Malcolm Pryce is rightly known for his wonderful novels setting a Sam Spade-like, world-weary detective in the hell-hole of crime that is Aberystwyth, with druids as gangsters and good time girls in Welsh national costume. In these books, Pryce creates a fantasy world that is totally bonkers, and yet works remarkably well. His new creation, the railway detective Jack Wenlock, might seem at first glance to be more of the same - and the book does have some of the same kind of absurdity with, for example, a group of nuns who go mysteriously go missing from a train and rampage across Africa - but 'Hail Mary' Celeste is several degrees closer to reality than the Aberystwyth books, and both benefits and loses from this. The plus side is Pryce's affection for the Great Western Railway. His lead character might be odd in the extreme, but it's hard not share some of Wenlock's love for the old-fashioned ideals of the railway (admittedly without being given a mother fixat...

For a long time, my taste in science fiction writers was limited to the favourites from my youth. The likes of Asimov, Blish, Brunner, Clarke, Heinlein, Kornbluth and Pohl. About as trendy as I got was Zelazny. But lately I've discovered two who have re-invigorated my love of SF - Iain M. Banks and Adam Roberts, both combining style and entertainment with superb ideas that really make you think. The opening of Roberts' novel Bête  had me spellbound. The cow that a farmer is about to kill is pleading for its life - and the scene is handled brilliantly. So too are conversations exploring the borderline between AI and consciousness. If an animal is made apparently intelligent by an implanted chip, is it the chip that is intelligent or the animal... or neither? Some of the rest of the book worked well for me as well. The surreal conversations, packed with popular culture quotes (some of which I got) were fascinating. However, I'm not a great fan of disaster novels - I lov...

I've recently re-read one of my favourite SF novels from the 1970s, John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider , and it has more than lived up to expectations. Okay, like any book using future technology it gets some things wrong. Its early 21st century tech is mostly too advanced (but then they still use tapes to store information). However, this book absolutely sizzles with ideas, some taken from Alvin Toffler's far effective readable futurology book, Future Shock . Just one example - the protagonist is in the business of creating digital worms to make changes to the net. At the time (1975), not only was ARPANet, the internet's predecessor very limited, the first actual network worm wouldn't be launched for another 13 years (Brunner originated the term in this novel). Brunner also creates a stunning dystopian society, where the US government/major corporations (hand in hand) manipulate what could in principle be an exercise in effective distributed democracy - the...

There are times when I have a little twinge of nostalgia for the times when food in the UK was mostly terrible. These days we relish a huge range of cuisines (though interestingly, by far the majority are non-EU - from Europe only Italian and to some extent Spanish have a significant hold nationwide). But I'm talking about the time when cooking a Vesta curry was the height of exoticism. This was all brought back to me by an advert I've just seen for a range of frozen roast dinners. They have one unifying theme. It's not the high quality meat. It's not the beautifully cooked vegetables. It's the fact that they're all smothered in the uniform, brown-flavoured gravy of my youth, Bisto. Ah, Bisto! Wondrous memories...

Image by Transguyjay from Flickr There's a lot I like about America. But something I really can't get my head around is the US assumption that human beings are unable to cross a road without help, and treating it as an offence if they attempt to do so. As a European I struggle to understand the US attitude to gun control. To allow so many thousands to be slaughtered each year simply to uphold a small part of the constitution which is both out of date and arguably misinterpreted - a constitution that has already been amended many times - just doesn't seem right to us. However, despite this, I can admire part of the thinking behind the right to bear arms - that we shouldn't allow an overbearing government to take control of individual's decision-making more than we can help. So, bearing in mind that Americans are prepared to allow thousands of their friends and relations to be killed each year to uphold the individual's ability to stand up to the state... ...

It's that time of year when scientists get dragged into silly press releases, usually by a PR company wanting to push a product, though this one seems to be a bit different. I first heard about this from Chris Evans (n.b. I do not listen to him by choice), who announced that Einstein had finally solved the problem of how Father Christmas/Santa Claus gets round all the world's children and down chimneys. My immediate muttering was that this was pretty impressive, given Einstein's been dead over 60 years and I was going to leave it at that. But then read one of the articles based on the press release (I assume). It tells us that according to Dr Katy Sheen, a physicist in the geography department of Exeter University, it would all work if Father Christmas travelled at 6 million miles per hour. This would get him around the world in time, and, as a bonus, (enter Einstein) 'drawing on Einstein's special theory of relativity' Dr Sheen worked out that he would shri...

I'm always delighted to see statistics being mangled, as it's good fun untangling them. Sometimes, though, they're such a mess that it's hard to do anything other than mock. This was the case with a story reported by the online magazine ShortList . it claimed that '120,000 leave voters have died since Brexit.' That seemed an impressive claim, so I took a look at the analysis, apparently sourced from the Twitter feed of someone called Steve Lawrence, who is an architect: One statistical no-no jumps out here without even seeing where the data came from. We're being given figures in the 16-18 million range, based on some interesting manipulation which includes several estimates. Yet the values are given accurate to 1 - note how the big totals end in 9 and 5. You can either present a spuriously accurate number like these and provide an error range, or, less likely to mislead, you can round to your error level and still give an error range. What you can...

In a recent article in the Guardian , Alice Bell asserts that 'we're all everyday climate change deniers.' To be honest, I get a bit irritated when a journalist asserts we're all anything . Firstly it implies a ludicrously over-simplified homogeneity in society. And secondly how can she possibly know what I am? We've never met. But knowing the ways of newspapers, I am going to give Bell the benefit of the doubt that she may never even have seen that headline - because the message of the article is nowhere near as meaningless. Bell suggests that by giving in to despair and not talking about climate change, we are de facto deniers. Clearly at the most basic level even this is silly - she is talking about climate change. I am talking about climate change. So how can we all be doing this? And it's also comparable with the tendency to label anyone with political leanings slightly to the right of your own a fascist to give the label 'denier' to everyone...