Authors Electric

The further from reality something is, the less scary it becomes. Daleks are so obviously a creation of an effects department that physically they are not terribly frightening – it’s when they speak that all this changes. Although their voices are mechanical and emotionless the fact that they have voices at all suggests thought processes equally different from our own, but not so alien that they are beyond our comprehension. This may be why extra-terrestrials have so frequently been depicted as having an adapted human form – Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars , and the Vogons in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy both have vaguely human body plans, so that we can imagine their emotions from the expressions on their toad-like faces. The closer something is to something we know, the more disturbing slight changes become. In Neil Gaiman’s Coraline , Coraline’s mother has been replaced by a mother with boot-button eyes, but she is otherwise the same, although her character is very different. Fi...

Since the beginning of August, I have been without incoming calls on my landline . I can call out with no problem, and the broadband is (mostly) there when I want it, but hardly anyone can actually call me. Ringing my number results in a message saying "you have dialled an incorrect number" or "invalid number" or  - rather more cryptically - three electronic beeps. The only exception to this rule seems to be when my phone provider rings to test the line or to apologize - they can get through just fine. Rather annoyingly, as it turns out, so can other call centres (so far a couple of random telemarketers and a robot survey) - although I have to admit things have been rather peaceful on the unsolicited calls front lately, so I assume most of them are getting blocked, just like my friends and family. The saga of investigations into this mysterious phenomenon could fill a whole book. Suffice to say that I have almost forgotten what my landline phone sounds like, to s...

Two things to blog about this month, one run-of-the-mill, the other a bit special, which fully deserves the adjective 'inspiring'. First, the ordinary. While I'm sorting out the final draft of   The Nightmares of Invasion, the second in the Bright Sea Dark Graves trilogy, I'm also putting together another collection of short stories, some already published, others new, for my private JOSLIN BOOKS imprint. This is one of the many, many things I like about independent publishing. It's almost like being a poet making a retrospective New and Selected, something it would be really, really foolish to ask a publisher to do unless you are incredibly famous. And to make Createspace paperbacks out of them as well as ebooks gives the whole project a sort of three-dimensional quality, a mark of permanence. Even if nobody buys them, they are still there to be had and that in itself, is a great comfort. So this time I'm taking two already commercially published storie...

“I told you I was ill.” Me in my kitchen. Must fix light. Of course not! The line is from Shelley’s Ozymandias, a great sonnet for reciting aloud late at night when you’re alone in the house. Don’t tell me I’m the only one. It helps to have a kitchen with a bit of echo (we had ours knocked through recently, not solely for this purpose), and as you change the bin-liner, or stir your solitary mug of tea, you can especially tinker with the climactic line, ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ How many exclamation marks to add to ‘despair!!!’ this evening? Where to place the emphases? ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’? ‘Look on my works, ye mighty ’ (sarcastic), ‘Look on my works –’ (no). Hours of fun. It’s surprisingly hard to commit ‘Ozymandias’ to memory, I think because of the oddly fragmented way the phrases tumble around each other, like the stones of the ruin. So here it is in full: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and tr...