Author Archives: Martin McCallion

Programmer, writer, sometime musician. I don’t write enough (or well enough), but want to do more (and better).

I’m an expatriate Scot, living in Hackney in East London, with my partner, our two kids, and a cat.

This blog is about politics, books, music, and I dare say a little philosophy and religion (especially where it touches politics).

A Dream of Wessex, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 9)

This is the motherlode of all brains-in-jars/life-is-a-computer-simulation-type stories. Gibson’s and the Wachowski’s Matrixes can both trace their origins back to here – or at least, they should be able to. I’m not aware of anything older than this that quite deals with this idea.
At Maiden Castle in Dorchester in the near future (of [...]

Water on Mars

Phoenix has found water on Mars, by the way.

Fluidity

Why does no-one make themes that are fluid anymore? By which I mean ones that re-flow the text when you resize your browser window, of course.

New theme

Have just activated a new theme for this site. It’s called MNML, and it’s designed especially for quick posts. As ever, I’m not quite sure about it yet, but we’ll seee.

The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest (Books 2008, 8)

What a fine conceit. Take the two great science fiction works by one of the genre’s defining masters, mash them up together, and use the result to tell the ‘inside’ story of both of them.
It’s title is an obvious allusion to The Time Machine, but this is actually much more rooted in The War [...]

42 referendums and and a resignation

I can’t decide on this David Davis thing Is it just a stunt? Is he genuinely concerned enough about civil liberties to take the chance (small though it is) of losing his seat? Certainly he sounds sincere when he talks about his concerns about the growth of state power; and Shami Chakrabarti of [...]

Newton’s Wake: A Space Opera, by Ken Macleod (books 2008, 7)

A scorching, searing cyberpunk space opera. It has everything in it: FTL starships, uploaded minds, nanotech, the Singularity, wormhole gateways… Absolutely stunning stuff.
Though on the downside, I did find it bit hard to follow some of the plot twists and turns. Specifically, it wasn’t always immediately obvious to me why some of [...]

Trying out Drivel

I’m trying out an offline blogging client that runs on Linux (these things are not that easy to come by). It’s called Drivel, and it seems to work OK, as long as you tell it that your WordPress installation is actually Movable Type.
Oh, and it looks like it only supports one category per post, [...]

Novelist Joanna Kavenna points out that I was wrong

Ok, I was wrong when I said that no other genres had disparaging abbreviations.

“I don’t understand what chick-lit means, and to a degree it’s just used to dismiss quite a lot of writing by women,” she says. “It’s a blanket term that renders a wide variety of literature frivolous. It’s used either to dismiss the [...]

Identity and letdown in The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall (books 2008, 6)

Eric Sanderson wakes without his memories. In short order he starts receiving messages apparently sent by his former self, is told by his psychiatrist not to read any such messages, and starts reading them – in the wrong order, which leaves him unready for the trouble that is about to assail him.
He is attacked [...]