MH17

9 years ago, we were living in The Netherlands when Russia shot the Malaysian civilian aircraft MH17 out of the sky. We found out when the phone started ringing from Australia. My wife’s uncle, who was staying with us, was due to take that flight the next day. Family were concerned that they may have […]

RIP Greg

Reading a biography of Elon Musk a few years back, I kept thinking about my school mate, Greg. He passed away 8 years ago. I wish Greg had been an Elon Musk. He studied engineering and computing so that he could design and build a military space fleet, but didn’t quite get there in this […]

A meagre homage

JG Ballard died in 2009 on April 19 (I am a tad late to say ‘OTD’). I read his “The Voices of Time” in a paperback collection edited by Damien Knight, 100 Years of Science Fiction. (I was very happy to buy those two volumes, by the way, in the mid-70s, with part of the […]

The Luge! The Luge!

For your Winter Olympics reading pleasure in the short breaks between episodes of The Curling (not a Laird Barron novel), why not read my story with a title that threatens to break the Twitter character limit, “The murder of Father Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin considered as the single men’s Olympics Luge final“? A story that manages […]

Story #26 – “The Time-Traveller’s lament”

May I recommend for your reading … pleasure? … my most recent publication, and my final for 2021 (and who knows, perhaps my final ever?), The Time-Traveller’s Lament ? So many things to say about this, for a change. Thanks to the folks at Sci-Phi Journal. This is the second story of mine they have […]

Testostero

The opening of the first paragraph of Testostero by David Foster may be the most Australian thing* I have ever read, and it is not even set here: The most astounding feature of Venice to Noel Horniman, who at age forty is seeing it for the first time, is not the architecture – which seems […]

Horror as optimism

I knew what books she liked … – gloomy horror stories, Gothic novels with crumpled covers featuring a drawing of a Bat. Perverted monks, severed hands that murder people, coffins flushed out of graveyards by floods. Evidently reading this sort of thing confirmed her in the conviction that we are not living in the worst […]

KABOOM man

Well, that was a lot of fun. With that title – “The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man”, and my love of his Fractured Europe series, I was always going to read this novel of Dave Hutchinson‘s. However, I am never early to the party, and I see that it has been out in the […]