It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

That’s one lot of festivities / commercial frenzy over. Next up, the New Year – a celebration of an entirely arbitrary point in time. Bah humbug. I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve. It was… a spectacle. The 3D is excellent. The film looks beautiful, if a bit too much like the cover art from a [...]

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So, the year ahead… 2010, another science fictional year. This is a good time to think about my intentions for next year. Not resolutions – they exist to be broken. And not plans – that’s far too… fixed a word. Besides, plans always go wrong. These are things I’d like to do in the coming [...]

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Those of you who followed my blog at its previous address will have noticed that it was down for five days. This is because it was locked by blogger.com on suspicion of being a spam blog. In the civilised world, where people are innocent until prove guilty, the process would have gone something like this: [...]

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I’ll be moving my blog from blogspot.com to here just as soon as the buggers unlock it.

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Sf Signal asked a bunch of people for their picks of the top five genre books, films and television of 2009. I was one of those people, and you can see my response here. I’ll be doing my usual best of the year here on this blog as well, of course, but it won’t be [...]

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And by that I don’t mean that science fiction is stories set in the future. At this moment in time, in purely commercial terms, taking the genre as a whole, fantasy is outselling science fiction. Mark Charan Newton gives some reasons why on his blog here. But that means what, exactly? That sf is at [...]

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Ten things you find yourself doing when you should be working on a short story or novel: 1. browsing the Internet2. reading3. watching telly4. playing a computer game5. alphabetising your book-shelves6. re-tagging your MP3 collection7. daydreaming about the short story or novel you’re going to write8. thinking up a top ten list of something9. housework10. [...]

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It seems my last post on Beacon Books caused blogger.com to think It Doesn’t Have To Be Right is a spam blog. So they locked it and I had to ask for a review. Otherwise they would delete it. So perhaps sex and science fiction don’t mix all that well, after all.

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I’ve just heard that Spandau Ballet are reforming, and I have to wonder if there is a side-effect of the credit crunch no one has considered…. All those terrible bands and celebrities of the last twenty-five years we’d happily thought had retired have also been hit by the credit crunch. So they’re relaunching their careers [...]

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Back in the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers used “monster” people – i.e., make some poor sod out to be a combination of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Gary Glitter. It didn’t matter if they deserved such treatment. It sold newspapers. It seems the 21st century spin on this is to take some nobody who bludgeoned [...]

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