All the World’s an Eavesdropping stage.

Wired’s Threat Level blog has an interesting piece on the  NSA’s release of paper’s regarding the discovery of electromagnetic vulnerabilities in encyption machines which led to various bits of research in cracking during the Cold War. TEMPEST, the name for the attack, was proved in 1943 but it appears disppeared until 1951 when the CIA […]

Pastoral passions in Disney

The New York Times book review has a piece on The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Amazon UK) which discusses the pastoralist view of nature presented (think Bambi which outraged hunters in 1942 on its release) in its films.
Disney does sentimentalise the children’s stories that it creates and arguably always has done. The […]

Scott Westerfeld gets high on a Zeppelin

Scott Westerfeld’s next book is an alternate history set around Word War One and as part of research he got to to go on an airship. Not just an airship but a Zeppelin. Sigh.
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Re-reading Enid Blyton

Caitlin Moran has posted a blog item on reading children’s fiction to her child and rediscovering some gems, particularly Enid Blyton. (I did once try to read Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit to Mia but being a cat she wanted to chew the book so that was the end of that.) I have to say I […]

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem due

Atlantic Books will be publishing the new Neal Stephenson, Anathem (Amazon UK), in September which I’m hoping is going to give some answers as the nature of Enoch. How Root is he? What has  Stephenson really been driving at since the awesome Cryptonomicon?
Synopsis from Amazon:
“Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a […]

Weird Tales celebrates 85 Weird creators

Weird Tales has posted a great list of 85 weird authors including Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, Tim Burton and so on in a list which respects weirdness and not genre boundaries.  They will be running a piece on each creator a day.
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Harry Potter and the Manhattan court room

BBC’s iPM, the personal version of the PM programme, had an interview with Steve Vander Ark about the court case (it should be on the podcast).
Having heard it, I’m in two minds whether he and RDR are naive or wilfully keeping their head in the sand. Firstly there is the issue of how the contributors […]

The problem of Hermione: the role of Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter novels

Girls in young adult fantasy novels tend to fare rather poorly, especially in the light of Susan from the Chronicles of Narnia. When Aslan admits the Pevensies into paradise, Susan is barred because she has forgotten Narnia and is more interested in stockings and the real adult world, because she has dared to want […]

Talking Midnight with Scott Westerfeld

Scott Westerfeld recently took some time to talk about Extras and Midnighters. I’ll post the link to the Extras questions once they are online.
One of the things that struck me was that there’s a certain school rites of passage feel.
My Dad was a data processing guy in the 60s, he ended up working with Nasa […]