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I was happily reading the Age the other day, thinking everything was okay with life when I spotted an article titled “You don’t need to spell it out, OK is okay in anyone’s language” . WTF? Had someone gone and changed the language rules without telling me? The article itself is more about the origins of okay than a debate over which way to spell it, but it does say that it is okay to use OK instead of okay. And I had changed every use of OK to okay in a manuscript I recently edited (sorry Chris). Just to make sure, I checked out the online Macquarie dictionary. It informed me that OK, o.k. and okay were all OK. Unconvinced, I searched for an online style guide. The only one I found that would let me in without having to stuff around registering or paying, was for the Guardian newspaper in England. It says: OK is OK; okay is not . So it looks like okay could not be OK here sometime in the future. Has U Gone Missing? OK got me thinking, what ...

When most writers think about the future of publishing they think about a world where the ease of e-publishing leads to the market being flooded by millions of wannabe authors. How is a new author going to get noticed in amongst all those books?   But what if the 2050 bestseller list looks something like this: Global Best Selling List 2050 1. I Married my Pregnant Android – Bob Katter. 2. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling 3. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 4. Stalking Tigers – Graham Clements 5. Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 6. 9.11.2001 – Stephen King 7 . Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes 8 . Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 9. Fifty Shades of Grey – EL James 10. The Corrections – Jonathon Franzen. What if the bestseller list is dominated by books from bygone eras? Couldn’t happen, you say. Surely we would be writing better stuff than that in the future, you say. Well I reckon it coul...

Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, has one of the most interesting and original premises I have read. Aliens land at several locations on Earth. They have no interest whatsoever in humanity and use alien barriers to ensure they are not bothered by humans. The aliens only stay for a short time and after they depart, they leave alien trash scattered around the locations, as if they were a bunch of bogans on a camping trip. Some of the trash has amazing properties, like batteries that never run down. But much of the trash is dangerous, and many who venture into the areas are killed. So the authorities fence the areas off, making them no go areas except for those desperate for the money that retrieving an alien artefact brings. These people are called stalkers. The novel takes place in an unnamed country, but most probably the US, at an undated time. Its main character, Redrick Schuhart, is a stalker, who at first retrieves items from the prohibited areas for a lo...

If much of the time you are too tired to read or write science fiction, like me, the next best thing is watching it, or some good speculative fiction. Fortunately I have Foxtel and an ipad, because if I had to rely on commercial television for my science fiction fix I would be one unhappy trekker.    My favourite speculative fiction show at the moment is a toss-up between Eureka and Misfits . I always seem to make time to sit down on Tuesday nights and watch Eureka on Foxtel, and after watching the last episode of the first series of Misfits , I immediately downloaded the first episode of the second series. Eureka Eureka, if you have not watched it yet, is set in a top secret town devoted to science and geeks. Each week someone’s science experiment seems to have unforeseen consequences, or the scientist involved decides he wants to be noticed. The main character is an unscientific sheriff who is more into intuition than science in preventing these experiments be...