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Showing posts from February, 2010

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 4 of 4

It's about 8am on Saturday 19th September 1998 and I'm having a cooked breakfast in a little cafe in Mount Pleasant Air Force base on the Falkland Islands. After I've finished eating I walk across the road with my colleagues and check in to board the plane home to the UK. We're hitching a ride home with the RAF. there are no scheduled flights to and from the Islands to the UK so the only way to travel is by chater flight (see part 1) or by buying a spare seat on an army rotation plane. After a couple of hours of waiting we walk out across the tarmac (no transfer buses here). It's quite a trek to the 737. We board, settle in and soon the plane is taxiing out to the runway. My first thought as we soared into the patchy clouds was how intensely the plane seemed to be banking as it climbed. I wondered if the pilot was showing off to his buddies in the back just how he could push the flight envelope of a 737 in the same way as he could with a jet fighter. It was nerv

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 3 of 4

I'm sitting in a Bristow personnel transport helicopter built to carry about 30 people. We're hovering about 2 feet above the runway at Mount Pleasant Airforce Base and I'm wearing a ridiculous (but lifesaving) 1-piece suit with rubber seals around the neck, wrists and ankles. Some of the other guys who I'm sharing this flight with have been in the training simulator and passed an exam to be here (a dummy helicopter cabin is dunked upside down into a swimming pool and if you don't escape to the surface, you don't pass the exam, among other things). My training consists of a 20 minute video, most of which is about how to put the suit on. The video told me that is you're not wearing the suit when the helicopter ditches into the frozen South Atlantic, then you'll live for about 1 minute and 40 seconds. With the suit, you get to tread water for an additional 6 minutes before freezing to death. It's hard to know which is better, given that nobody could ge

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 2 of 4

It's 4:30am, mid-September 1998 and I'm up and about, making a quick cup of coffee in my hotel room and getting dressed for a day at the portacabin, sorry office. When I'm dressed I plug in the headphones on my CD Walkman and step out into the frozen night. It's perfectly still and perfectly clear. I listen to Paul Carrack's album "Beautiful World" and I walk to the other side of the sleeping town of Port Stanley. The stars are unrecognisable above me but they are present in their millions in a truly breathtaking vista. There's no pollution here. My workday began at 5am, which was 9am in the UK. I was dealing with our internet service provider in Wigmore Street in London, and the Cable and Wireless folks in Aberdeen. Come 1:30pm, when it was 5:30pm in the UK, my day came to an end, and I was free to please myself for the afternoon. The Head of Operations offered me one of the SUV's to go driving if I liked, but I couldn't drive. However there

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 1 of 4

All this stuff in the news about the commencement of offshore drilling in the Falkland Islands brings back vivid memories of the previous drilling round which took place in 1998, which I was there for. I wanted to write a bit about it because the time I spent on the island gave me a lot of inspiration for my science-fiction writing, and three of my stories ( Remnants , Galileo's Tides and The Techipre Filament ) are based on memories of that trip. This blog entry will be in four parts. At the time I was working for one of the oil companies drilling there (obviously) and I remember there was some speculation as to whether I would get to go with the exploration team who were headed down to the Islands. But, given the remote location it was decided that my IT skills would be essential to set up and maintain the email/phone link to the London office, and ensure the team's laptops and PC's were working at all times. The project was costing $100,000 a day, so downtime would be

Web Fiction Guide reviews Spireclaw

Fiona Gregory over at the Web Fiction Guide has given my eNovel "Spireclaw" a respectable 4 out of 5. She starts her review by saying... "Within the first paragraph of this novel I knew I was in the hands of a skillful, practised writer. The atmosphere is eerie and evocative as the main character, Kieran, wakes from a disturbing dream and looks out the window into the dark, wind tossed yard." But she seemed to struggle with the ending. This was either because she somehow managed to skip a big chunk of the penultimate chapter, then had to go back and read it after realising her error, or because she found the twist ending a little too shocking (and let's face it, she won't have been the first to have that reaction). But she finishes up the review on a positive note by saying... "If you’d like to read a nicely crafted modern dark (subtly) supernatural mystery set in London, here’s your book." All in all a very positive review.

The Future of The Axiom Few

SF Crowsnest's Rod MacDonald has confirmed himself as a fan of The Axiom Few. In his review of their latest appearance in Jupiter SF 27, he describes The Voidant Lance as "an electric story" and calls out to Channel 4 to make a TV series! High praise indeed and very inspiring for me. SFRevu's Sam Tomaino speaks just as highly of the story and was also kind enough to link to my website for the follow-up. So I'm five stories into The Axiom Few's world and I'm wondering whether to flesh out the canon with more short stories or press on with a novel. A novel, as I said before, would be a big undertaking and I have a few ideas for it, but I don't want to undermine the format of the short stories which seems to work so well. I rather like the idea of constructing the whole canvas (back story and all) in a collection of short stories that fit together as puzzle pieces, rather like they are beginning to now. Other ideas have crossed my mind, such as creat