Thanks to Nik Morton for a guest post suitable for Halloween. Nik spent 23 years in the Royal Navy as a writer, and after retiring from the Navy went into IT. He moved to writing for and editing magazines and now lives in Spain where he is concentrating on writing. GUEST POST Malta is rich in history and scenic attraction. I first visited the island in 1967 when our ship HMS Zulu docked in Valletta harbour. I hadn’t been in the Royal Navy long – joined two years earlier. In those days, approaching foreign ports was always exciting. I’d been fascinated by Amsterdam, and Gibraltar was breath-taking. But Malta was something else again. The grandeur of the Grand Harbour has not diminished over the years – it’s still one of the most photogenic scenes I’ve come across. Going ashore in civilian clothes, I toured the island by local buses. They’re economical and cover virtually the entire island. On one journey, I got to the fish-tail of the island and caught the ferry across to Gozo...

It's quite popular to knock the USA. And there is no doubting that politics there has got into an awful mess, and from Europe it's very difficult to understand why there is such an aversion to universal health care, or such a love for the gun. But I feel in our relationship with America we are in danger of falling into that dangerous trap of relationships where you always spend time niggling and pointing out fault and never find time to say how great the other person is.  I say this because we shouldn't forget there's a lot to like about America. Pretty well every American I've met has been a warm, friendly, helpful person, and I'm delighted to count a lot of Americans among my online friends and/or readers of my books.  There's a lot to be said too for American culture. We might moan about Hollywood's attitude to the rest of the world and occasional schlockiness, but the fact is the US makes some great films, music, TV shows and more. You won...

Time for another guest post. Robin Walker was born in Worcestershire, and after reading Classics at Cambridge, he emigrated to the then Rhodesia with my family. A few years later, he joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs as a cadet, retiring as a District Commissioner in 1980, by which time Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe. His book, Last Orders at the Changamire Arms , was published last month by Mark Lloyd of Pillar International Publishing. It's a humorous account of his last years in the ministry, and the great people he was privileged to meet and work with. He has written a novel, also laced with humour, on the life of the Greek hero, Herakles, probably better known as Hercules. Apart from that, he is engaged in beating his head against traditional academic walls with his fresh approach to the similes of Homer's Iliad. GUEST POST American research has come up with an interesting angle on fishing. It has brought to light an idea I have been hooked on for some while, and t...

Every now and then I'm sent a review request for a novel that catches my eye, and this was the case with Kiss Me, Hadley by Nick Macfie. Featuring a news agency reporter who goes undercover in an illegal casino in Hong Kong, but with a comic twist, it sounded rather intriguing. I was a bit disappointed when the book came as it has the look and feel of print on demand (though the layout and editing is fine), which never feels quite like a 'real' book, but I managed to ignore this. The reality of reading Kiss Me, Hadley was entirely curate's egg. Let's do the good bit first. Macfie is great at the setting, really getting us into the sleazy casino world and particularly making Hong Kong come alive. The action scenes, especially those set in a casino, are engaging and pull the reader along effortlessly. These parts of the book are great, and if somehow they could be extracted and interlaced with better dialogue and modified in the ending, this could be a brillian...

I know I am going to infuriate some musical tastes here, but I really don't get the appeal of Bob Dylan. Part of the problem is likely to be that, musically speaking, I am a child of the 70s rather than the 60s. I didn't buy my first album until 1970 (admittedly that was the Beatles, but it was late Beatles), so I never felt any of the emotional attachment that many do to the whole ethos of the 60s - but what that means is that I listen to Dylan as music per se, and to my mind he comes up wanting. My modernised folk (I think folk rock is too heavy a term) heroes would be Simon & Garfunkel and Al Stewart (who I saw perform last Saturday - at age 68, he is still going strong, unlike certain croaky elderly types, naming no names). For me they are streets ahead of Dylan. Now don't start moaning to me how my choices are much too light and fluffy, and not meaningful enough. I'm talking about their merits as songwriters, not as revolutionaries. Don't be an intell...

I'm going to be running a series of guest blogs over the next few weeks and the first is from Sue Guiney . According to Sue: 'I'm a writer of fiction, poetry, plays. I'm a teacher of fiction, poetry, plays. Born and raised in New York, I've made my life in London with my husband and two sons. I'm grateful for it all.' I had the pleasure of doing a science/literature event with Sue a couple of years ago and loved her book Tangled Roots . GUEST POST BY SUE GUINEY It seems to be festival season around here. Bankside, London, is in the midst of the Merge Festival , which is the local immersive arts festival. Its aim is to provide a series of events which showcase and draw on the rich heritage and contemporary culture of this area of London's south bank. Last night I went along to a demonstration and networking evening where artists and scientists came together to chat, drink wine, amaze each other with the incredible ideas we all have, and especially t...

I hate the term 'meme', because I think there is a very poor parallel between genes and ideas (and it's a cringe-making word), but it can be quite handy when referring to a phenomenon that is very common online. It used to mostly happen through emails, but these days it is more likely to be a Facebook 'share' because it is easier to do. Typically you get a message from a friend that either warns you of something dire ('Don't open a message like this! It's a computer virus!' or 'Don't use this product, people have been killed by it'), or says 'like this picture and something amazing will happen' (it won't), or tells you something outrageous that really underlines your suspicions about someone in the public eye (most recently that Michele Bachmann wants to ban Halloween). By all means pass this kind of thing on if it's true - but just as it's a good idea to wash your hands to avoid spreading nasty bugs, so it...

More important than games There was a lot of fuss in some sections of the news recently about runner Mo Farah having problems because someone pushing a child's buggy in the park where Mo was trying to train wouldn't get off the path to keep out of Mo's way. Now I'm sure Mo is a nice guy, and was very polite, and there certainly shouldn't have been the fight that ensued. But I also am sure that the media outrage that poor old Mo had to suffer so much by not having the path to himself because of this unreasonable father was ridiculous. Let's get the picture in perspective. Mo is very good at a game, the playground game of 'Who can run fastest?' He's one of the best people in the world at this particular game, and that's lovely for him. But compared with keeping a baby or toddler safe, it is a totally worthless activity. It's fine in its place. If he had been training on a running track and the father and started pushing his pushch...

CERN's Alpha Project mentioned below - image courtesy of CERN I had a very interesting exchange with a physicist the other day which I think really helps underline the difficulties of getting science right. I had asked this person 'do you have any personal expectations (or even hope!)' about the outcome of an experiment. His response was 'As an experimentalist, I must be completely unprejudiced about the outcome of our experiments. So I don't have any expectations.' Now, in answering one part of my question he was entirely correct and proper. But as far as the other part goes, assuming he is a human being and I wasn't communicating with a robot, he is fibbing. The right and proper part is having no expectations. We now recognize that it is very important that an experimental scientist does not prejudge the issue and expect an experiment to come out a particular way. This is because there is plenty of evidence of the 'experimenter effect' whe...

There has been a lot in the news about the dire failure of the Al-Madinah free school in Derby, mostly debating whether this shows that the Conservative free school policy is flawed, or whether this is merely a blip, because more free schools are outstanding/good than are traditional schools. However there are some aspects of the problems there -  limited curriculum, segregation and inequality of treatment of boys and girls (and female teachers) - that could just as easily be put down to this being a faith school. I really wonder if the time has come to ask if we should allow religious groups to dictate what goes on in a school at all. It's not that I oppose religious freedom, but I do wonder if it is appropriate for religions to be indoctrinating children at school, at the age when they are most likely to take religious instruction as fact, rather than question it and decide if it is appropriate for them as adults would do. If parents want to encourage their children into their...

One of the big benefits of Netflix has been bringing to me some excellent US series that I haven't tried before. Although a little hokey, and suffering from the 'Charlie Hungerford syndrome*', I have very much been enjoying watching Fringe , and recently got to the finale of season 2, which has a whopping great cliffhanger. I would like to respectfully ask makers of US TV shows not to do this. Here's the thing. I absolutely love shows with a story arc - ones where as well as the specific story of the episode there is a building theme that runs through the whole season. The show that most springs to mind for bringing this to my awareness is Buffy , though I faintly remember being captivated by The Fugitive and The Invaders as a child, both of which I think had arcs. But here's the thing. As we all know, TV scheduling is a ferocious, dog-eat-dog business that rarely deals fairly with its viewers. I mean, come on, they cancelled Firefly , one of the best shows I...

Not this Nature No, when I refer to Nature I don't mean that estimable scientific journal - this is the real thing. According to a report by a charity only '21% of children aged 8-12 are "connected to nature".' This study has to be one of the worst ever made of this sort of subject, so much so that I would suggest it has the potential to get some of its findings totally back to front (though this doesn't prevent the BBC reporting it with a totally straight face). I have two big issues with this study. One is sample selection, the other is criteria. But first let's see what the shocking headline results were. That 21% value was based on having 'realistic and achievable' connection with wildlife and the natural world. Apparently 27% of girls were at or above this target, but only 16% of boys. There were also regional variations. Wales did worst, while London was best in England. Urban children had a slightly higher connection than those livi...

No, not this Gravity. I was slightly disappointed though not at all surprised to see that the BBC has given the movie Gravity (no relation to the excellent book of that name) a plug by entering that hoary old debate, 'Can science fiction ever get the science right?' The article points out that while 'many critics' (who, of course, are mostly scientists?!?) have praised the film for its scientific accuracy, US astronomer and science promoter Neil deGrasse Tyson has 'several issues with the accuracy of Gravity's portrayal of space.' Frankly, most of the issues Tyson raises (satellites usually go west to east, but the debris goes east to west; Sandra Bullock's hair doesn't float around in microgravity - never heard of gel, Neil?) are trivial, though there is a more significant point that somehow you get the ISS (at 250 miles up) and Hubble (at 350 miles up) in line of sight of each other. To be honest these issues are pretty trivial compare...

For a long time now, I've had a bit of a problem with credit (and debit) cards. Not mine, other people's. Before you call the police, I haven't been walking off with them, but I do want to be able to handle them. Because every now and then someone will ring me up, or approach me when I'm selling books, and say 'Do you take cards?' and I have to say 'No, just cash or cheques.' Until recently the UK solutions for simple card acceptance have been decidedly second rate. As most of them don't accept chip and PIN, you can't use them with VISA. But now I've signed up for WorldPay Zinc which does all the main cards (except American Express), and so far I'm very impressed. You can take cards over the phone via their website, and you can take cards on the spot using a little chip and PIN device that links to your smartphone by Bluetooth. There's a fee of £59.99 to buy the reader (but see below for a discount), but apart from that, all you...

Every now and then astronomers moan about being mistaken for astrologers. But to be honest, it's not so surprising. Apart from the words sounding rather similar, until surprisingly recently most astronomers doubled as astrologers (even though they didn't believe in it), because that's where the money was. But the other reason the confusion occurs is that astronomers are a sentimental bunch, insisting on hanging onto things long past their sell-by date. You can see that with the reaction to the downgrading of Pluto, but the reason they get in a tangle with astrologers is the way they insist on referring to the ancient constellations. Of course any astronomer worth his or her salt will point out that constellations have no significance in reality, they are just a pattern in the stars as seen from Earth, and the stars in a constellation are usually nowhere near each other. But the way they still keep using them is as if chemists insisted on putting the chemical elements into...

What do David Attenborough, Noam Chomsky, Derren Brown, Bear Grylls, Miranda Hart, Heston Blumenthal (oh, and me) all have in common? They've all contributed to a great little book where assorted folk give answers to questions about life, the universe and everything by young people aged 11 and under, pulled together to form a solid little hardback. And to make things even better, the profits from the book go to the NSPCC. Opening it at random, I can discover: What is DNA? How come planes don't crash in the sky? Why are bumble bees disappearing? Why do stars twinkle? and Who killed the last dodo? Although the answers are phrased to be suitable for primary school children, many of the questions will entertain and test any reader. (Speaking of tests, there are some fun little quizzes towards the back.) The topics aren't all science - Miranda Hart, for instance, answers Why is it funny when someone farts? (okay, that is probably psychology, but there are also, for ...

Because of taking another step in their ongoing legal battle, the former owners of the Chymorvah B&B in Cornwall, Peter and Hazelmary Bull, are once more in the news. These are the people who refused to provide a double room to a pair of civil partners because they believe that sex outside marriage is a sin. I think there is a real problem with their position. Leaving aside the fact that it seems ridiculous that anyone can impose their own religious rules on someone who is not a member of that religion (note the fuss in the news at the moment about a school allegedly imposing headscarves on non-muslim teachers), there seems to be a fundamental imbalance in the Bulls' position. Let's say, for argument, that they were right that sex outside marriage is a sin. I'd suggest that this is not a reason for refusing to let a room to someone. After all, Christianity tells us that we are all sinners - so why pick on a very specific (and let's face it, relatively harmless...

Okay, I haven't had a good rant in a while, so batten down the hatches, me hearties. I hate seeing men, especially paunchy middle-aged men, in replica football shirts. To me it is both incomprehensible and stomach-churning. It's different with children. If we can accept seeing our children dressed up as Power Rangers, say (that's what it was in my children's day - substitute current alternative), there's no reason why they shouldn't also dress up as football players. But grown men do not have the excuse of fantasy play. Why on earth do they shell out as much as £50 for a shiny replica of a match shirt, and then wear it to go shopping at the supermarket, or for a pint down the pub? It looks hideous. This is a uniform, designed for a specific purpose - it simply doesn't work as a casual shirt. And they don't make it any better by either having a real player's name or their own on the back of the shirt. I also question why they feel the need to ...

At the weekend we went to see About Time , the latest rom-com from Richard Curtis. Not my typical movie fare, but it did involve time travel in what was, in a very subtle way, a remake of Four Weddings and a Funeral . There will be spoilers, but I will give plenty of warning of their arrival if you haven't seen it. I'm quite happy to watch this kind of thing as brainless entertainment, but when it enters my territory I expect a little rigour in the time travel, which wasn't entirely present. Even so, I recognize this is fiction, and at that it is fantasy, not science fiction, so I am prepared to give it more leeway than, say, Looper . True science fiction time travel, using technology, started with H. G. Wells' The Time Machine , but About Time belongs to an older tradition, where the trip takes place effectively by magic, whether it's as a dream or, as in Mark Twain's famous time travel book, by being hit on the head. In About Time , the magic is achiev...

It's fashionable to criticize friendships made online as second rate, but as my friend Henry Gee (met via Nature Network) has pointed out , in reality it often leads to 'real world' events and encounters that make it every bit as rich as going down the pub. Personally I have only ever been members of three online communities - Nature Network, a blogging/social network set up by the journal Nature; BWBD, a forum for bloggers with book deals; and Litopia. As it happens all three are now defunct or nearly so, but the one I particularly wanted to mourn here is Litopia. Litopia was by far the biggest of the three and was set up by my former agent, Peter Cox, as a kind of extension of his agency, but interfacing to the world through an open (and very large) forum for writers published and hopeful to get together, compare notes and generally support each other. As such, for several years it worked very well, and there are a range of writerly people around the world I now cou...

Said ebook opening. (Is it just me or is there no way to have the cover full screen in iBooks?) The other day I was stuck somewhere with nothing much to do. I had finished the book I had with me, but I had my iPad about my person, so I fired it up and opened a book I had downloaded some while ago in Starbucks' nice little Apple collaboration where they have those weekly little cards that allow you to get a free book, tune, TV programme or app. It proved sufficiently engrossing that I read about 1/3 of it on my train journey from Cardiff to Swindon. But it did make me wonder if ebooks and page turners were a dubious combination. The thing is, I tend to skip-read fiction at the best of times. I will slither my eyes across a descriptive passage, getting a general feel without bothering with the detailed words. I'm sure it's very sad for authors who have spent hours crafting that beautifully drawn setting, but I just want to get on to something happening. What I found...

Whatever your politics, it's hard not to feel sympathy for Ed Milliband when the Daily Mail makes such a scathing attack on his late father, and if the Mail intended this to turn people off Labour, I suspect it has backfired in quite a big way. Part of the problem with any such headline-based spat is that we get immediate knee-jerk reactions to 'the man who hated Britain' and yet actually the picture is much more nuanced, something that has struck me while reading a book by one of my favourite authors, Margery Allingham. Let's be clear - I do not agree in any way with the late Ralph Milliband's politics. I think Marxism is a dire system that more than throws the baby away with the bathwater. It is ill thought out and destructive. But popular British books from Milliband senior's formative period really do demonstrate that there were things to hate about Britain back then. I've commented before on the casual racism in Dennis Wheatley's books. We may...

I tend not read reviews of my books on Goodreads or Amazon. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't appreciate people writing them - I do. But while I tend to make use of good reviews in the press, for instance quoting them on my website, all reading a Goodreads or Amazon review can do is slightly inflate my ego (if it's good) or make me feel really grumpy (if it's bad). I was looking at the Goodreads widget, something you can put on your website to point people to Goodreads reviews of your books (which, as I said, I don't want to do, but hey I was curious) and I noticed the top review shown for my book A Brief History of Infinity was a 2 star one that started off pretty damned miserably. I couldn't help but be sucked in and looked at the rest (which, true to form, made me feel grumpy). But I was then cheered up by some superb advice from Goodreads at the bottom, discouraging authors from responding to a bad review. They are so right. It is tempting...