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When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall My rating: 3 of 5 stars Very well written, and an imaginative take on a future and how people might behave. It is set in England where a virus has wiped out most of the population and a few people live in isolated pockets using technology that is slowly running down. The main focus is a family that lives by themselves in an large apartment block. The story is told from the POV of a twenty something female. Children and people that age are rare. The story centres around her waiting for her finance (who she has never meet in real life, all their interactions have been on the web) to arrive, by bike - there are no cars or pods still running, while a mysterious stranger turns up, is he good or evil? The plot is not fabulous, but the story is more about how a family that has been cut off from physical interaction with others copes with this new worldly stranger and the world he introduces them too. View all my reviews

A personal essay I wrote for uni about the influence two books, 1984 and Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane, had on my reading and writing.     The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.                                 Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four.   In my mid-teens, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four told me what I already suspected. It confirmed my thinking that everyone I knew – my iffy school mates and more definite school hates, as well my teachers and my parents – were all just like me, desperate to fit in because they were too scared not to. Nineteen Eighty-Four was also full of ideas about how society could be manipulated, and had me thinking what our future world might be like. A few years later I escaped to university and found myself surrounded by outsiders. One of them shoved Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Fou...

This is a copy of a speech I wrote for a writing subject in my BA of Internet Communications. Whatever happened to the technology singularity? I am here tonight to ask the question, whatever happened to the technology singularity ? I ask this question because we don’t seem to be getting any closer to being dragged into its event horizon. The singularity’s supercharged revolution of society is something I desperately want to experience. Rather than just writing about the singularity, I want to live it.     I can remember my excitement when I first read Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation , where he told us of the wonders of nanotechnology. He told us of a future where nanobots - nano-scale robots - can manufacture everything, molecule by molecule. Many Star Trek fans would have immediately imagined that replicators would soon be churning out all the burgers and beer we could ever consume, for free.  My excitement about the future I would live in s...

Hi all, I thought I better post something just to prove I am still alive. I have been so busy studying that I have not had time to regularly post on my blog.  In fact, I am feeling guilty as hell that I am writing this and not taking notes for one of my subjects. My course did not stop for the end of the year or even Christmas. I even had an online quiz to complete by the end of Christmas Day, and got the results for it, when it ticked over into Boxing Day.  I am currently doing News and Politics, a journalism type subject, through Griffith Uni and Critical Thinking, at Macquarie. I am doing well in the latter. For the former, I worry that my latest assignment wasn’t very good.   I did not have an end of year “best of” of science fiction for this year as it would not have been very comprehensive. I hardly went and saw any films and I only finished reading one novel. It was a pretty average year for science fiction movies anyway, with Arrival probably be...

The video is a remediation of Advance Australia Fair made for my BA in Internet Communications. The remediation uses the anthem to critique Australian society. 

Once again its been a long time between posts. Two months at least. My BA in Internet Communications is really eating up my time. I am now in the third period doing my fifth and sixth subjects. One of those subjects is an introductory subject to studying at Uni that everyone who studies at Curtin, at least everyone who does a humanities degree, has to do. It focuses on how to write essays, reflective or critical thinking, working in groups, and we have to give an oral presentation. I am having a bit of trouble figuring out how to do reflective writing, although my tutor said my second practice attempt was excellent. I have always hated working in groups - hey, that is one reason why the independent life of writing appealed. I don't like giving speeches either. So the subject is going to have its challenges. The other subject is about new media, with a focus on participatory culture and remediations. A remediation is changing one media object into another, ie, turning a book into ...

Just noticed it is about six weeks since I posted anything on my blog. I have been extremely busy with my degree in web design. I am currently building a new website for one of the subjects, and it has interactive elements, ie, things that move on it, like a slide- show of pictures, and hotspots that when rolled over reveal further information. It involves using JQuery and Javascript, both of them I had not used before the course, so it is a steep learning curve.  This is a photoshop mock-up of  what I am trying to do: And that is just the homepage. If you are curious how I am going, the website is under construction at grahamclementsauthor.com.   It needs to be complete in four weeks time.Those little arrows on the side of the slideshow took hours to figure out.  I have done alright in the course so far, I scrapped in a high distinction for the previous web design subject and a distinction for the other communications subject. Nice to get high marks, but...