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"The Good Food Guide—'Recommending Akbars'. The only Indian restaurant recommended in Yorkshire." :) interesting!

My pleasure:cool:! Just signed deal with Orbit for three historical fantasies so feeling v happy myself. Now tell me about this amazing curry place you're being taken to...

Okay, totally disagree about Vance; like and read his work but he's not in the same prose league (imho) as Ballard, Peake or Wolfe. Suspect you should read Light. You can accuse it of may things but being turgid isn't one of them. (Mind you, I find it hard to believe we're discussing the same MJ...

Think that PKD was unusual in that his work was so far ahead of its time (as was his paranoia, now free with every govt press release) that it took until after his death for the world to catch up enough with the world PKD was writing about for it all to make sense... ps thanks for the tag for...

1a) What are your favourite science fiction films? (Name up to 5) Akira Fifth Element Matrix (first and only first) Starship Troopers Solaris (original Tarkovsky version, no remake) 1b) Why do you like these? First four films are balls to the wall full-on fast, funny and furious (with rare...

If you had been doing it professionally you'd be doing it to a deadline and probably a synopsis and would need to finish the book you were working on because that was the one the publisher had bought. For what it's worth, and this is only personal experience, but new ideas always look fresher...

When I was reviewing four books a month I remembered almost nothing about any of them! Now I'm reading for pleasure again I'm remembering much more. I do think it's down to the quality of the book though. Ones that have characters that stay with me tend to remain. The rest just blur<g>

I'm surprised no one's mentioned M John Harrison (unless I've missed it). Much as I admire Chris Priest's work I think the Separation brings some of the problems of complexity that Gene Wolfe's work brings. Also, I suspect that Mike Harrison's Light is a book that is going to grow in cult status...

Waterclocks were used by the Egyptians several centuries BC and simple weight-driven clocks had appeared in Europe by the very late 1200s/early 1300s, with spring-driven clocks appearing in the 1500s... Harun al Raschid, caliph of Baghad, is meant to have sent the Frankish emperor Charlemagne a...

One page is the standard in the UK... It helps to think in terms of *sell* (one line to one paragraph), *synopsis*, probably a page, *chapter breakdown*, which can run to three or four page. The synopsis tells the agent (and then the publisher) what the book is about. It's not an...

Treat US editions as translations... It helps preserve your sanity. Most of the changes I've seen are to do with things like point-of-view, with the US readers supposedly having less tolerance for pov changes within the same chapter. A New York editor told me that reading some UK book was like...

The book you are after is A Tough Guide to Fantasyland (Gollancz) by Diana Wynne Jones.:cool:

Also, the legacy of his early novels remains influential. The first Matrix film ransacked Gibson's ideas wholesale as Hollywood caught up with what everyone else had been doing for years. And much as I love the Sprawl trilogy, and much as they rode punk and the West's rising obsession with...

There's no copyright on ideas or titles... At the most you could bring a court case after the event to claim plagiarsm or passing off. At least that's my understanding of it. And given how ideas, in writing as much as physics or economics, seem to come in waves (so, cyberpunk, new weird), with...

It's interesting... So many people with different tastes loving the book. (I adored it and read it almost in one go...) There are very few novels I know that get this kind of unanimity.

Our Lady of Chernobyl, published 1998, and in a couple of Egan's short story collections is stunning and one of the best examples of cyberpunk that I've read.

your box too full to pm you! be happy to grab a beer though. jon

Yep, I'll be there! Lucky enough to have a book out in Japanese to tie in with the Con (redRobe renamed for Japan, Samsara Junction!) No idea what the text says but the cover looks cool... I'll be reading your blog to find out what's happening. Most of the time at cons I haven't a clue<g>

One of my favourite books. I can't read Canticle without thinking about the fact he was involved in the bombing of the monsastery at Monte Casino in WW2.

I bet she does!