August 2011
31 posts
“Military sf is seen as a male province and it seems to worry people when women...”
– Lois McMaster Bujold
http://notthedayjob.tumblr.com/post/8914289904/interview-lois-mcmaster-bujold
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“I always enjoy writing Culture novels, I feel at home; it’s my train set, I...”
– Iain M Banks
http://notthedayjob.tumblr.com/post/8914135987/interview-iain-m-banks-whats-in-an-m
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“At the end of Snow Crash we’re left wondering what might happen to YT and in The...”
– Neal Stephenson
http://notthedayjob.tumblr.com/post/8920706538/new-words-neal-stephenson
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“I did all the things that I wanted to do at the beginning and I stopped while I...”
– Neil Gaiman on finishing Sandman
http://notthedayjob.tumblr.com/post/8921273638/going-underground-with-neil-gaiman
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Going Underground with Neil Gaiman
First it was going to be a sewer. Then a deserted tube station. It might have been a tall roof in London or a deserted smoke-filled hospital. In the end we caught up with Neil Gaiman on the set of his new TV series, Neverwhere, in the depths of South London. Ex-journalist, comic writer, creator of Dream and Death, collaborator with Terry Pratchett, short story author, song writer, poet,...
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New words: Neal Stephenson
His books are multi-layered adventure stories with tomorrow’s technology mixing with yesterday’s archetypes to threaten a world that’s never quite as we know it, but Neal Stephenson still has to visit London to promote his latest best-seller. Mary Branscombe uncovered him in a Kensington hotel and discovered a dark-eyed and intense man with a very dry sense of humour and a penchant for painfully...
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The Mars Man: Kim Stanley Robinson
Although colonising the nearest almost habitable planet is a frequent subject for science fiction, with more than 15 Mars books coming out in the last four years, one writer has dominated the red planet recently as much by the scale of his ideas and themes as by the scale of his Mars trilogy. But Mars certainly isn’t the only interest of the versatile Kim Stan Robinson (Stan, as he’s referred to...
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“There are many examples of technologies in our world that aren’t necessarily the...”
– Neal Stephenson
http://notthedayjob.tumblr.com/post/8920706538/new-words-neal-stephenson
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Peter Hamilton: a very British sf writer with vast...
Taking six years to write, Peter Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy will be nearly 3,000 pages long (more if you count the book of short stories due next year) and it’s about nothing less than the end of life as we know it. Mary Branscombe interrupted the author at his labours to find out where he gets his sense of scale.
Peter Hamilton is fond of combining disaster with science fiction. He bought...
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I set out to outdo everyone: Lois McMaster Bujold
Last summer at the Worldcon, Lois McMaster Bujold won yet another Hugo award, this time for Mirror Dance, the story of what happens after you rescue someone and they turn out to be your cloned twin brother who’s supposed to end up living your life for you. Apart from an unusual fantasy novel, The Spirit Ring, which starts with the premise that all that complicated mediaeval alchemy actually...
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Interview: Iain (M) Banks - What's in an M?
One of the UK’s most successful writers of the last 15 years is Scottish. Mary Branscombe met him in Edinburgh to find out how SF put the M in Iain M Banks.
Iain Banks shot to fame and controversy in 1979 with The Wasp Factory and has since become infamous for his dark, macabre and bizarrely funny books. Before The Wasp Factory was accepted, he’d already written three SF novels...
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Interview: The Books of Iain Banks - and Iain M...
Banks is a prolific writer and (at the time of this interview) had produced 13 books in 16 years. We asked him to describe his books for us and he told us “it’s a tired old cliché but books are like children…”
The Wasp Factory
“It was supposed to be a respectable, normal kind of book that went away and came back with a ring through its nose and a safety pin through...
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Interview: Iain Banks on Excession
Iain M Banks’ latest Culture novel is a tale of conspiracy, deception and eccentricity. So Iain, we asked, what’s it all about?
“About 450 pages” he replied, hefting the book and grinning. It is indeed a long and complicated tale of conspiracy that keeps you counting on your fingers to work out who is deceiving who past the last page and when we asked him what really happened to the Ships at the...
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Excession: Iain M Banks
When you’re rich and powerful and can have almost anything you want, what do you do next? Well, if you’re Iain M Banks ,you write about what interests you, like the secret manoeuvrings of the ship minds that really run the Culture (and you indulge yourself with as many gratuitous Culture ship names as you like). And if you’re one of the ship Minds that manoeuvre around secretly running the...
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Interface: Stephen Bury/Neal Stephenson
Just how do you get elected President of America these days? You can sink a political career on TV in a few minutes if you make enough of fool of yourself; on the other hand if you look and sound good enough you can sway the nation. All you need to know is how well you’re going down with the voters. Take a politician who’s had a biochip implanted into his brain, linked to the computers that...
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Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories: Lucius...
If morality is “a work in progress” you can do whatever you want - or whatever you can get away with. That’s the motto of the Strange Magnificence, the black-satin-clad terrorists taking over space station Solitude in the title story of this collection but the idea recurs in nearly all the stories. From the mostly justified violence of the detective trying to defend the station (and the half-wit...
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Distress: Greg Egan
What a world. Once you’re legally dead, they can pump you full of neurochemicals that bring you back to life just long enough to answer a few last questions before the toxins polish you off. If you don’t want to be a typical man, surgery can turn you into an asexual or if you can afford it, you can rewrite your DNA so no virus can ever affect you again. Meanwhile the physicists are well on the way...
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Skybowl: Melanie Rawn
It’s people rather than places, principles or even the ever-present politics that are at the heart of Melanie Rawn’s books and you need to figure out a way of keeping track of them if you’re going to enjoy what is really rather an enjoyable tale of magic, battles, discovery and the very occasional dragon. You can’t rely on names because in order to show the complex...
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The Last Legends of Earth: A A Attanasio
Legends persist long after the people, even the world that spawned them have died. But with a sufficiently advanced technology (here indistinguishable from magic of the distinctly mystical kind) you can bring anything back to life. All the beings on the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror have been reborn from fossilised DNA drifting in the reaches of space, hurled out by the explosion of...
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Spawn: the movie
Spawn is based on one of the most popular comics in America (and comics are hot property for turning in to movies these days). But do stunning special effects, an industrial soundtrack and a creator with complete control make a good movie?
On paper, Spawn sounds great (on paper it is;the best issues have good art and better stories). Take a government agent (Michael Jae White as Al Simmons, an...
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Isaac Asimov's The Ultimate Robot
Can Isaac Asimov tell you everything you want to know about robots?
Asimov’s Laws of Robotics have defined virtually every robot that’s appeared in science fiction since he first stated them back in 1941 and they’ve had a big effect on real-world robots as well. This CD-ROM attempts to tell you everything there is to know about robots from Asimov’s Laws and Robbie the...
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The UK Sci-Fi Channel: the first three months
The Sci-Fi Channel claims to be “all things science fiction.” With Paramount and Universal Studios behind it, we should be seeing a great range of sf, from Star Trek to the latest films and in America it has a great schedule. Unfortunately, in the UK the popular sf shows have already been snapped up by Sky One (Star Trek, TNG and Voyager, VR 5, Nowhere Man, Earth 2…), with classic and cult...
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Count Dracula (BBC Productions)
If you’re looking for half-clad blood-spattered virgins screaming themselves silly at the sight of a pair of rubber teeth in the usual tacky vampire film, think again. This is a Dracula that takes itself seriously. One thing the BBC is really good at is costume drama, bringing the classics to the small screen in authentic and very English adaptations and that’s exactly what you get in...
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Confabulation - the 46th British National Science...
Huge deserted buildings, an automatic railway shuttling empty carriages between the steel and glass edifices; London Docklands was an appropriately futuristic setting for this year’s Eastercon, in the Britannia International hotel. The guests were Lois McMaster Bujold - award-winning author of the Miles Vorkosigan space operas (Shards of Honour, Mirror Dance) and one fantasy novel, the...
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The Two Georges: Richard Dreyfuss and Harry...
Suppose Richard Nixon had stayed a second-hand car dealer instead of going into politics; he’d still end up being called Tricky Dicky, but this time he gets shot from a grassy knoll. This isn’t Dallas however, it’s New Liverpool - the Los Angeles of a world where George Washington and George III worked together to keep the North American Union a loyal part of the British Empire. With no unified...
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Detox herbal tea
This is a mix of herbs suggested by Sue Hawkey, a herbalist in Bath, England. It’s ideal for detoxing the system when you need help getting over an addiction; it’s been used for helping heroin addicts, which, she says, makes it a little help for anyone trying to give up smoking (I’ve never tried either but I’m told nicotine is by far the worse addiction).
Camomile - a great relaxant...
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The main course
Last night I caught a rerun of the Duchess of Duke St (a below-stairs Edwardian drama about Louisa Layton (Gemma Jones) who wants to be the best cook in England). In fact, the food was as much the star as any of the characters - a whole turbot cooked in Court Bouillon in a huge copper fish kettle and served with huge handfuls of parsley, every pear nestled in a white linen cloth for storage,...
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Garlic bread
I’m famous for my garlic bread, what with the amount of garlic, the parsley, the butter and the crispy base. Clichés from the 70s are avocado and prawns, coq au vin and garlic bread (plus fruit topped with cream and sugar and grilled). The 90’s clichés were grilled vegetables with parmesan or peccorino, wild mushrooms, risotto, bangers and mash and bruschetta. I don’t if that makes me a child of...
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Bread, bread, bread
It’s wonderful to be eating bread again. Supper last night consisted of a big wide oval loaf of wonderfully fresh and chewy white bread with sesame seeds baked into the crust (rather than just loosely attached, as on many loaves where you get half a pound of seeds in the bag and none in your slice of bread). We did have salad with it, and butter (I’m still trying not to eat dairy but...
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The trouble with offal
Offal makes me nervous. I’m sure it must be delicious when prepared right, but I take one look at honeycomb tripe or liver and lose my nerve - I’m equally sure it will be repulsive done wrong. I’ve been repeatedly told that I have eaten offal, when I’ve had faggots, and thinking about it there’s probably about as much offal in the average sausage roll, what with MRM...
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Food, devious food
I’ve always had what I refer to as a deep and abiding interest in food, graduating about the age of 14 from fish fingers and ad hoc stews, via burnt fried eggs (completely carbonised underneath but still yellow on top) to cakes and casseroles and pasta bakes. Cooking classes at school (home economics, rather) taught me how to make pastry and shortbread and that it was better to core apples...