Authors Electric

What questions do you wish you had asked long-ago loved ones? I don't know how perceptive my questions or illuminating their responses would have been, I would have liked to find out. Having been a journalist for many years, I learned that interviewing is a demanding but unreliable art that requires repetition as well as unabashed perception. Tougher yet if it's of someone close.  I interviewed my paternal grandfather over a week's time when he visited my home in Los Angeles at age 92. I wrote a family memoir based upon that. I wish I had asked him so many more follow-up questions before he flew off to Italy where he passed away several years later.  Nowadays I query my fictional characters to add to their dossier, and still there are unanswered questions. No matter the homework, characters remain as much a mystery as real people. If we're lucky, one way or another, we develop a sense of what's true for a character and what's not. I've always been fond of fa...

Are you sure it's only a figment of the imagination? A gorgeous botanical drawing of a Triffid by Bryan Poole for the Science Fiction Classics (1998) Dr Seuss allegedly invented the word ‘nerd’. Lewis Carroll gave us Jabberwocks, slithy toves and vorpal blades.  And no dinner service is complete without a runcible spoon, courtesy of Edward Lear. Everyone has heard of robots - a word popularized by Karel Capek in 1920, although he credited his brother Josef with actually inventing it. Following the discovery of a newly discovered particle called a positron, Isaac Asimov provided his robots with ‘positronic’ brains to help give the stories a more scientific feel, even though he admitted himself that it was a bit of spoofery. It was catchy, sounded right, and stuck, and has been used ever since by other writers - not to mention being incorporated into the names of any number of companies: even non-nerds will have come across the word. Personally, my fa...