Authors Electric

The last few weeks have been a hectic mess. I’ve not been writing as much as I’ve been too busy dealing with the vagaries of real life, but did manage to revisit an idea I’d sketched out some years ago. The seeds of this story hark back around seven or eight years, and were planted when I heard Professor Stephen Hawking talking about the dangers of artificial intelligence. (Having seen the output of most of the machine learning models so far, I think there’s quite a way to go yet; I usually refer to it as ‘artificial idiocy’ – yes, I’m a curmudgeonly old technology sceptic – as most of the time it seems too easy to find faults either in the system itself, or the training data used ; you don’t have to look far to find stories illustrating how biased facial recognition systems can be, for example.) Over the next few days, there was a raft of stories across various media, either proclaiming AI as the salvation of humanity, or the beginning of the end. But one thing struck ...

Hey, I landed a gig with a 'proper publisher'!   Super Scientists by Susan Price Rising Star are the publishers and it's one of an extensive series of 'Game Changers' aimed at different reading ages. There are books about game changing entertainers, computer pioneers and 'hidden heroes' or people who did great things but were never given their due. Initially I was offered a choice between writing about game-changing sports people or scientists. An easy decision for me. Sport has always left me cold but science has always fascinated me. Writing the book was difficult and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There was a strict word number but Rising Stars wanted eight scientists, which worked out at about 1,500 words each. The brief was: a short introductory account of each subject's early life, followed by a broad account of their main achievements. This was easier for some than others. As an exercise, try covering Einstein's achievements and li...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on – The Beginning of Infinity [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by Oxford theoretical physicist David Deutsch , also best-selling author of The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.      Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, as I wrote them, everything seemed to be going along just fine until, one day I open the file and, nightmare...