When I hear a man’s voice behind me shouting ‘kiss me’, my instinct is to keep walking. Hearing the voice getting closer just makes me walk faster. So the man was out of breath when he caught up with me.…
Monthly Archives: August 2015
Fiction review: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The local library’s electronic checkout system didn’t like Gone Girl. A machine can’t tremble and sob, so it threw an error message instead and sent me to the human being at the desk. He picked up the book, did a…
Greater Minds: HP Lovecraft on Weird Fiction
Lovecraft wrote his history of supernatural horror at the same time as he was writing The Call of Cthulhu. He revealed his thinking at the time he was writing the seminal work of science fiction horror. Lovecraft acknowledged Poe as…
Tagged with: Cthulhu, Cthulhu Mythos, fantasy, horror, HP Lovecraft, science fiction
Posted in Greater minds, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Greater minds, Wednesday Pontification
Supermarket Ambush
The remains of George’s life fell in with a crash of supermarket trolleys. Half of his instincts screamed at him to run. The other half reminded him how ridiculous he would look fleeing down the pet food aisle. Between them,…
Inspirations: The terminator’s coming for my job
As robots become more capable, they replace humans in the labour force. In spite of their limitations, they will take over many skilled jobs in the coming decades. Unless they generate more jobs, they will lead to mass unemployment. Employment…
Tagged with: Ada Lovelace, Algorithms, Andrew McAfee, Artificial intelligence, Carl Frey, CGP Grey, David Graeber, Federico Pistono, Future, Gavin Kelly, Lady Lovelace's objection, Michael Osborne, Pippa Malmgren, Resolution Foundation, Robots, Science, science fiction, Technology at Work
Posted in Inspirations, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Inspirations, Wednesday Pontification
Triage
How did I get here? I didn’t do anything. Really. Oh, I’m sorry nurse, of course that wasn’t what you asked. Force of habit. My wife…anyway, you want to know why I’m in Accident and Emergency at all. What’s your…
Greater Minds: Octavia E Butler on Life, Writing and Kindred
Octavia E Butler was one of the leading science fiction writers of the 20th Her seminal novel Kindred was partly inspired by growing up as a black woman in 1950s and 60s California. Butler said a novel is the product…
Tagged with: Kindred, Octavia E Butler, science fiction, Writing
Posted in Greater minds, Wednesday Pontification
Posted in Greater minds, Wednesday Pontification
Book review: So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
I reviewed Jon Ronson’s exploration of Twitter tyranny, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, on Goodreads before I started reposting book reviews here as well. I’ve just found Ronson’s TED talk on the playground politics of social media, which should be…
Banshee
It was a white sheet blowing in the wind that changed my life. Not that I recognised it as a sheet at the time. The scudding clouds allowed just enough moonlight to show me something shapeless, twisting and rippling toward…
Book review: The Martian by Andy Weir
Mark Watney comes round to find himself marooned on Mars. The rest of the novel stems from what he’s going to do about it, with the help of NASA mission control once they realise he’s out there. The Martian is…
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