In search of mad scientists, and enjoying schools

I'm delighted to say that my latest book Armageddon Science is now available in the UK as well as the US. I won't repeat all the details - I gave the bumf about it here, and I cover it here on my website, but you can now rush along to Amazon.co.uk and buy a copy in the UK, if you feel so inclined. To make matters even more thrilling (can they be more thrilling, I here you ask?), if you click on the 'n new' under 'More buying choices' on the right of the Amazon page, you can buy a signed copy. What's not to love? This is the Christmas present that says you mean more to me than the apocalypse.

As there is only so much self-promotion I can do without feeling faintly queasy, I ought also to say what a great time I had at Bradon Forest School yesterday. Situated in Purton, a village outside Swindon, this secondary school had a special day yesterday where all their Year 7s had four writing-oriented workshops through the day. There was me on non-fiction writing and books, plus a poet, a writer and artist and an ex-stand up comedian who now writes freelance for magazines.

It's great talking to this age because they are old enough to get the ideas, but haven't been in secondary school long enough to become cynical. They were great audiences (each of us gave the session four times to groups of around 55). My only worry is that I was doing a fairly unstructured session - I had notes on bits I wanted to put in it, but I let the structure flow. This is fine for a single workshop, but by the time you are doing your fourth I was thinking 'Oh, no, have I already talked to them about this, or was it the previous group?' So apologies if I repeated myself...

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Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

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