Technically, this 1985 Gene Wolfe novel could be classed as science fiction, but the reality is far closer to fantasy. I particularly love the cover image from my UK edition, because it's the worst example of a cover artist not knowing anything about the book I've ever seen. It portrays a hi-tech future city complete with a spaceship, where the actual novel is set in a seedy, run-down US city with a 1970s feel - and even when surprising technology does arrive, it's decades old. It feels like Wolfe is still finding his feet with real-world fantasy, and the book has a number of flaws, but it's still interesting. Four individuals down on their luck end up staying for a few nights free at the condemned house of Ben Free. The majority of the book simply features these four going about their lives, often in near-farce. This is particularly the case in a section involving a mental hospital where the staff assume everyone they meet is mentally ill. The two female characters - s...

As I've mentioned elsewhere I have recently moved to a plug-in hybrid car. The other day, when fiddling with the information system I accidentally got to a screen that showed miles per gallon (MPG) and the number - 174 made me think. Firstly, isn't a bit weird we still refer to miles per gallon when we buy petrol or diesel in litres? The only justification I can come up with is that I have better mental reference of what's a good MPG - maybe more than 40 - than I do MPL - I would have to do the conversion, rather than thinking in semi-metric. However, the main thing is whether or not this is meaningful. Traditionally MPG would tell you (roughly) how much petrol you would use for a specific journey. I can divide the distance by the MPG and get a feel for the fuel needed. But I will never do a journey where this is the case with an MPG of 174. What is really happening is that all my local journeys are done on electric with a nominally infinite MPG, while my longer journeys a...

I'm interested in why people believe odd things (and ignore the science), so I thought I'd give the podcast  Marianna in ConspiracyLand a try. This is the work of Marianna Spring, the BBC's 'disinformation and social media correspondent', who has the cringe-making habit of referring to herself as 'A.K.A. Miss Information.' The first series follows the rise in support for conspiracy theories in the West Country town of Totnes, boosted by a conspiracy-spreading newspaper called The Light . Despite a certain naivety in the interviewing, I found the series interesting for two reasons. The obvious one is the nature and danger of conspiracy theories, particularly around subjects like vaccination and climate change. I'm always looking for ways to get scientific views across and (as demonstrated so well in the book I recently reviewed, Science with Impact ) , it can be really hard to get past conspiracy viewpoints. When someone can claim, as they do in one of Ma...

One of Wolfe’s specialities is to keep the reader unsure of what’s happening - and this 1988 novel is probably his greatest example of this particular fantasy mode. The central character (we don’t even discover his name until well through the book) has fallen deeply in love with a woman he has only known for a few days - but she has disappeared leaving behind a mysterious note about doors he should avoid (or back out of if he accidentally goes through one). Inevitably he goes through such a door, into what appears to be an alternate USA, where there are references to people and even dolls who resemble the missing Lara, who he is obsessive to find. But is any of this real or is he mentally ill? This is an idea that isn’t pursued enough in real world fantasies (though done beautifully in Buffy ). It has been a long time since I last read this book, but I’ve always remembered it as one of Wolfe’s best. I was disappointed when I’d got well past halfway through and nothing was becoming clea...

I've already mentioned my own experience with artificial intelligence hallucinations when Google's AI got the facts wrong about the BICEP2 telescope , and when ChatGPT made up an entire industrial accident when asked to provide details of one at the BBC. But if an article by Amanda Guinzburg is true, the ability of AI to mislead and directly lie is even worse that many of us thought. I use that 'if an article... is true' format because I don't know Guinzberg and have no way of verifying the truth of the experience she describes - but if it is real it surely should put a significant nail in the coffin of using generative AI for many text-based purposes where an accurate response is essential. In the article, Dialbolus ex Machina , Guinzberg describes asking ChatGPT to select from a number of online articles she has written to include as examples in a query letter. ChatGPT makes suggestions with explanations as to why it has chosen these articles. So far, apparently s...

My posts on the  Popular Science website  and here on my blog  Now Appearing  will always be free, but if you'd like to help keep me going please consider using the 'Buy me a Coffee' link below to support my online book reviews, science, and writing life articles. I've also introduced a membership scheme that makes it possible to give a small monthly contribution (and potentially get rewards). There are three levels: Bronze - £1 a month (or £10 a year), like the individual coffee purchases, this will help me be able to dedicate the time to writing these posts and reviews, but makes it more secure. Silver - £3 a month (or £30 a year) - by moving up to a coffee a month, I'm adding in additional posts and messages just for silver and gold members, plus discounts on signed books. Membership also includes the option to suggest books for review. There will be still be as many free posts for all readers, but there will be some tasty extras for members. Gold - £5 a month (o...

Authors have mixed relationships with book covers. Some publishers give us full right of veto on what a cover looks like, others simply show us what it's going to be. Some covers are great - others are, frankly, dull. There have been covers I treasure (for example, when I was still writing business books, the Spanish translation of my book Capturing Customers Hearts took the title literally, featuring a scarred chest with the heart removed), while others I'd rather ignore. It is also possible to be misled by the appearance of covers on well-known online bookshops. I've recently had published a book called Navigating Artificial Intelligence - a highly-illustrated overview book that gives you (I hope) a good introduction to the topic and its significance: and let's face it, there isn't much that is as significant as AI at the moment. To go along with some fun illustrations inside (who wouldn't want to see a dog dressed as Henry VIII?), the cover is impressively ...

This is a real oddity - in my quest to re-read my Gene Wolfe collection and review the books I hadn't covered so far, I'd mentally pigeonholed this 1990 book as urban fantasy, but it's actually a murder mystery. Being Wolfe, things aren't as straightforward as you might imagine, though. The book is allegedly written by the seventeen-year-old Holly, just edited and smartened up by Wolfe. It's set in the 1980s, but the feel of the place (and this teen's viewpoint) is very much not post-punk - it's more like something from the Mad Men era. Trivial example: Holly and her friends never cuss (as she would probably put it). Like Castleview this is a slice of small town American life, but here seen through the eyes of a young would-be author. The Pandora reference is to a mysterious box, to be opened at the town fair, with a prize if anyone guesses what's in it. At this point there's a sudden transition to murder mystery, with Holly both injured and acting...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from June 2015 Recently (this is 2025 recently), I moaned on X and Bluesky about the bizarre way that Word (the word processing software - and doesn't the term 'word processing' look old fashioned?) was incapable of opening earlier versions of its own files. Science/SF writer John Gilbey responded 'Go directly to LibreOffice,' as apparently it's extremely accurate for opening old formats. This may be true, but the concerns from 10 years ago below about OpenOffice would also apply. It may be IBM's old weapon of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in action, but I am still wary of abandoning Word because of the usual interplay with the vast majority of publishers and magazine which do still use that software. Broadly speaking, most professional writers either use Word or a specialist program like the much-praised Scrivener, which is apparently excellent for fiction work. However, every now and then, someone asks me 'Why do y...

Having recently covered Adam Roberts' Fantasy: a short history , I became aware I'd never reviewed some of my favourite fantasy books. I'm starting with one of Gene Wolfe's masterpieces, Castleview , first published in 1990. This is a booked that is steeped in a particular small town America with a strong mid-twentieth century atmosphere - I can't think of another fantasy novel that does this so well apart from Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes . We are plunged straight into this when a new family is viewing a house for sale in the town of Castleview. From the very beginning, the cosy, folksy setting clashes with events - a death, the mysterious viewing of what may or not be a ghost castle, a dark horseman nearly causing a car crash - Wolfe piles on the mysterious events while maintaining a small-town-USA vibe. It is masterfully done. Practically every chapter ends with a notching up of the mystery level and tension. It's a thankfully short book (I ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from June 2015 The other day I got a piece of junk mail that made a bit of a change from SEO and diet supplements: 'THE FIRST FREE ENERGY GENERATOR' it proclaimed, and just to rub it in, 'Humiliates top scientists.' Well, there's nothing I like better than humiliating top scientists* and what's more, apparently this energy generator 'violates all the laws of physics', which is even more fun. So what would this involve? If you look up 'free energy generator' on Google you'll find lots of examples claiming to be just this - but overall it is a worrying concept. The obvious problem is conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental aspects of physics. You have to be a little careful with conservation of energy - it does require a closed system, and we patently don't live in a closed system, so it's easy enough to get 'free' energy in the sense that the Sun is pumping vast quantities of it in ...

About thirty years ago, I wrote a book on business creativity with my friend Paul Birch. We wanted to make the book format itself innovative - part of this involved incorporating sidebars with many asides, further reading, suggestions and more. But also we finished each chapter with a short piece of fiction, because we both believed that reading fiction was important to help business people be creative. This didn't work for everyone. The British Airways chairman at the time, Sir Colin Marshall, who gave us a cover quote, told us that he didn't like having the stories. But some did appreciate them. Some of these stories we wrote ourselves. Others were out of copyright - for example wonderfully witty extracts from Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark and Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey , where she breaks the fourth wall delightfully. But I also wanted to include a short story by my favourite fantasy writer, Gene Wolfe - and knew just the one, a short short called My Book ...

I get sent many popular science books to review, a very small percentage of which are self-published (never one based on the author's 'new theory'). A recent example was, for me, an object lesson in the pitfalls of writing science for the public, most of which apply whether you are DIY or with a mainstream publisher. (In fact, some big names, particularly academic publishers, provide very limited editing these days.) Note, by the way, I am not talking about quality of writing here. A starting point is having a good narrative and making your writing engaging and readable. That's a given. But this is more about the content that is presented in the book. There was one issue that was specific to self-publishing: make sure there are no layout oddities. Appearance is as important as fixing typos. This particular book had a first paragraph in a smaller font that the rest of the text (as well as a couple of spurious bursts of italics, finishing part way through a word). More ge...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from May 2010 'Sustainable' is a word you hear banded about a lot these days. As I described in  Ecologic , it's a term that is often used because it sounds good, without thinking through what it really means. There are broadly two possible meanings, sustainable lite and full-fat sustainable. Sustainable lite means something that's viable to continue operating. It makes economic sense, it is obtainable and there's a continued demand for it. If any of those three conditions don't apply it is no longer a sustainable activity. Full-fat sustainable is what is usually implied in the environmental usage of the word. Here it means something that can operate without external inputs that will run out, or negative environmental impact. So, for instance, a sustainable farm should be able to operate without bringing in fertiliser and other inputs. A sustainable house should be 'zero energy' requiring no energy input from the grid. U...

It's early days using a plug-in hybrid, but after a holiday trip to Cornwall I now have some experience of commercial chargers, though admittedly a small sample. When at home I always charge there - my electricity costs about half the rate per mile of petrol. Looking at commercial chargers, moderate ones (or those at friendly locations) are similar to petrol, while fast chargers can be up to twice the petrol price. For this reason I thought I wouldn’t bother to charge before the return journey, as there wouldn't be a financial advantage, but in reality, travelling the 223 miles down to Gwithian, I found the cleverness of the hybrid mode meant that I got significantly more miles per gallon/kWh than I would on petrol alone. As a result I had four attempts at charging in Cornwall, of which two were successful.  The first one seemed perfect. It was at a location we were staying several hours, at a rate a little cheaper than petrol. I plugged in, started a charge on the app… and not...

If you have an interest in fantasy books, or where they came from, this is a must-read title. It’s not a popular history of the genre: this is Adam Roberts in professorial mode. He doesn’t make it too easy for the reader - for instance, in a section on Arthurian fantasy, he several times uses segments of ‘Rex quondam, rex futurusque’ without any explanation, and is perhaps unnecessarily liberal with academic lit crit terminology (though there is also the odd ‘Boing!’). As such, I’m probably not the ideal audience, but I still got a huge amount out of it. The structure is broadly chronological, though there are occasional thematic leaps forward in time, with the paradigm shift coming post-war when the Lord of the Rings and its endless league of copycat stories changed the way fantasy was handled (though Roberts doesn’t ignore, for instance, Paradise Lost , the genius of Lewis Carroll or now largely ignored earlier fantasises such as  The Water Babies ). Although the strong British ...

After reading Stuart Turton's third and first novels (in that order), I had to fill in the middle one. I have to admit up front that its setting on a seventeenth century ship appealed to me far less than the other two, but going on Turton's ability to produce remarkable mystery novels, it seemed a no-brainer and it didn't disappoint. We rapidly follow the cast from the Dutch East India Company on board from Batavia (now Jakarta) on a journey to Amsterdam fraught with peril, both natural and apparently supernatural. The book is described as a historical locked room mystery - but that's just a smallish part of the plot, and the author emphasises this is fiction with a historical setting, not the kind of hist fic that aims to get every detail right. Central characters include a pairing seemingly based on the classic fantasy combo that began with Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser - a huge mercenary and a diminutive magician, though here the smaller character is a detective, the un...

In the third of her AIDE Lock/DCS Kat Frank novels, Jo Callaghan demonstrates again her ability to produce a page turner. Interwoven with a complex case involving the titular human remains are doubts about Frank's previous success putting away a serial killer, raised by a true crime podcast, and the presence of a stalker who seems intent on harming Frank. All the above would be enough to make a good novel in its own right, but the reason this series is so good is the involvement of the holographic AI detective Lock. His technical abilities are remarkable, yet even the professor who created him seems worried about the AI's insistence that he would be even more use if he had some form of physical body. The questions raised by his involvement, and the limitations his nature pose (when, for example, he ignores evidence because he wasn't explicitly asked to look out for it) add a huge amount to the depth of the book. The tension of the closing act is remarkable - once I started ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from May 2015 I have a confession that will make most authors' lib people - you know, the ones who unfriend you on Facebook if you confess to buying anything from Amazon - quake in their sandals: I find many independent bookshops intimidating. I don't like their often dark, claustrophobia inducing interiors, and I don't like being talked to by staff unless I invite it. (Please note, Mary Portas, who regularly advises that good customer services involves welcoming customers and trying to help them. I don't want to be chatted to by a stranger. I'd rather help myself. If I want assistance I will ask for it. If your staff approach me, I will leave without making a purchase.) So it was with some nervousness that I entered the  Mad Hatter Bookshop  in the pretty (or to put it another way, Cotswold tourist trappy) location of Burford, surprisingly close to my no-one-could-call-it-tourist-trappy home of Swindon. But I'm glad I did. I wa...

Although this book dates back to 2018, I came across it after reading and loving Stuart Turton's third novel from 2024,  The Last Murder at the End of the World . Each is a convoluted murder mystery that works very differently to a conventional police procedural. I think The Last Murder is somewhat better for a couple of reasons - but that doesn't take away from the brilliance of this book. The trivial reason I slightly prefer the later novel is that it is just the right length - The Seven Deaths is a little too long. But more significantly, in The Last Murder , we the readers really don't know what's going on for much of the narrative and have to gradually piece things together. Here we quickly do understand the context - it's the central character who takes considerably longer to get his head around what's happening. The setting is a decaying country house, somewhere around the 1920s. The central character is tasked with solving a murder mystery, each day occ...