Daily archives: August 24, 2010


links for 2010-08-24

  • There is an large untapped audience for more popular SF magazines.

    There are millions of people who already read SF novels, and who watch SF based film and television. Even more people also read SF flavoured comics, play SF inspired computer games, listen to music and look at art that could have stepped from the pages of an SF story. Whatever it is SF gives people: challenging ideas, original thinking, mythic storytelling, entertainment or sheer untold weirdness, people want it and they want it in their millions. This is an untapped audience which exists as part of the mainstream in our society and wants more material to consume.

    (tags: writing scifi)
  • Scientists in France discovered the huge reservoir under the Tête-Rousse glacier on the slopes of Europe's highest peak after conducting routine checks with magnetic resonance imaging.

    They sounded the alarm last month after finding the pocket contained 65,000 cubic metres (14.3 million gallons) of water, the equivalent of exactly 26 Olympic swimming pools.

    (tags: MontBlanc)
  • Marie Stopes (1880-1958) shook the world. She wrote a best-selling sex-manual for women and was a controversial birth control pioneer. On a darker note, she also corresponded with Hitler and believed in the creation of super race.

    When Stopes set up her first birth control clinic in 1921, everyone assumed that she had trained in medicine.

    Yet, bizarrely, she was an expert on fossil plants and coal.

    So how did this young palaeontologist come to transform Western society and become one of the most infamous women in history?

  • They have been unkindly compared to garden sheds on wheels, but racing Citroen 2CVs is a serious business.

    This year, 25 competitors entered the 20th annual 24-hour race at Snetterton in Norfolk. It lacks the big budgets and fast cars of its more illustrious Le Mans counterpart, but its competitors will tell you it is a real test of driving skill.

    The RB Racing team eventually won the 738-lap race, recording a fastest lap of just over 53 miles per hour along the way.

    (tags: 2cv racing)
  • In the early days of Michael Moorcock's 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric. In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenwood called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, "Six Days to Save the World", he says those early novels were written in about "three to ten days" each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing.
    (tags: writing)