I'm not a great fan of political correctness (PC) when it comes to some of its current excesses, such as getting all worked up about Mexican restaurants handing out sombreros. However, if there's one man who can single-handedly push me into the PC camp, it's 'journalist' Kelvin MacKenzie. I am proud to say that I have never bought a copy of the Sun newspaper, but my favourite paper, the i , has a daily 'News Matrix' section where it quotes snippets from other papers, and I came across this impressive rant from MacKenzie: For far too long, the PC brigade have got away with it. Nothing derogatory can be said about multiculturalism, the excesses of "feminism", climate change, the poor and their responsibilities to stand on their own two feet. I don't know where to start on that sloppy bit of writing. Firstly it's poorly written for something published in a national newspaper. It shouldn't be 'the PC brigade have ' but rather ...

I'm pleased to say that I have just published the fourth in my Stephen Capel murder mysteries, A Twisted Harmony , and I've done something I never thought I would: at the end of the book, I've tagged on the first chapter of the follow-up novel An End to Innocence , which will be published in the autumn of 2017. When I read a book and hit one of these 'bonus' chapters at the end, I tend to feel a little cheated. This is because I rarely bother to read them, so it feels like the book is shorter than it appeared to be. And the reason I don't read them is because I don't like books to leave things dangling. Inevitably, reading just the first chapter of a book leaves the reader in suspense, potentially for a long time. (It's that US habit of ending a TV series on a cliffhanger until next season.) I made the decision to do it this time for two reasons. One is that I already really liked the way the new book was shaping up in my mind, so I wanted to get s...

Perhaps because I've always hated team sports (to watch or play), I've never really understood the tribal politics that makes people consider politicians to be either wonderful or entirely terrible, with nothing in between. So I'm rather pleased to be able to totally agree with Michael Gove about something. Let's be clear. Gove made some ludicrous decisions while in charge of education, and acted in a totally unprincipled fashion in the post-Brexit shenanigans. However, I've just read an article by him that I can only give my whole-hearted support to. In today's Times (I don't usually read it, but Waitrose won't give me a free i ) Gove argues for the removal of charitable status from private schools. As he says, it's absolutely ridiculous that these bastions of privilege don't have to pay VAT, get an 80 per cent exemption from business rates... and apparently taxpayers even subsidise their quasi-military cadet forces. Surely there can be no re...

Revisiting some of the SF favourites from my youth, I've just read Molly Zero by Keith Roberts. This came from the second phase of Roberts' career. He started out with sub-Wyndham SF disaster novels like his The Furies featuring physically impossible giant wasps, but then wowed the literary world with his bucolic alternative history novel, Pavane , set in a modern day Britain where technology was held back to the steam level by a controlling Catholic church. Molly Zero also feels like an alternative history novel, though it isn't. We meet the eponymous schoolgirl heroine being sent by train from the 'Blocks', where she was brought up, to another location. This could easily have just been another Brave New World derivative, but it's far more. My 1970s copy has a huge plot spoiler in its blurb (as does at least one of the Amazon pages) - I'm not going to do that, but I am about to discuss its main theme. This book proved a particularly appropriat...

A lot of my friends on social media are academics - mostly scientists - and it sometimes seem they spend more time jetting around the world to conferences or other events than they do in the lecture theatre or undertaking research. I find this odd, as they are, on the whole, also the kind of people who are concerned about the environment. Of course, they will always come up with justifications for these jaunts, but do those excuses really stack up? As far as I can there are broadly five reasons for flying off to distant parts: Attending conference lectures/seminars Poster sessions The ability to network with other academics To undertake onsite research (e.g. an astronomer viewing an eclipse, a marine biologist visiting a coral reef, or an archaeological going for a dig) A free jolly to somewhere exotic Let's see how each of these stacks up as justification for the massive carbon footprint that goes with being a jet-setting academic. Attending lectures - Oh, come o...

I've had a couple of Amazon Echoes in the house for a while now. I will review these remarkable voice-activated devices fully in a while, but I just wanted to share an experience that shows we're still quite a way from being able to interact freely by voice with a computer. It's widely acknowledged that Alexa, Amazon's equivalent of Siri, has some syntax limitations. It occasionally takes two or three tries to get it to do what you want, as it's nowhere near as flexible as humans in understanding the different ways to ask for the same thing. But this example involved a very simple command that is meat and drink to Alexa - playing a piece of music. Usually, Alexa is great for this. I have the option that allows me to dip into Amazon's 50 million plus database of tunes. So to pull up, say, the latest Ed Sheeran, is the work of moments. I can even ask for something as obscure as one of Rick Wakeman's less popular prog rock albums. (Mmm, The Myths and Lege...

Already sadly half-forgotten, Roger Zelazny was one of the best science fiction/fantasy writers in the generation that came after the golden era greats like Asimov, Heinlein, Wyndham and Clarke. He often wrote in a science fiction - fantasy crossover known unimaginatively as science fantasy, which seems to have almost disappeared as a genre - and why it can be so good is demonstrated masterfully his short novel Roadmarks . It's science fantasy in that it operates like science fiction, with logical, science-based content providing the setting, but it contains a couple of off-the-wall elements that don't have any scientific basis. Arguably, the one area science fantasy has flourished is in superhero stories - but Zelazny's are far more interesting. Although Zelazny is probably best remembered for his highly entertaining Amber fantasy series, Roadmarks is significantly more sophisticated in its approach. To begin with it's not totally clear what is going on - in a goo...

Embed from Getty Images You can't pick up a newspaper these days without seeing dire warnings that the robots are coming and are going to take our jobs. Often this dire warning is aimed at manual labour or taxi drivers or burger flippers - low paid jobs. Yet the real benefits to automation for companies will be stronger if they can replace workers getting higher financial rewards. Any author will tell you that they are slightly in awe of editors who can go through copy word by word and spot all the little errors and foibles an author is prone to*. And the best ones are very canny about specialist areas, dealing with all kinds of technical gubbins. This editing process is an essential to creating a quality book. But some publishers appear to have decided that the role is a waste of money and can be automated. A friend of mine is writing a book for an academic publisher.  I won't tell you which publisher it is, but their name begins with Spring and ends with er. It...

It was interesting to see in today's paper that a neuroscientist is chiding teachers for preventing children from counting on their fingers. The practice is apparently frowned on because it is childish and it was assumed that it prevents internalisation of the numerical processing. Professor Jo Boaler of Stanford University is quoted as saying 'Teachers are stopping children using their fingers at a ridiculous age - four or five - so that has to change.' She point out that when we work something out mathematically, the brain maps this onto fingers - and better maths achievement goes hand-in-hand with better finger perception. I think she possibly stretches this a little too far by saying 'It explains why musicians, particularly pianists, typically have a higher level of understanding of mathematics' - but apart from anything else, to discourage the use of a readily available resource seems crazy. I am happy to admit that if I am asked by a website to input the...

I was more than a little wary to see that Netflix had issued an eight-part series 'based on' the Douglas Adams titles  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency  and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul , especially as these novels are very British, where this is a US-based series - but with a couple of quibbles, the result was very pleasing, sufficiently so that I've got through the whole thing in a couple of evenings. (It helped I was home alone.) And surprisingly this is because the TV show bears hardly any resemblance to the original books. There's something very odd about Douglas Adams's output. I'd suggest that each of his fictional series - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently  - only properly works in one format. The HHGTTG was a superb radio series, but for me seemed forced by comparison in book form, was so-so on TV and disastrous on film. When it came to Dirk , these were novels of ideas (in part cobbled together from unused ...