularly impressed by Card as a writer, but I did find his opinions - or rather the way he attempts to justify them - pretty interesting.

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Review: Penguin Great Journeys

More a recommendation than a review – a couple of years ago Penguin published a series of books called Great Journeys. They’re quite slight books, didn’t receive a lot of attention (being, as they are, mostly taken from texts in the public domain) and are easily lost amongst the swathes of needlessly fat books that fill the shelves of most bookshops these days, but they’re well worthy of attention.

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Mammoth-killing Comet Questioned

Do you think they did good cop, bad cop on him?

Sometimes the greatest writing surfaces in the most unexpected places - such as here, in this letter of complaint to Richard Branson.

“…cheese Richard, a cheese.”

I never realised letters of complaint could be such an artform.

Matt

Ben Bova // Hodder // 480 pages

This review originally appeared in Death Ray magazine.

In a Nutshell: Victor Zacharias is separated from his family in the aftermath of Ben Bova’s long-running Asteroid Wars and must run the gamut of a number of old enemies to find them…

Review: Any moderately sophisticated reader will be forgiven an initial groan at the sight of an opening line as deeply unpromising as ‘Don’t touch that switch!’. In truth, it’s unwarranted – the kind of hackneyed predictability that such a cliché might be expected to presage never actually materialises. That, though, is both a blessing and a curse.

Instead, what we get is 500 pages of maddeningly complex, relentlessly bewildering plot drawing in – so far as it’s possible to tell – at least four completely different storylines, some the loose ends of Bova’s prior Asteroid Wars books, others introduced for the first time (and ostensibly resolved) here. This is the kind of book that could only be précised by using the word ‘meanwhile’. A lot.

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What did you get up to this Sunday? Dirty beggars, the lot of you. It’s probably all the vicars having to relieve the stress after a morning surrounded by choirboys.

It’s a good job online gaming isn’t on that graph - the day World of Warcraft becomes more popular than surfing grot will be a very sad day for us all.

I also notice from the graph that September 2008 was the month that social networking sites overtook internet porn. If anyone happens to have a friend or colleague who signed up for Facebook during September last year, I think it’s safe to assume they were previously a colossal porn-fiend.