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Hi everyone, It’s been a while since I posted, I have been busy, sick and slack. I plan to write a few more blog posts this year. As usual they will be mainly about writing and science fiction, concentrating on apocalyptic and time-travel fiction. But first a bit of a summary of 2019, my annus horribilis. 2019 2019 started with my finishing three very challenging years of study with a BA in Internet Communications in early March. The degree was easily the hardest study I had done. Way harder than my Master of Creative Writing. I think its difficulty was due to the combination of doing web-design subjects, (I had virtually no knowledge of even html) and getting used to the “Arts” way of thinking, with its huge emphasis on well researched and argued essays. Due to the nature of the degree, I also had to learn many software packages and web platforms, like video editing software to create video mashups for assignments. I should have been happy when I completed my degree, as I did extr...

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I very much enjoyed being challenged in my thinking by the two novellas in this collection. It contains two very different stories: Caught Between Love and Loss, and the title story, A Refugee’s Rage. Caught Between Love and Loss This story starts out as if it is going to be a story about Richard, a guy who buys a block of land in the bush and decides to build a house on it, but then gradually becomes a story about his girlfriend, Rachel, as she struggles to define what her relationship with Richard is. Is he just a lover? Perhaps a potential long-term boyfriend? Is she in love with him? Or is she just in love with the idea of building a house and living in a beautiful rural Australia setting? The house becomes a metaphor for their relationship as the reader wonders whether it will ever be complete. The story tugs at the heart as you hope they can find a way to really connect. A Refugee’s Rage In contrast to the first story, A Refugees Rage is a very ...

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi My rating: 5 of 5 stars Amazing world building, peopled with very flawed characters who are mostly looking out for just themselves. The novel is set in a future Thailand in a world that is near apocalyptic as it deals with climate change and rising sea levels, running out of fossil fuels, and famines caused by diseases attacking genetically engineered crops. Thailand is a holdout from food conglomerates who want to introduce their genetically engineered crops into the kingdom and get access to the Thai seedbank which the Thai's have used to create crops that are disease resistant. Add to this mix are windup people or clones, servants that have been create with jerky movements, hence the term wind-up. The plot has four main strings, a battle between the trade ministry, who want to open up Thailand to the overseas food conglomerates, and the environmental ministry who don't. The second plot revolves around a conglomerate agent's attempt...

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...