Book Review – Firefall by Peter Watts
Firefall by Peter Watts My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is an epic science fiction first contact piece that left me wondering about sentience, consciousness and whether I could trust anything I saw, heard or felt. It is certainly the best book that I have read so far in 2015. Peter Watt's acceptance speech at the Hugo Awards ceremony in 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The book is an expansion of a previous novella, which is about half of the story. It's set in an advanced human spaceship travelling out to make contact with some suspicious anomalies in the outer solar system a few years after a massive extraterrestial probing of Earth, the firefall of the title. The mission is lead by a vampire (Peter Watts has a novel take on vampires, and they're not the traditional blood drinking horrors,…
Author Interview – Peter Bailey
This week's interview is with Peter Bailey, a British based author of horror stories. How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I wrote my first ‘story’ way back in March 2011, and story is in quotes because it was a completely factual report of a disastrous trip to Las Vegas – but written in a deliberately comic style loosely based on Dave Barry (And if you’ve never read Mr Barry, please do!) The review is still online at and has gathered over a hundred replies. Now this was very surprising , It had never occurred to me that anyone might be interested in what I had to say, and once the idea had formed there was no turning back. The review became a short story, later stories were printed online and in ‘real’ books…
Mid 21st Century Policing
English: Metropolitan Police officers on patrol in London's Trafalgar Square (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I've been thinking about how policing in the UK might evolve over the next few decades. This is a combination of evaluating the background I've done for Perfects and also looking at perhaps running some more near future police roleplaying over the summer. I'm going to pick an arbitrary date of 2040, 25 years in the future. One thing I'm sure won't change is the concept of policing by consent. It's a fundamental plank of how we do things in Britain, and we know that it works. Other things that I think are given are budget pressures (the perennial more with less cry) the adoption of new technology to transform how policing happens visible policing with people on the ground So it's an evolution of traditional policing…
Film Review: Jurassic World
Immediately after the Don't Panic megagame I took my nine year old son Alexander to see Jurassic World at the cinema. We saw the 3D version (although I don't think that the 3D added anything to the experience). I wasn't expecting it to be a fantastic movie from a story/plot/realism perspective. Jurassic World is the fourth in the Jurassic Park franchise, and some of the earlier ones were a bit ropey. I couldn't quite see how any government would license a dinosaur park given the mistakes of the previous attempts, especially the last one that set a T Rex loose in a major American city. The movie worked though. It paid homage to the previous movies and acknowledged the need for absolute safety. It also showed a lot of safety measures as background too. It also showed the science having…
Author Interview – Ron Levi
After a bit of a hiatus to study for my exam I'm back with blogging. Here's an author interview with Ron Levi, who has written a non-fiction guide to youth ice hockey in North America English: Image taken during a youth hockey tournament in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden. The teams playing are MODO Hockey (Örnsköldsvik, Sweden) and Tingsryd AIF (Tingsryd, Sweden). (Photo credit: Wikipedia) How long have you been writing for and what made you start writing? I’ve been writing since high school – over 30 years ago. In college I wrote poetry which I never published, and I’ve done technical and business writing, but my first published work is Navigating Youth Hockey: The Definitive Guide for Parents and Players which was released 4/25/2015 on Amazon. Do you write for a living, or do you also do other work? I am a Project…