grahambinns.com

From BBC News:

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90...

Sir Arthur's vivid - and detailed - descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world.

He was the author of more than 100 fiction and non-fiction books, and his writings are credited by many observers with giving science fiction - a genre often accused of veering towards the fantastical - a human and practical face.

I think there are few writers that I could name who have been more influential on my own worldview than Arthur C. Clarke. Although his writing has never really influenced mine - I tend to write in a different strand of his genre if at all - it did instil into me some basic rigours of the rule of writing: Be truthful, within your own universe; once you've set the rules for yourself, don't break them and, most importantly of all, Science Fiction is about the people, not the science. The science is incidental.

I remember a line from his book of essays, Greetings, Carbon-based Bipeds!, specifically from his epitaph to Isaac Asimov. It went something like this:

I once introduced Isaac to a dinner by saying "Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one Isaac Asimov." Well now there is no Isaac Asimov and the world is a poorer place for it.

I think that you could pretty much use his own words to describe how a lot of science fiction readers and writers feel right now.

And so one of the greats of our age passes into history. But, as always, his legacy remains.

My colleague and friend Matt Revell has a nice summary of some of the reasons for rising domestic fuel prices in the UK at the moment. A phrase that particularly caught my eye was this one:

Wind power, also, is not reliable nor particularly efficient and requires generation from other sources (coal, gas, nuclear, for example) to back it up when it’s either too windy or not quite windy enough. So, this is the Goldilocks of power generation and just like Goldilocks in the story, it can’t go for that long without needing a lie down; it’s the energy source with ME. So, no, your electricity won’t be free and nor should it be.

I confess that I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the telly these days. It's a means for me to watch DVDs and little else; most of the news content I read on a daily basis is read via the intertubes. But the point that Matt is making in his post, the one about the problem with TV audiences, or rather with TV programs who cater to the lowest common denominator and require no effort from their audience (that's how I see it, it may not be how Matt sees it) is a valid one.

One of the problems with living in an age of high information availability, when all you need to do to be able to know something more about an issue is look it up on Google, is that people accept the information that comes to them almost without question, in the same way that a stereotypical Daily Wail reader will accept the paper's opinion that the country is going to the dogs almost every single day of the week.

Is this just a human problem? Are we just naturally rather too trusting of, well, just about anyone who seems to be better informed than us? One of the most common phrases I've heard - and which has irked me no end - over the years is "It's (in the paper|on the web|on the TV) so it must be true!"

Anyway, I'm not going to go on further in a post that started out with a purpose but has subsequently become somewhat disjointed and is turning into a rant. Go and read Matt's post for a saner and less crabby commentary on matters.

Instead, dear reader, I'll leave you with a summary of my thinking on such matters by that other web luminary, XKCD:

For every prat like this there's an equal and opposite prat like this:

The government faces a legal challenge for sending every secondary school in England a copy of Al Gore's climate change film An Inconvenient Truth.

... A father from Kent, Stuart Dimmock, has lodged papers at London's High Court seeking judicial review. He is reportedly also seeking to prevent schools receiving the DVDs.

Well, the muse seems to have deserted me today, so it's back to editing the Muse manuscript instead. I got through a chapter of edits last night - the dramatic bits were okay; it was the bits in between that needed refining - and I'm now at 77 out of 333 pages edited. You can see the count on the right hand side of the page.

In-between the bursts of editing (you can only concentrate on your own prose for so long, I find, before you need to take a break) I'm watching the countdown to the shuttle launch on NASA TV. At the moment the clock is at T -9 minutes and holding, and unlike yesterday's countdown, which I was alternating with the cricket - well done to England by the way - at work, it sounds like everything is go for launch. For a sci-fi space junkie this is good news.

In other news, the non-explosive battery for my laptop arrived this morning. This is especially good timing as I'm going to be travelling down to London for work this week, and I didn't feel particularly like blowing up the train when I plugged my laptop in. The new battery charged remarkably quickly, however, which makes me somewhat suspicious. Perhaps I'm just being over-cautious but I think I might have to give it a few charge-discharge cycles before I'm sure that it's working properly. The nice people at Dell have also sent me a jiffy bag and a UPS label for the old battery, so I can get rid of it without worrying about losing any necessary or, indeed, unnecessary limbs.

And now, back to work.