I’ve got a new post up at Black Gate, looking at Salman Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus. I note at the start that the book was in the running for a sf prize before the publishers pulled it, wanting to avoid Rushdie being branded (in both sense of the word) as a science fiction writer. Brian […]

I’m old enough now that in my adult life I’ve seen new things come into the language, for better or worse or both. One of the things I’ve seen, and so have you if you’ve been paying attention, is the use of the phrase “tasked with” to mean “ordered to do.” It’s not a usage […]

Maybe worth noting here that over the past couple of months, as I try to return to full health, I’ve taken up archery. This was Grace’s idea; she found that our local branch of the SCA had a weekly archery practice near us, and we’ve been going since mid-February. It’s been incredible fun. As I […]

Grace and I just watched last week’s Doctor Who. We enjoyed it quite a bit; I thought it felt a lot like an episode of the classic show — humans trapped in a confined metallic labyrinth, chased by an alien, and only the Doctor can save them. And David Warner guest-starred as an elderly scientist. […]

I don’t watch much TV these days, but I do watch A Game of Thrones. Which I find interesting as a show and as an adaptation. There’s a level of technical interest involved in seeing how the show creators deal with the various difficulties of translating Martin’s novels to the screen. I don’t just mean […]

I’ve developed a habit, now I’m in my (very) late 30s, of revisiting things I enjoyed as a child or teen to see how they’ve changed; how my sense of them has changed, but also how the passage of time has put them in a new context. I mostly do this with things that I […]

A little while ago I taught an intro college-level course to film and storytelling. That involved me reading a fair bit about film, and so developing a list of movies I wanted to watch. One that I never got around to at the time was a film called Häxan, a silent Swedish film about witchcraft. […]

When I was young, my father had an Osborne computer which seemed almost magical to me. He also had several floppy discs (the five-and-a-quarter-inch discs, thank you, truly floppy things) filled with games he’d got from one bulletin board or another. I want to write here about one game in particular, called Dungeon. In that […]