I was casually asking ChatGPT what it knew about me when it told me I’d been on trial for money laundering. I don’t remember that time tine because it turns out there is another Matthew Brown who lives in the area. The scary part was how ChatGPT pulled together my …
I’ve spent more than a reasonable amount of time figuring out how to feel and move past the news concerning my one-time literary hero, Neil Gaiman. After a serious back and forth in my mind I arrived at the station marked, “All heroes fall in the end“. This might not …
You’ve heard of full names but let me introduce you to even fuller names. In Iain M. Banks‘s Culture novels, names act as an address if the person concerned stays where they were brought up [ref]. This got me thinking about the roles of names in the age of The …
I’ve been sketching ideas of late. Mostly to learn how to get the best out of my new brush-tip pens but also to shake off the rust from my (limited) art skills. This is a before and after of the digital clean-up of a mobile snap I took of one …
WITNESS is a theoretical system that logs number plates in an encrypted database that can later give you a WITNESS statement if it saw a target car or bike at a given time. I could make it for real but I am mostly exploring the idea for fiction. I had …
This is a snippet of dialouge from my upcoming Visual Novel (The Spell Collector) between the titular Wizard (W) and their assistant Brian (B). It appears after chapter zero. W: Tell me something Brian. B: What do you want to know teacher? W: I truly appreciate the assistance you have …
This is in reply to: Writers, tell us about your WIP Yesterday I started writing a story. I called it “Cube”. It is about a person who one day discovered they have the ability to summon a large extra-dimensional space. My plan is to write each episode, take it to …
In the update, I hinted that the first step was to resolve the guests and plus-ones. In this post, I am going to walk you through some of the clues and try to figure out who the guests and plus-ones were. Massive spoilers to follow. This is the grid that …
For the 7th of December #TimeTravelAuthors question set by Julie Bihn, will be (unless any of you go back and change it) the question of the Earth moving. I shall make the case that this is not a problem at all. Or, rather, I will make several independent cases. “But …
There is a sense you can get in some quarters that Sci-Fi that isn’t serious (Hard Sci-Fi) is (in some gatekeeper way) invalid. I’m calling BS on that right here. Soft Sci-Fi is still Sci-Fi. Fans of the hardest Sci-Fis might not like it but the world does not turn …
