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 ...