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Kurt Vonnegut certainly has his own quirky writing style, a really warped view of reality. I would say Cat's Cradle is less in touch with reality than Slaughterhouse Five. Cat's Cradle is written in a tone amused at the strangeness of human beings and the way they interact with the world. Unfortunately, I was never quite sure whether I am getting the joke. Still I found the antics of the naive world-weary main character irresistible. The story begins with a writer, simply called John, wanting to write a book about how those close to one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, Felix Hoenikker, felt on the day it was dropped on Hiroshima. He interviews strange workmates and even stranger relatives. On the way we discover that Hoenikker has invented an even greater weapon of mass destruction called ice nine. As John runs around the US and then the world interviewing those close to the scientist, the reader is left wondering what happened to the ice nine and will it ...

Hi all, I was very busy with writing activities last week: my next article for Divine, my blog and my novella. I spent a lot of time researching such things as ebooks, authors with disabilities, skinhead clothing and the Indian language. By the end of the week I had had enough. I began thinking about taking a break when I finish my next Divine article; a break where I don’t turn on the computer for a couple of weeks. It would be nice to go somewhere near the sea and swim, fish and wander the beaches. Until I take that holiday, I’ve decided to treat my weekends more like weekends and leave the computer off on Saturday or Sunday, perhaps both. I left if off on Saturday and did nothing writing related when I turned it on yesterday, and I feel mentally revived today. Will Ebooks Dumb Reading Down? I finished reading the ebook Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut last week. I found it very hard to remember the definitions of some of his made up terminology. Maybe my memo...

Hi all, New Article on Divine I have another article up on Divine, this one is about studying online for my master of creative writing at the University of Canberra . If you are considering studying writing at the University of Canberra I have a more substantial appraisal of the masters course and its lecturers on my website . The Divine editor made a few changes to my article, even though I rewrote it and edited it many times. Oh well, changes to my writing always make me anxious. Some of them I can see why, the reason for others is not so obvious. I will examine them again when my ego has stopped raging. More Torchwood I was rapt to read that they are making another ten episode mini-series of Torchwood. Television is running out of quality science fiction. Cheap Books at Booko I had a look at an Aussie website called Booko a couple of days ago. It is a site that automatically searches for the online prices, including delivery, of books. Just type in the tit...

Hi all, After fixing my computer problems last week (I’m just asking for the thing to crash with a comment like that), I am feeling strangely over-confident and willing to strangle any challenge that wanders within arms reach. Windows Vista was the Problem, Not My Computer I did have some help from an excellent technician at Hewlett-Packard’s, but I did have to first believe him and then implement his solution. He told me, like someone who did not want to be overheard by Microsoft, that the problem was not with my computer but with Windows Vista, particularly its latest updates. So I did another recovery, but this time I stopped windows from automatically updating. Since than, five days ago, my computer has not crashed or stalled or turned itself off or come up with one of a multitude of error messages. Safari a Better Browser Than Firefox I was in the mood to experiment so I tried a couple of other web browsers in the hope that they would solve a problem I had with Fire...

Hi all, I have not read any other Ian McEwan novels. I gather his other novels are serious dramas, whereas Solar was more of a tongue in cheek comedy. I never laughed out loud, but none the less I found it amusing as the pompous, insular, brilliant and sometimes inept main character schemed his way out of a number of awkward situations. One scene where is he trying to urinate in 20 below zero temperatures is very memorable. Michael Beard is its central character. He has spent much of his life living off his fame after winning a noble prize for physics in his early twenties. He is constantly asked to be on boards, make paid speeches, lecture etc, while producing very little new research. Then one day he is asked to join the board of a research facility trying to find solutions to climate change. Fate then hands him the process of converting water into hydrogen using solar power, the ultimate clean energy. Meanwhile his hectic private life of four marriages continues. He is so...

Books I read a few more books last year than in the 2009, including my first ebook on a Kindle. I try and mix my reading up by rotating genres: science fiction, fantasy or horror and than something non-genre. Usually I am reading a speculative fiction anthology or magazine too. I also read the odd non-fiction book and book on writing. I tend to try and read Australian authors, 75% of the books I read last year were written by Australians. Of the books I read, I enjoyed reading The Gypsy Morph , the third and final volume in Terry Brooks’ environmentally themed fantasy/science fiction Genesis of Shannara series. Greg Egan’s Incandescence brimmed with ideas and imagination, but unfortunately was a very difficult read because of hard to understand descriptions of physics concepts. After reading China Mieville’s The Scar the previous year, I was disappointed with his Peridido Street Station . Although very strong in imagination, the story took way too long to begin. ...

Hi all, My news year's resolution is not to download any ebook that is priced below $5. This includes any book requesting a donation. A lot of my posts last year were about the potential for free and ridiculously cheap ebooks to destroy the publishing industry, so I will only download ebooks where the author/publisher has said that they deserve to make some money out of their efforts. Forget all this crap about selling huge numbers of $1 ebooks, it won’t work. Not when there are millions of free ebooks (2.5 million on google books, 50% of the Kindle bestseller list) and tens of thousands being sold for $1 or less. And you can ditch the argument that cheap downloads worked for the music industry. (Did it?) Novels are a completely different commodity. Consumers can consume 100’s of downloaded songs a year, whereas the average consumer purchases about one book a year (which many will not even read). The quantities purchased don’t compare. Oh, I hear you say, but whe...

Hi all, I thought I had my computer back working properly, no problems for a few days after I did a recovery, but today, just after I turned it on, an error message appeared saying that there was a problem with a driver and it was shutting down. The message said, as they often do, if it was the first time I had received that message, not to worry. I think it was the first time. The computer restarted okay. Interestingly, Windows was installing updates at the time. When I did the recovery about a week ago, I had lots of problems installing the 79 Windows updates. During that time error messages came up about just about everything, modem, power source, graphics card, memory, but no particular error message seemed to repeat. Another commonality with problems seems to be the browser Firefox, which I have stopped using (I have since found other browsers to be faster). One good thing about doing the recovery was it removed a few minor irritants, like programs that had failed...