Intriguing stuff, especially for me - I'm on immunosupressants anyway, so a change in prescription might not be a bad thing. It does sound familar though - a drug from the ground, which has geriatric properties...

The spice must flow!

From the last installment of his tech biography series:

By summer 2001, we had our business plan and our proposals and our business cards printed. We'd bought an off-the-shelf shell company, zHosting Ltd. All we needed was £600,000 and a second-hand mainframe to install in a hosting centre like SCOLocate. So we booked our first meeting with IBM to discuss leasing options, and our first session with possible angel investors ...

On September 12th, 2001.

So there you have it: the punchline to the extended shaggy dog story that is my career history in the computer industry. And now you know why I'm a novelist rather than the chief technical officer of a successful dot-com. Timing is everything - and my whole non-writing career has been one damn comic double-take after another.

That meeting was ... well, the subject of conversation was rather overshadowed by the events of the previous day. NASDAQ was closed, air travel in North America was shut down: the hammer was about to come crashing down on the tech sector for the second time in two years. We buried zHosting outside the graveyard gate only a month later, and went our respective ways; Andrew back to consultancy for a couple of years (he's now running a successful bespoke software business), and me to writing.

Well, near-future scifi anyway. From Charlie Stross' blog, on which he announces that instead of a sequel to ''Halting State'', he's working on a new ''Laundry'' book instead:

Why the switch? Well, I was just settling down to work on the "Halting State" sequel last summer when the news went nonlinear. That book is meant to be near-future SF, which means it's highly dependent on the state of the world today. It was bad enough when, as I was waiting for "Halting State" to work its way into print, bits of the plot kept turning up in the news; this time around, one of last year's major news stories ate my plot!

I think we can all be very glad that he's delayed a Halting State sequel to work on a Laundry story because the former came true in real life, rather than the other way around.

And where can I get some?

China began designing their own superhuman soon after, but didn't have the tech for Megareactor Buddha's Spine until 1990. Nominally, PRC is atheist, but the old religions never went away, and a surprising number of Chinese state scientists still think in terms of qi. The superhuman Maitreya was a subject enveloped by scanning tunnelling microscopes wired into his visual cortex, forced to meditate upon his own atomic structure until he could perceive the quantum foam of every particle of his being birthing and annihilating under the uncertainty principle. His emergence into superhumanity was heralded by the impossible light of zero point energy accessed from the spaces between virtual particles. The Chinese filled a warehouse with political prisoners and told Maitreya to kill them, to demonstrate his power over spacetime and matter. He instead fashioned them into a vast musical instrument of entrancingly beautiful tone. Then configured all the assembled soldiers and scientists into a self-supporting worm-like structure and fired them into space with/through the musical instrument, where they journeyed as a biological probe of brains linked in parallel that reported information about the solar system back to Maitreya via quantum entanglement until the structure, starting to break up, was identified as comet Shoemaker-Levy and eventually smacked into the surface of Jupiter.

That's an awful headline, sorry.

Charlie Stross has another go at predicting the future - this time, of gaming. In bullet points:

• CPU power is going to hit a brick wall pretty soon
• There's a couple of orders of magnitude of bandwidth to use up, but that'll hit the buffers too at some point ("I don't think we're likely to get much more than a terabit per second of bandwidth out of any channel, be it wireless or a fibre-optic cable, because once you get into soft X-rays your network card becomes indistinguishable from a death ray.")
• Mobile devices will continue to converge (of course)
• They'll all have picoprojectors in them
• VR glasses are actually coming along nicely
• All this leads to a lot of clever augmented reality stuff

Actually, just read Halting State.

Well, instead of watching BSG I ended up watching Primer. And I think my brain is now broken. Not bad for a film that only cost $7000 to make!

Over the last couple of years, Dan Curtis Johnson has been adding mysterious little fragments of dark epic sci-fi to his livejournal, tagged (although I didn't click at the time) lexicon. One of them I've blogged already, the lovely Old Faith of the Precursors.

Now all is revealed - he's been playing an enormous game of Lexicon with his mates - and the result is a wodge of incredible writing, in the form of an encyclopaedia with commentary, describing the futile attempts of a far future 'convocation' of religious leaders to create a single unified faith. There's a fascinating narrative - a set of narratives, really - to be teased out, by the looks of it.

Oh dear. More pictures here, by the way.

There, in the background, as Scotty.

Here's Sylar, sorry, Spock, in the process of eating someone's brain to take their powers. No, that's not right either, it is?

Right, let's see if:

• Russell T presses the Reset Button and it all turns out to be an alternate reality, timeline or dream or something
• Donna Noble (Noble Lady?) turns out to be Timelordy and somehow sacrifices herself to become the next regeneration (while hopefully leaving it Tennant)
• The Doctor's Hand-in-a-Jar saves the day

Somehow I still think it's going to be Tennant. As Lawrence Miles points out, Big Russ would never let "It's starting!" be Tennant's last words, and regenerations have traditionally always been different - this one's so far identical to Ecclestone.

UPDATE: well, 2 and 3 pretty much, but some nice twists. Have to admit that Tennant does the 'tragic figure doomed to travel space the time' rather well, and Donna's apotheosis and exit was well done. But Rose getting the cheap knockoff Doctor for her very own was a bit much, and for God's sake don't put Martha and Mickey in Torchwood. Please.

They're remaking The Day The Earth Stood Still. With Keanu Reeves as Klaatu. He'd be much better as Gort.

Apparently, in the new Star Trek film (which seems to be doing the trendy 'franchise reboot' dance), Scotty might be played by ... Simon Pegg.

There's an interview with the Wizard of Northampton in (of all places) the Telegraph, about (of all things) Lost Girls, his pornographic magnum opus with Melinda Gebbie. The interviewer is Susannah "Norrell and Strange" Clarke, although her style is fairly transparent in this piece (thank heaven), and there's even a helpful list of Moore quotes at the end, and this isn't from that section:

I did Voice of the Fire, which was set in the county of Northamptonshire. But with Jerusalem, I thought that that was probably far too cosmopolitan and far-reaching and that I ought to concentrate upon a couple of square blocks of Northampton, where I actually grew up. This is a half-million words, so the next book is obviously just going to be a couple of million words long; it's just all going to be about one end of my living-room. I suppose it's having started out with fantasies about the farthest reaches of space and time and the human world, I suppose it's a gradual realisation that the actual place where I'm sitting is about the most fantastic spot in my universe.

I just saw a thingummy on the telly saying that Star Trek : the Next Generation is 20 years old, and I thought, 'that can't be right.' But it is. Good grief. 28th September 1987 to May 23rd 1994 was the original US run - to be fair, it was delayed here for a couple of years, but still, to think that it's been 13 years since it ended...

That's Catrin in absolute hysterics at her first ever viewing of the 60's Batman TV series. Of course, it's a part of my cultural upbringing, but I suppose to someone who's never seen it before it must look like it's from Mars. A very, very gay Mars.

Going to see the Studio Ghibli Tales from Earthsea movie tonight, with some trepidation... will it piss all over my memory of those beautiful books, as the SciFi Channel's abomination did? Le Guin's own opinion seems to be that it's better than that, but still not right.

UPDATE: Well, that was odd. Lovely looking film, but it wasn't Earthsea - it was a film with some characters in it with the same names as those in the books. I've yet to see an adaptation where the film's plot bears less resemblance to the original story. Oh well. The dragons were good.

From Dan Crisper, posted on Tuesday:

Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night with that horrible image replaying over and over in my mind, of the second plane crashing into the Archduke, and the immediate realization that the Continent would never be the same.

Dan Crisper has done it again, with a wonderfully inventive cultural archeology of the next thousand years or so, viewed from an unimaginably far future:

Originally worshippers of simple Nature, protohumans recognized the existence of, and divided their Universe into, four primal Elements: Energy, Gas, Liquid, and Solid. It was their belief that these "elemental states" represented a progression or procession of "refinement", from lowest Solid to highest Energy, to which all materios should aspire - and through which, if left to its own devices, all existence would invariably descend. It is important for the reader to understand that this was not merely a metaphorical model for personal self-improvement, as it so clearly appears at first glance. No, the Ancients actually believed this was how molecules worked. To be fair, they recognized the existence of shades and nuances within this simple structure, and they did apply fairly sophisticated rituals to its philosophical exploration. And before one dismisses this proto-belief out of hand, be aware that application of this simple model was sufficient to get them to the culminating revelation of Elementalism, the fission reaction, that process by which (in their eyes) crude, banal, degraded Solid could be transmuted instantly into bright, enlightened, perfected Energy. This direct experience of the divine as they understood it was so profound that, in their first wave of interplanetary transit (so far as we can determine) they predominantly relied on atomic drives, forgoing any number of obviously superior alternatives, carrying their precious Transmutative Process with them like a superstitiously-held good-luck charm.

And after that it gets really strange, culminating with the fantastic pantheon of Old Precursor Paganism:

Vortosk - God of Time, Inventions, and Absence. Patron of Scientists and all who have lost something. According to myth, entirely lacked outward-facing senses of any sort. Followers typically practiced potlatch-charity and self-amputation.

I was looking for this the other day - the article in which Jonathan Last makes the case for the Empire in Star Wars being 'good,' while the Rebel Alliance are the terrorist scum. After all, the Empire have a good education system, high standards of personal freedom (although admittedly things can get nasty for you if you harbour terrorists, which sounds familiar). It's clever stuff, and particularily interesting given when it was written - early 2002.

I thought this would happen, mainly because we got the RSC brochure last week and they were advertising him as Hamlet next year, against Patrick Stewart as Claudius. Which should be interesting - who do I heckle? Do I shout "Make it so!" at Stewart or "Reverse the polarity!" at Tennant?

I'm very much looking forward to it, which I suppose cheers me up a bit if there's going to be no Who in '09, but I hope it gives them time to think about the series and stops them getting into a rut, rather than robbing them of the rather nice momentum they built up in the last series.

I'm a little confused by the BBC saying:

Tennant, 36, will reportedly (sic) to play Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) from July to November next year, however this has not been confirmed by the RSC.

when they're actually advertising tickets for it though...

"Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign."

This is sheer genius - a comic strip asking the question "What if the Lord of the Rings was a D&D campaign?" Of course, you might not get a lot of it if you've not played role (with dice and stuff, not running around the woods with rubber swords or anything that a sex therapist might advise). But if you are a veteran roller of the regular solids, you'll recognise an awful lot of it.

Just saw the Transformers movie. Yes, I know it's old hat now, but we were sillybusy when it was on. We're still sillybusy now, but we decided dammit, we'd go out.

Lovely, all very shiny Transformer effects and that, and some great lines, but strewth it went on. It could easily have been three-quarters of an hour shorter.

I suspect the length was to help you forget the gaping plot holes. Still, it pleased my inner 12-year-old, and with a film like that, that's all that counts.

Things to read later: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick. Lovely essay on the man over at Suicide Girls (I only go there for the articles) by Warren Ellis.

Warren Ellis has seen the new Doctor Who, and has reviewed it. He's a hard man to please, and he likes it.

It is, in fact, DOCTOR WHO, as it was, complete with fake jeopardy for the kids and laughs for the adults. It will probably disappoint old fans - and anyone looking for a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA-style treatment - because it resolutely refuses to take itself too seriously. It's not afraid of doing gags like having a kid eaten by a marauding plastic rubbish bin because that's all part of the ride, all part of the style. In Michael Moorcock's phrase, it obeys and enjoys the genre.

And so you get that nice little counterpoint between strange comedy bits and straight dramatic moments that is the hallmark of a certain strain of British fiction. Showroom dummies (yes) coming to life and shooting people might look funny, and it is - but the bodies are just as dead. And that - the placing of an alien element into a naturalistic contemporary British context - is the signature of the old British sf style, from WAR OF THE WORLDS to DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS, from QUATERMASS AND THE PIT to, especially, DOCTOR WHO.

Definitely agree with that first paragraph - "taking itself too seriously" was the key mistake made by the Paul McGann abomination.

Oh, and read the next article, in which Warren talks about James Bond. Good stuff. Oh bugger - and the next article on Holmes.