There are some excellent pictures of Bristolcon on Gemma Morgan’s website, featuring myself, Alastair Reynolds, Cheryl Morgan, Paul Cornell, Roz Clarke, Huw Powell, Colin Harvey, Nick Walters, and many others…

See the pictures here: www.gmorgan-photography.co.uk/portfolio72059p2.html

For a small event organised in a short amount of time and with no budget, Bristolcon went amazingly well. The panels were interesting and the guest of honour talks fascinating. And it was great to meet up with so many friends and colleagues for a few beers and a bit of a chat.

Next on the agenda is the upcoming event How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years to be held in a remarkable new pavillion, The Black Cloud, in Victoria Park, Bristol. The work and its accompanying programme of events has been commissioned by Situations at the University of the West of England, and emerges from a month-long residency as part of the RSA Arts and Ecology programme in Bristol in 2007.

From the blurb:

“The Black Cloud is a new temporary public sculpture designed as a shelter for the park in readiness for a hostile and inhospitable future, to screen people from an unforgiving environment and create a place that community can coalesce in difficult times. The Black Cloud is informed by vernacular architecture built to withstand extreme environmental conditions, with the Yakisugi treatment of the timbers creating a scorched protective shield, the irregular oval form closely referencing the shabono, and the triangular structuring and ethos of the building technique echoing Drop City. Its function as a communal focal point has been modelled upon The Range in Slab City, and the future landscape envisioned for the work is based on the bleak elemental extremes of J.G. Ballard’s catastrophe series.”

How to Prosper during the Coming Bad Years will be held on Saturday 10 October from 10.30 – 1pm. It is intended as a forum between people of diverse disciplines to explore the future through the differing mindsets of conservation versus preparedness; a theme that dominates the thinking behind The Black Cloud.

I will be attending as a key speaker to deliver a 10 to 15 minute talk about the use of science fiction as a means of debating and modelling the future, and to take questions.

Everyone is welcome at this event, and because of the passionate opinions it has stirred locally, it promises to be a very lively event.

Tomorrow sees the launch of a brand new science fiction and fantasy convention: BristolCon.

I will be there during the afternoon, selling and signing copies of my book (free badge with each copy sold) and appearing on a discussion panel about the differences between science fiction from the UK and USA.

There will also be:

• Special guests
• A book launch
• Live music
• A quiz
• Dancing
• Drunkeness

Personally, I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends; mixing with editors, publishers and fellow writers; and having a drink and a boogie later in the evening.

See you there?

A few days ago, publisher Angry Robot ran a competition on Twitter. The challenge: to write a complete story featuring a robot in 140 characters or less. It sounded like fun, so I decided to have a crack at it…

Now, the results are up on their website, and my entry can be found under the “Best Tales of Gore” category.

Following Kim Stanley Robinson’s outburst in New Scientist in favour of British science fiction, Toby Litt writes in New Statesman:

“…one of the greatest pleasures of any art form is that it can make us think, “I’ve never seen/heard anything like that before,” but also because it is surely one of the particular duties of science fiction to show us things that are startlingly unlike those we already know.”

Read the full article here.

Meanwhile over on Futurismic, Paul Raven asks why we should care that science fiction doesn’t win literary awards:

“If you care enough about science fiction that you want to see it read more widely and appreciated as something more than simple escapist entertainment, don’t waste your time storming the ramparts of the crumbling ivory tower of literature, or decrying the inevitably populist results of fan-voted awards. Instead, try to convert one other book-lover.”

This afternoon, I printed out the first 20,000 words of my story-in-progress for someone else to read.  After working in isolation for so long, this is a nervous moment for any novelist.

A friend of mine lost an entire short story when his computer crashed. The story represented three months of hard work and in the blink of an eye, it was lost forever, along with all the accompanying notes. Can you imagine how frustrating that was? My friend was absolutely gutted. But it could easily have been worse. He could have lost everything he’d ever written, including the novel he’d been hammering away at for over five years. The reason he managed to salvage the majority of his work is that he had it backed-up onto disc. He just hadn’t got around to backing-up the story he was working on. Personally, I back-up everything I write. Whenever I close the document I’m working on, I make sure it’s been saved on the computer’s hard drive and copied onto the 2GB memory stick I carry around with me. If the house burns down or the computer catches a virus, I want to be sure I’ve saved all my work somewhere it can be recovered.

Writing for New Scientist magazine, US science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson thinks British science fiction is in a golden age, with a huge number of active and talented writers producing work on the cutting edge of the genre. He also thinks it’s time it won some literary awards.

“Many recent British science fiction novels describe the near future, creating a kind of anticipatory realism, the best description of the first decade of this century. Others venture into the depths of distant space and time, creating a new space opera that is not only sophisticated entertainment, but also usually a surreal allegory for the choices we have to make as a civilisation and a species. Some even explore what I think is the hardest zone of all (which is why I asked the writers here to give it a go) – the time about a century from now, when our growing capabilities will be confronted by immense dangers, creating an unstable and unpredictable future.

“The result is the best British literature of our time.”

Read the full article, plus short fiction from eight leading British SF writers, by following the link here.

Astronomers have unveiled an amazing 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere. And guess what? It’s the image of a galaxy seen edge-on, up close and personal.

Click here for the full story.

A question for you writers out there: Does listening to music help you to write, or does it gets in the way?

Personally, I find lyrics distracting, so there’s a five hour-long playlist of instrumental music on my computer, covering everything from Mozart to Tom Waits, via Charlie Parker, The Beastie Boys, Vangelis, Glen Miller, Ennio Morricone, and Faust.