After the Second World War, Isaac Asimov and Jack Kerouac were both hanging around the Columbia Univerity campus in New York. I can’t help wondering what would have happened if they’d become friends. Would Asimov have lured Kerouac into writing science fiction? Would Kerouac have turned Asimov into a “Beat” writer?

James Maxey reviews the Future Bristol anthology for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Of my contribution, he writes:

“The strongest part of the story is the budding love story between the narrator and a girl he meets in a bookstore. I found the dialogue to be very natural and plausible; often dialogue in short stories is simply there to push the plot forward. Here, the dialogue has nothing to do with the gee-whiz tech that will erupt a few pages later. As a result, it felt very real to me. It seemed like the way people actually flirt, and makes the story feel like an actual window onto life.”

Read the full review online here.

Today, I was told by the manager of the Forbidden Planet store in Bristol that my short story collection reads like “JG Ballard on Prozac”. He meant this as a compliment, and it’s made me determined to read more of Ballard’s work, as this is the second time we’ve been compared.

Put simply, the Fermi paradox states that if alien civilisations exist, then at least one of them would have already made contact with us – but as they haven’t, we have to ask ourselves: where are they?

The trouble is, this is a deeply flawed argument.

How long have we had radio? A hundred years? As I write this, I’m looking at a picture of Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1672, a dusty whorl of several hundred billion stars lying more than 60 million light years away.

If a single civilisation arose in NCG 1672 and saw fit to send (for whatever reason) a radio signal in our direction, would we have equipment sensitive enough to receive it? And even if we did, 60 million light years is a long way. In order for us to receive it now, in the relatively short period of time since we discovered radio, they would have had to broadcast it at around the time the dinosaurs were dying off on Earth.

But what if they evolved some time in the last 50 million years? Or in the last 2 million years? We’d never know.

After all, how long have we been around, as a species? 100,000 years? What if they discovered radio a thousand years ago? Perhaps we’ll find out… in 60 million years’ time.

So, fuck the Fermi paradox. The answer to the question Where are they? is simply: A really, really long way away.

Given the vastness of the cosmos and the distances involved, expecting alien signals to have arrived in the eye-blink since we invented radio seems ludicrous and self-important.

It’s like landing a plane in Nairobi, sticking your head out of the cabin door and saying: “I see no lions, therefore lions must not exist.”

We may have to resign ourselves to the possibility that although there may be a million super-civilisations currently operating in the galaxies we see though our telescopes, we’ll never know.

Even if, for some unfathomable reason, they decided to send a signal our way, the human race would probably be long extinct by the time it arrived.

I’ve divided the novel I’m writing into three sections or acts. I’ve just put the finishing touches to Act One and I’m about to start work on Act Two.