May 2023 I get the impression that most people have either forgotten or never heard about Bill Gates’ bold assertion that the Internet wouldn’t come to anything. I guess he’s remembered for other stuff he did (and does!) – more astute business decisions, addressing the issues of the moment. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, thought …
“Creating something that is to us as we are to a frog!” Read More »
APRIL 2023 Okay, why am I so interested in the European Space Agency’s “Juice” (“Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”) mission, which launched a day late on 14 April? It’s going to take eight years and four gravity assists to get to the Jupiter system! How could that be exciting? Well, for me there are two main reasons: first, …
March 2023 So, I ignored my own advice in the January ramble about not sending people to Mars and created a small settlement on the Red Planet called Karima-Napata. (I know it sounds like the famous Swahili catchphrase from the Lion King, but might that also make it easier to remember?) In Anything But Accidental, …
Martian Shuffle is waiting for you to go and grab it for free! Read More »
February 2023 I had already started cobbling together something for this month inspired by a very good article about ChatGPT (my favourite bit being a funny story about photocopier software) which has been in the mainstream news, hasn’t it? Everyone seems to be asking if, from now on, teachers will ever know if their students have really written …
January 2023 In the context of the current war in Ukraine, remembering the space race of the 1960s seems to take me back to an age of innocence. I know there were crises and that most of us felt the threat of nuclear war looming over us at one time or another before Reagan and …
Newsletter – December 2022/January 2023 First of all, apologies for mucking about with the newsletter day of the week again! It’s a bit all over the place at the moment. One of the reasons is that I’ve just added the second novel of the series, published only a few days ago, to one of these …
Newsletter – November 2022 At last, we’ll soon be heading back into space! It seems a long time since I uploaded The Big G as a free giveaway to blaze the trail, and yet the second full-length novel, due to be published next month, is set before the events on Ganymede and was mostly written …
Lazy or cloak and dagger sci-fi and The Safest Moon! Read More »
Newsletter – October 2022 Unlike my three brothers, I inherited my mother’s sweet tooth, and though I hated most of the school dinners I was ‘forced’ to eat as a boy – employing contrived methods of avoiding doing so – I loved the stodgy, sticky puddings. And I have always been a sucker for almost …
Bugs and flour and Imperfectly Deadly on Kindle! Read More »
Newsletter – September 2022 After a freakishly long dry – and hot! – spell, someone must have looked at the calendar, seen that it was autumn and finally decided to send some serious rain to Cantabria. This apparently endless summer had given us the time we needed to get agreement from the residents’ committee to …
Newsletter – August 2022 As well as anticipating at least one of my future ‘careers’, my final year undergraduate degree project with the promising title ‘Computer Programming for Flow over Side Weirs’ granted me access to the university Computer Centre. I remember it as a circular building, though perhaps it was octagonal. More importantly, it …
Why did Derek kick the cards across the computer centre? Read More »
