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Bryce Courtenay's Embellished Life. Yesterday I read a large article in the Age Good Weekend magazine from March 17 titled The World According to Bryce Courtenay.  It details many questionable claims Bryce has made about his life. For example, recently I heard that Courtenay invented the mascot Louie the Fly for Morten, not so according to the article, Louie the Fly was around in 1957before Courtenay started in the advertising industry.  Courtenay, according to the article, claims to have taught English to black South Africans servants in a hall that was burnt down by police. But according to the church that owned the hall it was never burnt down.  Probably Courtenay’s most amazing claim is that while he was running the Boston Marathon he struck up a conversation with another runner who said he too was a writer. When Courtenay asked the writer his name, he told him it was Stephen King.  Stephen King’s executive assistant says King has never run the Boston m...

Books I Read at High School I watch the American quiz show Jeopardy on cable and currently they have a Teen Tournament. I am always amazed at the teenagers’ knowledge of literature in these tournaments, and wonder if  they read a lot of the books that appear in the questions as part of the curriculum in American high schools. I then start thinking about the books that were part of my high school curriculum way back in the seventies. The first book I can remember having to read at high school was The Great Gatsby . If ever a book failed to resonate with a reader, this was one.  The only thing I got from it was a loathing of novels about poor little rich people.   I think somewhere about the same time I read Go Ask Alice , which was about a drug addict who died, I think. As I was not planning to become a drug addict, spending too much time playing golf, it said nothing to me.    Then I read Macbeth , I remember enjoying the violence in the film t...

Laptops and Sore Fingers. I recently had little choice but to buy a laptop computer due to the lack of quality desktops on sale in Wangaratta. One of the reasons I have been wary of laptops is that I had heard that their users were more prone to carpal-tunnel syndrome.  For the past two weeks both my little fingers have been very sore and prone to pins and needles at night. The only thing I am doing differently in my life lately is using a laptop.   So I have re-positioning the laptop on my desk and raised my seat height.  I hope this does the job because the right-hand pinky can become very painful. There is less pain now, but I have been using the laptop less. I may end up getting a wireless keyboard.    It would seem that I have manifested a self-fulfilling prophecy with laptops and carpal tunnel syndrome.  Now if I could only convince myself that the world is desperate for science fiction written by me… Ideas Walking into my Head....

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Dervish House's big plus is its setting, a near future Instanbul, during a heatwave. Its author, Ian McDonald, took me somewhere different from most science fiction novels, he took me away from the west. McDonald writes such a convincing description of Istanbul that I could believe he is Turkish. I originally bought the novel on the strength of his Hugo nominated “Vishnu in the Cat Circus" which had me convinced that he was Indian. But he is English. The Dervish house was nominated for a number of science fiction awards in 2011. And I can see why. It is a very ambitious novel with many different story lines and characters. The threads of these stories merge at different stages, some right at the very end. The characters include a boy who is confined indoors because any loud noise might cause his heart to fail. He explores the outside world with small robots and along the way witnesses an abduct...

Article on Climate Change Submitted to Divine Last week began well when I submitted my eighteenth article to Divine magazine. The article was about the health effects of climate change. I did a fair bit of research for the article reading large chucks of IPCC and Australian Climate Commission reports.    I had a bit of serendipity while writing the article. A program on ABC radio told me about a disease that increased four–fold in the Darling Downs after the recent floods in Queensland. I then read the disease is on the rise due to climate change, in an IPCC report. According to the reports, climate change will increase not only deaths due to heat and more frequent extreme weather events, but also increase infections, allergens, diseases and mental illness. And the worst affected state, by a long way, looks to be Queensland. Hopefully the article will be up on the Divine site soon. Bookshops Versus Online Buying. Last week I suddenly realised my moth...