This really should have been on prime time TV, but was put out on BBC4. It wouldn’t surprise me if pressure was brought to bear to not broadcast it on BBC1.
This is a program about about the exposing of those fraudulent bastards who run this country. It’s on I-player for another five days only, then it’ll probably be buried for the next ten years.
G’day Neal,
My name is Will Bassett and I’m a 25 year old Sci Fi fan from down under. I’ve been a big reader ever since my early teens when my father found a box of his old books and let me take a look through them. I grew up reading through the works of Richard Adams and Aldous Huxley and as I grew older I continued reading and stumbled across an expanding range of genres and really started to enjoy science fiction after coming across some Philip K Dick collections in my local library.
I left my small coastal town in the Australian state of Victoria after graduating high school in 2002 to join the Army and a few years in I was sent to Sydney on a mine warfare course where on the few days we were granted leave from base I went in search of an author I had heard great things about from a fellow digger. “You should really give it a go, if you like your cyperpunkish space opera.” Cyberpunk? Space Opera? How intriguing. So off I went and searched the city bookstores to no avail. Being Australia, often when you go looking for something even in the larger bookstores all that meets your questions are blank looks and “how do you spell the authors name again?”. Eventually I was able to pry the copy of Brass Man from my friend, and looking back at that moment he did me a great favour by introducing me to the world of the Polity. After reading Brass Man over the course of about a week in my spare time at base I was captivated. Being Australia though, I did have to wait a few weeks until I was off base and back in my home city, then another few weeks patiently waiting for Gridlinked and the Line of Polity to arrive in my local bookstore from overseas.
In the last few years since leaving the Army I have read many authors, many due to stumbling across them in anthologies such as The New Space Opera, and the New Space Opera 2 which I was very pleased to see an Asher appearance in. I now work in Air Traffic Control training, helping run the simulator that students are trained on at Melbourne International Airport, and I can safely say that I am always prepared for any downtime at work, with no less that two Neal Asher books sitting in my locker, just waiting for a re-reading.
Living in Melbourne is an experience of it’s own, a typical day here contains all four seasons, waking up to frost on the grass and ice on the car windows, to a hot and dry 36 degrees Celsius after lunch, only to be followed by high winds and rain. Luckily for those of us not too adverse to sitting down with a good book, we live in a city where even though you can be sunning yourself at the beach in the early afternoon, you’ll be rugged up with some great space opera as it pours down outside with the wind roaring. That’s if your local bookstore hasn’t forgotten to order in that Orbus book you keep ringing up about!
Nice review here of Orbus from Alex Cull.
Ever since reading Neal Asher’s The Skinner back in 2003, I have thought that the Prador (a race of enjoyably nasty and warlike crustacean-analogues from deep space) are among some of the best SF baddies to emerge since Terry Nation invented the Daleks. Furthermore I have believed it was high time that they had a whole novel to themselves, more or less, without any danger of the planet Spatterjay’s entertainingly horrible and ruthless oceanic fauna stealing the show. Asher’s 2006 novel Prador Moon came close to accomplishing this, the one caveat being that it was all too short, but at 438 pages, Orbus hits the bull’s-eye.
Now in what branches of ‘science’ might this approach be applicable nowadays? One specific example springs to mind but, really, the answer is ‘all of them’.
Update: And in the spirit of Feynman (or should I say the bloody obvious), the Institute of Physics has come out of the closet.
These are the traits of groupthink (Janis, 1977). Where do we see them?
1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
Incidentally, a ‘flat-earther’ is he or she who did not question the general consensus.
I just had a look at Whatever, John Scalzi’s blog which often has interesting stuff about the business of writing. I read this and was intrigued, so went over to the post by Charlie Stross. This then led me to further interesting posts. You can learn a lot here about the processes involved in getting a book into your hands.
I’ve been meaning to say something about this for some time. Many of you may know about Dave Langford’s Ansible – you’ve maybe read some of his articles in various magazines. I get this newsletter by email and get filled in on the various doings in the SF world. Particularly enjoyable are ‘How Others See us’ in which he records the ludicrous statements of those who don’t want to be accused of science fiction, and ‘Thog’, in which he points out some of the silly errors many fiction writers make (still waiting to be thogged). Dave Langford is an erstwhile weapons physicist, fan and fiction writer and recipient of an embarrassing number of Hugos.
Update: You can subscribe to the email newsletter or get the RSS feed up in the top lefthand corner here.
