Top 100 Australian Books
Radio National is running a vote on the top 100 Australian books until October 1. You can vote for up to 10 books. My votes are below. Science fiction is not as dominant in my votes as I thought it would be, with five novels, two of which were written by George Turner. Only one […]
Update of my review of The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas.
I have just updated my original review of The Slap on Goodreads. I wanted to read The Slap after reading that it was written with eight distinctive voices. The novel also won a boatload of awards. It is split into eight sections, with each section written from a different POV. The voices are distinctive in […]
Review of Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Shroud is the second novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky that I have read. The other was Children of Time. Both had humans battling a non-human collective. Both made me think about how humans might interact with sentient non-humans. Both novels are excellent reads. Shroud starts when a human exploration, or more appropriately, exploitation, ship discovers a […]
No longer on Facebook
I’ve quit Facebook due to its utter enshittification. My feed was full of scams, AI slop and ads. Facebook has no morals, as it pays far-right groups for rage-bait. I could no longer link to my blog posts, etc., because Facebook ensures no one sees posts with links in them in their feed, which means […]
Fixing old blog posts
I am still correcting the formatting of many of my old blog posts, created before August 2014, on this blog. When I transferred the posts from Blogger, they didn’t format correctly, with many false sentence breaks. Any links in these older posts are also unlikely to work. Apologies for any post you view where the […]
Radio National’s Top 100 Books of this Century.
ABC Radio National ran a survey in October of the top 100 books of this century, as voted by listeners. You could vote for up to 10 books. My votes are shown in the image. Five of them are definitely science fiction (The Dark Forest, Oryx and Crake, The Passage, Terra Nullius and Klara and […]
My mum died
I have been quiet on this blog because my mum died on the 23rd of December. It was unexpected. A fall, which seemed to do no damage, then a week later she died. With help from my sister, I organised her funeral. I loved my mum. My eulogy: Remember to speak up. Thanks for coming. My […]
Review of All Systems Red by Martha Wells
Books by Martha Wells are consistently mentioned in social media science fiction groups as favourite reads, so I decided to read one of her novels to see what her imagination and writing are like. I chose All Systems Red as it is about a sentient android. The subject of sentient artificial intelligence fascinates me. I have […]
I will continue blogging
After some thought, I have decided to continue blogging as I enjoy reading, researching, and writing for each post. Just one post a week once I settle back down (you can sign up to receive notification of a post using the form at the bottom of this post). I will have to find new ways […]
Dancing with myself
Due to the lack of likes and comments, it would seem either no one is interested in the subjects I blog about, I am a terrible blogger, the only things looking at my posts are bots, or maybe all three reasons. Although I enjoy writing the posts, it seems I would be much better off […]