Authors Electric

Speckled Wood “As writers, as a group, readers of this blog take words and their meanings seriously." Life in the world beyond books, blogs, and articles, however, demonstrates that large numbers of people don’t. Take the heading ‘NATURE RESERVE’ on a notice: is this a place set aside to provide a safe and suitable habitat for wildlife, native plants, trees, maybe a wetland area?   A location where a handful of rare species have been seen to hang out? Even the slow worms in our 7-hectare local nature reserve are counted to make sure they are doing okay.   Or is it, as a runner recently put it, ‘just a place for everyone, and dog-walking…’ As fiction writers, we’re in the business of creating both environment and inhabitants, which will include inhabitants who don’t think like ourselves, and environments we’d find strange, hostile, uncanny, as well as beautiful, welcoming, or exciting. Possibly more often than not these environments will indeed be in the negative, at least for...

My strawberry pot. And I have flowers already!   Hands up who thought a pandemic would be like this. None of us, I reckon. I’ve been reading dystopian novels ever since I was a teenager, and it was John Wyndham who wrote the most believable ones. The Midwich Cuckoos , in particular. Take a sleepy little English village, and turn it upside down by making every woman of childbearing age pregnant with an alien. Or The Day of the Triffids . It only takes two things to go really wrong for chaos to ensue.             What I hadn’t anticipated was the attention paid to the economy, although perhaps I should. All those books were written before the advent of the internet, and worldwide stats became available at the touch of a key. Nor did I ever envisage a narcissistic American president who gave such stupid advice, because he only cared about himself and his image. I’ve been leaving writing this until the last minute, an...