I’m delighted to have a short story featured in Crises and Conflicts, a new anthology of space and military science fiction, just published by NewCon Press as part of their 10th Anniversary celebrations.
My piece, ‘Round Trip’ is a tale of loneliness, obsession, patience, and the tedious experience of waiting for a no-frills budget space shuttle to Jupiter (we’ve all be there).
The central science fiction idea in the story is that the universe is finite and curved, a theory developed by the cosmologist Professor Janna Levin. I can highly recommend her book How The Universe Got Its Spots and her beautiful Moth story ‘Life on a Mobius Strip‘. Continue reading
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Societal progress moves at a glacial pace. Sexism didn’t go away when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and it’s still with us even though Teresa May now occupies Number 10 Downing Street.
Still, it’s interesting (to me, at least) to watch our societal attitudes change, even at the quantum level. In fact, I think it is particularly worthwhile to note the most granular changes in our discourse: in this case, how we talk about women and men.
Many people have shared this article by Nicole Morely in the Metro: ‘Theresa May’s husband steals the show in sexy navy suit as he starts new life as First Man‘.
Continue reading
The worrying news from Turkey has made me think about the way in which the recent political machinations within the British Labour Party have been described (usually by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn) as a ‘coup’.
I’m sure the people who use that word do not mean to suggest that the 171 Labour MPs who want Mr Corbyn to resign are equivalent to soldiers with guns. But use of the word does imply that the manoeuvrings are anti-democratic.
But they are not. They are profoundly democratic. Continue reading
Earlier this year I recorded a podcast with the award-winning journalist Anjan Sundaram. We discussed his wonderful book Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, an account of the extinction of press freedom in Rwanda.
This week the podcast and an edited transcript of part of the discussion was posted in the PEN Atlas section of the English PEN website. You can listen to it on SoundCloud or via the player below.
Rt. Hon. Jeremy Corbyn MP has two jobs and two job titles. First, he is Leader of the Labour Party, a position to which he was elected by a majority of those eligible to vote, in every voter category (members, registered supporters, affiliates). If that were the whole story then a leadership challenge would be completely undemocratic and wrong.
However, Mr Corbyn is also Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. This is not some ceremonial title you get when elevated to a particular position, like Lord of the Isles or Second Lord of the Treasury. Instead it is a post that fulfills a crucial rôle in our democracy, scrutinising Government actions and Bills on behalf of the entire country, including people who did not vote Labour. Just as the Prime Minister (First Lord of the Treasury, by the way) is accountable and answerable to everyone, so too is the Leader of the Opposition. Continue reading