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  The Wool Omnibus is one of the best and most original science fiction books I have read. It is full of tension and intrigue from page one, and that tension is maintained through to the very last page. Anyone who enjoys stories set in strange post-apocalyptic worlds that have themes more complex than just power struggles and good versus evil should enjoy Wool . Wool is a collection of five novellas containing three separate stories that logically follow on from each other. The series is set on a future devastated Earth.   Earth’s atmosphere is full of deadly and corrosive chemicals that can eat through a space suit in a matter of minutes. So the remnants of humanity have retreated to an underground silo. The silo has 130 levels and a central staircase that connects all the levels. There are no lifts, and no web or phones, as the silo’s designers did not wanted communication between the silo’s inhabitants to be easy. The silo’s designers didn’t want unruly gatherin...

I am a member of a few science fiction communities on Google+, where an increasing number of authors want me to give money to their Kickstarter projects. I had ignored these requests, considered them to be a new form of begging. I had also thought why would a writer need the money? With the new world of self-publishing all a writer needs is to pay an editor and book designer, and a few other incidental costs. If they couldn’t afford an editor than they would need to find some good critiquers or someone to edit their book for free. If they wanted people to pay them while they wrote, they could go and get a job. But then I thought, maybe there are actually people willing to pay me to write my novels, so I went and checked out the Kickstarter website. The website says that since 2009, more than 4.3 million people have pledged over $670 million to fund more than 43,000 creative projects. It has an all or nothing approach, so the project only gets funded if it reaches it fundrai...

Now I know you have been impatiently waiting for me to do another survey of prices of the top 100 bestselling ebooks. So here it is. If you’re a wannabe author, like me, you have probably been doing a Kirk/Picard, as you contemplate the price of ebooks. If the price of ebooks dropped the impulsive Kirk would rush online to buy more ebooks. But the more pragmatic Picard would probably stop and ponder the effect on author’s livelihoods. If you are wondering, I am behaving more like Picard. I am sticking to a new year’s resolution of a couple of years ago of not paying less than $4.99 for an ebook. But I do make exceptions when an author informs me that they have made their book free in an attempt to push it up the Kindle rankings (although I read somewhere recently that Amazon is making this harder, if not impossible, to do).             Kindle Top 100 prices. Twenty-two of the ebooks in the top 100 were priced a...

  When I first pulled Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars from the shelves of a bookstore I remember muttering a sarcastic “yeah right,” after I read a comment on its cover claiming it was “A novel about the end of the world which makes you glad to be alive.” That’s not the role of apocalyptic fiction, I thought. But after reading the novel’s blurb, I decided to give it a go. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic America, a decade after a virus has killed 99% of the population. Hig, a poet, handyman, gardener, fisherman, hunter and pilot along with his dog Jasper, share a small airfield with a Bangley, a gun-toting survivalist. They have nothing in common but need each other to survive. Hig uses his Cessna to make daily surveillance flights searching for marauding survivors, while Bangley uses his guns to kill them. All other survivors are deemed threats because Hig and Bangley both know what they had to do to survive. So at the beginning of the book they are hard characters ...

On a Facebook Crohns and Colitis page, I learnt of a research report where nearly 50% of pot smoking Crohns suffers went into remission.     Caught bits of a radio national program where and author discussed her book about the history of obscenities. She said words like shit were not considered swearing centuries ago because people defecated and fucked in public. Swearing back then was more likely to be oaths against God. No idea what the program was and can’t remember when it was to attempt to find it on the radio national website. A bit to my surprise, Divine agreed to let me write an article on the medical use of cannabis for people with disabilities. Thinking about obscenities in the future, will the easy access to porn on the web and virtual reality again make obscenities referring to sex and body parts so inoffensive they become redundant? Is Peter Heller a bit of a wanker? I am reading his novel The Dog Stars which has a good story...