I review SF books on the Popular Science website , but this is a review of a science fiction magazine, which seems a sufficiently different prospect to find its way onto my blog instead. Interzone is the classic British science fiction magazine dating back to 1982 - I last read it many moons ago when David Pringle was the editor and it was formatted like a magazine - now it's in more of a glossy digest format. As it happens, this double edition marks the change of an era, as it is the last from current editor Andy Cox, who is handing over to Gareth Jelley.  Apparently, the Science Fiction Writers of America don't consider Interzone a professional magazine due to the unusually low rates they pay (just 1.5 cents per word) and the circulation - I think it's a shame. Frankly, they ought to pay more and it's sad that this magazine seems to be looked down on by the SF establishment as it is practically the only such magazine we have in the UK. As a reader primarily of SF b...

Urban fantasy, which brings fantasy elements into the everyday world, is far more interesting than the totally imaginary setting of a classic fantasy, because the clash between familiar life and weirdness provides brilliant opportunities to stretch the imagination. Of late, some of the best urban fantasies have incorporated a police procedural element - most notably the Rivers of London series. But Adam Simcox inverts the whole approach.  Standard urban fantasy/police procedural crossovers feature real world police coping with fantasy-driven problems. Simcox gives us a refreshing new approach in dead detectives who deal with crimes defeating the mundane police. This is linked into an afterlife that seems loosely based on the Catholic triad of hell, purgatory and heaven, with the main fantasy setting being the Pen, described as purgatory, but in reality distinctly hellish. It’s from here that dead cop Joe Lazarus sets out, making a dangerous transition to our world, which the dead ...

With apologies to the late T. S. Eliot, this is the way the series ends: not with a bang but a whimper. I held out a lot of hope for The Undeclared War because it was set primarily in GCHQ - always interesting - and it centred on computing and cyber attacks. As someone with a programming background I was sure this would appeal to me - and those core aspects really did, which is why I stuck with it through six episodes. But on the whole it was shambolic, poorly plotted and ended with an unforgivable double deus ex machina. ** SPOILER WARNING - I WILL DISCUSS DETAILS OF THE FINAL EPISODE ** Admittedly, from the start I had some doubts. Recognising that just watching people doing stuff on screens wasn't the most thrilling TV, it was decided instead to use a very heavy-handed visual simile. So when our heroine, Saara (who is basically Famous Five material, as she is student who defeats the baddies when the experienced adults can't), was searching through lots of code, we saw a ve...

Tickets are now available for my Canterbury Festival talk - Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World - Thursday 20 October, 8pm, Augustine Hall, Canterbury. Physics informs our understanding of how the world works – but more than that, key breakthroughs in physics – from thermodynamics to the internet – have transformed everyday life. I will be taking the audience back to ten separate days in history to illustrate how particular breakthroughs were achieved, meet the individuals responsible, and explain how each breakthrough has influenced our lives. It is a unique selection. Focusing on practical impact means there is no room for Stephen Hawking’s work on black holes, or the discovery of the Higgs boson. Instead we have the relatively little-known Rudolf Clausius (thermodynamics) and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (superconductivity), while Albert Einstein is included not for his theories of relativity but for the short paper that gave us E=mc 2 . Later chapters feature transistors, LEDs and ...

The wreck of a footpath near home At the moment, the streets near our house are a mess as noisy drills are heard all day and large swathes of the pavement are closed off with blue plastic fencing. This is because they are laying a new fibre optic cable. Surely, you may think, this is a good thing. And if we hadn't got fibre optic connections already, it surely would have been and I would have been all in favour. But we already have two fibre providers in our road: Openreach, which is used by a wide range of telecoms companies, and Virgin. So why the need for more disruption? According to the banner for the new provider, City Fibre, their USP is gigabit connectivity (though I could swear Virgin's vans also mention this). Here's were I go into grumpy old man mode. We already have 100 Mbps guaranteed, typically running at around 130-150 Mbps. That's more than enough for our requirements. Interestingly, our provider recently gave us a free month on 300 Mbps to try out the b...

I've recently tried out the Marks and Spencer 'Scan and Shop' app and I haven't had so much fun in ages shopping for a couple of food items. You might think I live in the dark ages. Most of the major supermarkets give you the ability to scan your shopping as you go around the store, while Amazon even has a handful of stores where you simply pick the stuff off the shelves and go. However, here in the Wild West we don't have those Amazon shops, and there is one huge difference between the M&S experience and the scanners in conventional supermarkets. Go round Waitrose or Asda, say, with a self-scanner and you end up with a trolley load which you take to a till and pay for under the watchful eye of staff. But the M&S app lets you walk around the shop (food section only) scanning stuff and sticking it straight into your shopping bag. At the end you pay on the app, then walk out of the shop, never going near a till. This is especially useful in our local Marks and...

There is now a genre of TV show known as Cymru Noir, modelled on Scandi Noir but with more drizzle - however, Malcolm Pryce, with his Louie Knight mysteries, brought the original American noir genre to Wales in a series of books starting with the 2001  Aberystwyth Mon Amour , that are sheer genius.  Pryce could have simply transported a Sam Spade-alike to the Welsh seaside - and that's certainly part of the attraction of these books, but the deadpan humour derives from the fantastical development of what might be considered Welsh stereotypes of old into the key elements of a noir detective novel. So, for example, the druids replace the mafia as the local gangsters, good time girls wear stovepipe hats, the friendly bartender becomes an ice-cream salesman and the tea cosy takes on a much darker meaning. This is a setting beautifully brought alive in Pryce's lyrical description of Aberystwyth and its surroundings that will be be evocative to anyone who spent a wet week in a Welsh...