Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 13

Left Liberal Fail (Again)

No, not the election – that's not fail, it's just long-overdue chickens coming home to roost.  If we weren't all so terrified of the Tories, it would have happened last time around.

Still, nice to see Jacqui Smith in tears – only a shame it couldn't have been David Miliband too.

No, the fail I'm talking about is here, in an interview by award-winning Guardian journalist Emma Brockes. It's really pretty impressive (as you'd expect from an award-winning writer, I suppose) – I don't think I've...

Command Update

For those who've come to this site more recently than a couple of years ago, I should probably re-iterate that I no longer reply to specific fan-mail.  So if you're one of the very large number of people who've mailed me with kind words over the last couple of months, many thanks and my apologies – you are not being ignored, you're simply victims of logistics.  It reached a point those couple of years back when the volume of traffic got so high that it was eating more time to answer the...

Hit, Girl

I was going to post about the bizarre tide of moral panic sweeping the genre-scape and the media in general on this subject; more specifically I was going to post about how slimy I find this sudden peculiar concern about violence and foul language that so many pundits both in and out of genre have just discovered.  And then  I discovered I don't have to – Elizabeth Rappe has said it all for me.  And along the way, she's nailed exactly what's wrong with the world of western comics in general, ...

Jim and Will and Ray – eureka!

Prowling about among my book shelves, flipping pages, falling into old, oft-read and re-read narratives for minutes or hours at a time – caught in that odd, half-energised state just short of creativity but (y'hope) winding up for it – the mood The The's Matt Johnson sang about as having too much energy to switch of your mind, and not enough to get yourself organised - and then, suddenly, staring at me off the pages of an old Ray Bradbury novel, here it is:

An Answer.

It's an answer to...

Volcanic

So, the ash first – I mean, I know the Icelanders got stitched up over the money their banks went out and lost, but calling up Norse divine wrath seems a bit OTT as a response.  Or maybe it was the trolls, sick of all the bad press they get in World of Warcraft. Anyway, it's ensured that Yours Truly is stuck here in Frankfurt for at least the next few days, until either the planes start flying again or the massive overload on surface travel ebbs enough for me to get a seat on a train heading ...

Truth, Justice and the American Way or Get On The Ground, Motherfucker! NOW!

Too angry to be even-handed about this right now. Peter Watts' trial following his arrest at the US/Canadian border last year is now over. He just got found guilty of something called, in tortured legalese, "obstructing/resisting" a customs official. This was after attempts to nail him for assault had been blown out of the water by inconsistent testimony from the arresting officers. There's more on his blog here, but the salient segment is this:

The press has frequently characterized the...

Truth, Justice and the American Way - or Get On The Ground, Motherfucker! NOW!

Too angry to be even-handed about this right now. Peter Watts' trial following his arrest at the US/Canadian border last year is now over. He just got found guilty of something called, in tortured legalese, "obstructing/resisting" a customs official. This was after attempts to nail him for assault had been blown out of the water by inconsistent testimony from the arresting officers. There's more on his blog here, but the salient segment is this:

The press has frequently characterized the...

Truth, Justice and the American Way or Get On The Ground, Motherfucker! NOW!

Too angry to be even-handed about this right now. Peter Watts' trial following his arrest at the US/Canadian border last year is now over. He just got found guilty of something called, in tortured legalese, "obstructing/resisting" a customs official. This was after attempts to nail him for assault had been blown out of the water by inconsistent testimony from the arresting officers. There's more on his blog here, but the salient segment is this:

The press has frequently characterized the...

The Faint Whiff of Respectability

Wow - at last! After what seems like a thousand years of banging at the local literary doors, they open abruptly and dump us all on the plush red carpet beyond. Five scruffy SF/Fantasy writers, including yours truly, get invited to speak at Aye Write, Glasgow's prestigious answer to the Edinburgh International Book Festival (though we had to promise not to draw spaceships on the upholstery first).

If you fancy a peek at this momentous inaugural occurrence, we'll be in the Mitchell Library ...

The Faint Whiff of Respectability

Wow – at last! After what seems like a thousand years of banging at the local literary doors, they open abruptly and dump us all on the plush red carpet beyond. Five scruffy SF/Fantasy writers, including yours truly, get invited to speak at Aye Write, Glasgow's prestigious answer to the Edinburgh International Book Festival (though we had to promise not to draw spaceships on the upholstery first).

If you fancy a peek at this momentous inaugural occurrence, we'll be in the Mitchell Library ...