A crystallographer (not my tutor) Image from Wikipedia I was giving a talk at Bristol University last Wednesday about randomness and probability, based on my book Dice World . Following it, I got an email asking if I was really suggesting that everything that happens to us is just random, even, for instance, meeting someone and falling in love? My response was that there is a mix of chance and choice. Chance is behind a meeting, but each party in such an occurrence then makes a series of decisions - choices - that influence the outcome. (You can argue whether those decisions are themselves pre-determined or if there really is free will, but I that's getting too philosophical for me.) I gave my questioner the example that I would not have met, fallen in love with and married my wife if my tutor at university had not been a crystallographer. When I started my Natural Sciences course at Cambridge I was expected to take four subjects. Three were pretty obvious - maths, physi...

Netflix does all it can to understand its customers from what they watch, but I think in my case they will be more than a little confused as I have watched over 70 episodes of Breaking Bad . Yet I have never seen a single full episode of this 62 episode series. Just in case anyone isn't aware of it, Breaking Bad has been one of the huge successes that Netflix has had with drama series. It features chemistry teacher Walter White, who takes to crime to support his family when he is diagnosed with inoperable cancer. I suppose you could describe it as a dark comedy drama. And behind my unusual viewing pattern is the magazine Good Housekeeping . What else? For many years now, I have written occasionally technology pieces for the magazine (my first editor was the delightful Aggie MacKenzie of 'Kim and Aggie from How Clean is Your House ' and S torage Hoarders fame), and my most overwhelming task has been to do a large scale review of laptops (over an extended period) for ...

There was a letter in the i newspaper at the weekend from a former Lib Dem MEP candidate, agreeing with an earlier letter that few people know the names of their MEPs. 'Whose fault is that?' asks Charles Bidwell of Oxford. Well, apparently Mr Bidwell gave lots of briefing papers to the local press, which they ignored, although I'm sure they were fascinating - so apparently it's all the fault of the media. However, I'd suggest Mr Bidwell entirely misses the point. Even if the media was full of details of our local MEPs, we still wouldn't know who they were. Because they have no significance to us. I know who my local MP is. I've emailed him a good number of times and spoken to him face to face on several occasions. I've asked about some local issues, which he has taken action on, and I've joined with others in writing to him about key national issues, which I can't say for certain has changed his opinion, but at the very least I can feel su...

After enjoying Jack Glass and being blown away by The Thing Itself , I have been familiarising myself with the back-catalogue of science fiction writer Adam Roberts, and Yellow Blue Tibia is a cracker. At first sight, the plot starts brilliantly but veers into the farcical. It begins just after the Second World War with Stalin bringing together a group of Russian science fiction writers to create a new menace to unify the people, a fiction that is then rapidly concealed - so far, a wonderful idea. But the menace the writers create seems to start becoming real an increasingly unlikely events. What Roberts manages to do, though, is to weave the same kind of magic as my favourite fantasy author, Gene Wolfe in his real-world set fantasies. When you read a Wolfe book, you know the whole thing may seem absurd, but somehow it will eventually all come together, even if you have to read it several times to real get into the depth of it. Similarly, Roberts manages in the end to tie togethe...

As I've mentioned before, after a long gap of not thinking much of contemporary science fiction writers, I have hit on two - Adam Roberts and the late lamented Iain M. Banks - who for me represent the best that SF has to offer. I got a whole pile of their books for Christmas and review two here. In each case, these happen to be the worst book by this author I've read. By most people's standards they're good, but - to me - weren't quite up to the usual incredibly high quality. This is no surprise - I've never seen an author who didn't have ups and downs. We'll start with Adam Roberts and Swiftly . As usual with Roberts this is an exploration of an audacious idea - in this case, we are in a world where the various species from Swift's Gulliver's Travels (see what he did with the title?) are real and encroaching on business and life in Victorian Britain. Of itself this is wonderfully imagined - the abuse, for example of Lilliputians (or their nei...

Unlike many of my social media friends, I am no fan of the European Union. Every direct contact I've ever had with the EU has involved ridiculous bureaucracy and vast amounts of wasted money. This has been everything from involvement in two large EU projects to something as simple as EHIC card, required to get healthcare in the EU - given I have an EU passport, why on Earth do I also need the costly (to the taxpayer) card, which has to be renewed every few years, as well? However, if the news story illustrated is true, it seems that the European Parliament has sunk to the sort of levels that were mocked so effectively in Yes, Prime Minister . 'Electronic persons?' Really? Not only is it technologically ignorant - effectively they are considering legislating for science fiction - it's chauvinist, applying human labels to a totally different form of entity, even if robots were intelligent and conscious, which they aren't. I wonder if the MEPs have ever seen an actua...

I don't know if it's some kind of New Year retail 'engage with the customer' exercise, but practically every shop I've been in so far this year has required me to fend off personal enquiries from the sales assistant. Let's be totally clear here. I do not want to tell you: What I've got planned for the day If I've got the day off If I'm having a relaxing day Whether I have a full calendar Or any other personal details of my life You get the point. I go into a shop to buy something . I do not want a conversation. I do not want a fake friend pretending to take an interest in me. I have a life, but I have no interest in sharing it with a complete and often spotty stranger. To be fair, I don't blame the sales assistants - they have no doubt been told to do this. But please be clear, retailers. Don't assume that all your customers want to share details of their day with complete strangers. Stop instructing your sales staff to ask ab...

As a writer I'm interested in words, and I expect that most publishers have a similar affection, so I was slightly surprised when I got an invoice from Macmillan (I'd bought some copies of one of my books - someone has to) and found what appeared to me to be a spelling mistake. Here's what I saw: The invoice used the spelling 'despatch' several times, yet I've always spelled the word 'dispatch'. As often happens at this point I had that nagging doubt I'd been doing it wrong all this time... so I hared off to that universal arbiter of all things wordly (sic), the Oxford English Dictionary . Even though the dictionary gave both spellings, I was delighted to discover that my spelling is the more correct one - and the incorrect (sorry, less preferred) spelling seems to have been due to a late night on the part of Dr Johnson. According to the OED, the word was always spelled 'dispatch' from its introduction until the early 19th cen...

I suspect most authors get emails from readers that cause an initial surge of pleasure, followed by a sense of anxiety. They tend to have the format ' I am enjoying your book...' Good! '... but...'  Ah. I've just had the first of these for my new book Are Numbers Real and I wanted to share it, to consider whether sending this sort of email is a good idea or not. My correspondent, Harvey Randall, started by saying he was enjoying the book, so I got my initial positive peak, but then he pointed out However, there may be either a non sequitur or a typo on page 24... The first line on the page, continuing the sentence on the previous page, states "... a simple rule) to add XXIII to XLIV for instance ... teach children how to add 23 to 45 ...." I believe XLIV = Arabic 44. While there is no particular reason why the Roman and Arabic sums should have been the same one, so it's not strictly a non-sequitur, I suspect with the numbers so close it was ...

The Damned Busters follows in a noble tradition of humorous fantasies in which someone gets one over on the devil when entering into a pact - such stories follow on from what seems to be a very early form of fantasy story with a number of legends (usually explaining odd landmarks) using this plot line. In Matthew Hughes' novel, comic-book obsessed Chesney Artstruther, an actuary on the high functioning end of the autism spectrum. accidentally summons a demon. His refusal to accept a pact results in a strike in Hell, which leads to Satan agreeing to allow Chesney demon-powered super abilities in exchange for ending the strike. Altogether this works reasonably well - Hughes has some clever twists on the pact with the devil riff, and keeps us engaged, even though the female characters are very old-fashioned: the overbearing mother, the girl he loves who is beautiful but shallow and the girl he will end up with who is bright and sassy. The writing style is good but sits slightly...