Bugs of the Empire
A little while ago I wrote about the Eagle Comic in the early 1960s. The Captain was a similar magazine from the beginning of the twentieth century. The upsurge in adventure books for boys in the late...
View ArticleA thousand miles an hour – the Bloodhound SSC
This week I attended a one-day education conference in Lancaster House, hosted by the British Government as part of the diplomatic activities surrounding the Olympic Games. I spent a while chatting to...
View ArticleLife Before Man
On my last trip up to Yorkshire I found one of my favourite childhood books, Life Before Man, by Zdenek Burian (pictures) and Zdenek V. Spinar (text), published in 1972 by Thames and Hudson. I bought...
View ArticleMinecraft Memory Palace
I’ve been a fan of memory systems for years, especially the Memory Palace method of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Known as the ‘System of Locii’ this is based on the principle of using places to...
View ArticleEuropa Report (2013)
Spoiler Alert News from Space last week confirmed the existence of an ocean underneath the icy surface of Enceladus. Furthermore it seems that this immense body of water is in contact with the moon’s...
View ArticleSoviet Space Art
Last week I was working in Russia. I attended a conference in Tver, halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg where I was set on fire. I was also asked to be one of the judges for a final graduation...
View ArticleInterstellar (2014)
**WARNING – Major Spoiler Alerts** I’ve been face down writing AntiHelix for the last month so I’ve neglected this blog a little, but having seen Interstellar on its opening night yesterday I thought...
View ArticleLife on Uranus – Frank R. Paul, Fantastic Adventures April 1940
I came back from Eastercon 2015 with several pulp magazines, including a couple of copies of Fantastic Adventures carrying Frank R. Paul’s ‘Life on..’ series. This was a wildly optimistic […]
View ArticleThe Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, and Logicomix
Comics again, this time with a couple of wonderful graphic novels that tackle similar mathematical themes but in very different ways. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis […]
View ArticleCosmonauts at the British Science Museum
The only mildly interesting scene in that otherwise steaming heap of found-footage nonsense Apollo 18 is when the US astronauts stumble across the Soviet LK Lunar lander sitting in a […]
View ArticleScience Wonder Stories – June 1929
The first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, is forever linked to Hugo Gernsback. In reality he was only in charge for three years. By April 1929 the Experimenter Publishing Company […]
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