I have been a fan of the British fantasy writer Alan Garner since meeting him, age 11. Garner attended the same school as me (significantly earlier), and came to give a talk, not to a huge auditorium but just a classroom of young readers.  For nearly a decade he brought out books that almost perfectly aged with me in their target audience, from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Red Shift (with the last we parted company as I found it too depressing). I was sufficiently fascinated by his books that I made a home movie in the late 70s visiting many of the locations used in them.  For those who remember the copper mine on Alderley Edge used evocatively in his writing as a dark underground location, a friend and I (probably illegally) explored a bit of it - which is where the photos below come from. In The Weirdstone there is a strange booming noise in the mine, coming from the goblin-like creatures, which meant we did eventually decide to leave in a hurry when we heard a similar sound.

At the moment I’m commuting to Bristol once a week to do some work at the university on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund . I’m very fond of Bristol as a city, but there times when I wonder if their green policies have been entirely thought through. When they first introduced rental e-scooters I pointed out that they were sometimes left in hazardous locations - this seems less the case now, though I did come across one recently nearly blocking a pedestrian crossing. But the most dangerous aspect is some of the central bike lanes. I’m all in favour of getting people out of cars and buses, but I wish there was more focus on walking. This is significantly better for you over a particular time duration than using a bike or e-scooter - but that’s not my point. Inevitably fitting bike lanes into an old city centre can be tricky. And some of them here are downright dangerous. The only time I’ve been nearly killed by a bicycle was someone coming down the steep slope of Park Street in Bristol a

To the south of Swindon, just outside the village of Wroughton (where my daughters went to school) is what's now rather grandly known as the Science and Innovation Park . This huge 540 acre site houses the Science Museum's store facility. It's also home to the museum's amazing library, where I can be seen telling the (then) BBC's Robert Peston about quantum theory - and acted as a track for the TV show Grand Tour before it stopped being a Top Gear lookalike. Last Tuesday, I was honoured to be invited to the unveiling of the new Hawking Building a massive store housing over 300,000 items from the huge to the tiny. The scale of the building is remarkable - it really does look like one of those CGI, bigger than anything you can really imagine, store houses you see in movies. But this is for real. Walking round is quite an experience. Unlike a modern, carefully curated museum, this is a wonderful jumble, where you might find a Dalek lurking near a submarine alongside

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2009 Some of the old posts I'm revisiting are merely still interesting (hopefully), but I was surprised to see as far back as 2009 that the impact of social media on the spread of news and views was already clear, even if I perhaps underplayed the negatives. It's also notable as I had totally forgotten about this story in writing my new book,   Brainjacking , out next month, which very much picks up on the way the ability of storytelling to inform, influence and manipulate has been amplified by technology, from writing through to AI. There has been much comment  and complaint  in the electronic world as a result of  Jan Moir's unpleasant Daily Mail article  about the death of  Stephen Gately . What I found most fascinating was how out of touch Moir was in her response to the wave of complaint that surged around the internet like a tsunami. She described this as a 'heavily orchestrated internet campaign.' This shows a mag

When I wrote my first popular science book, Light Years , I got some lovely reviews - and one or two stinkers. I asked my editor if I should respond to the negative remarks. She said 'Definitely not - unless the review contains something that's factually untrue, you only do yourself damage by attempting to put straight what is, in the end, an opinion.' This is an attitude I've stuck with through thick and thin. Since then I have also reviewed many hundreds of books. I have only twice had an author or publisher kick back against a negative review. One was of an adult colouring book (a genre, I confess, I detest - I ought to stress I didn't ask for a review copy, I was sent it unsolicited), where the author felt that, as an author myself, I was letting the side down - we've all got to earn a living. I did, as a result, remove my review from Amazon. The other has just happened - and the response was not just a moan. Either an author or the publisher put in a DMCA

I was amused to read on the BBC News site  ‘ Get ready for a cosmic surprise this autumn - Earth is about to get a second moon, according to scientists.’ I named my first science quiz book How Many Moons does the Earth Have? precisely because of this kind of silliness. My answer was ‘one’ and it still will be while a chunk of passing rock is briefly caught by Earth’s gravitational pull. Apart from anything, the suggestion that something is a moon just because it is briefly pulled off track by a planet’s gravity seems to reflect an underlying misunderstanding of how gravity works. Everything with mass distorts spacetime and causes moving objects to be displaced from their natural straight line path. This would make practically everything in space a moon if you took this argument to its limit, because they are all being pulled of track by the planets. The news item is also amusing because back in 2013, the TV show QI claimed that the Earth had a large number of moons (it was QI’s variou