Shadows of the Apt

The fantasy genre is one of the most divided genres in the aforementioned police state of genre fiction (1). I’m not talking about science fiction here, or perhaps I am. It’s harder to draw that boundary than you think. After all, there is the distinct old-school “hard” science fiction, where the point of the story is […]

Just a brief rant, really, and nothing much to do with anything except the human condition.   I’m a sporadic trawler of Youtube, and a short while ago I decided to scare up some natural history. I did a little searching on sea critters, and got the usual decent crop: octopus attacks shark, enormously long sea cucumber-like thing claimed unknown to […]

Palaeontology, hotbed of political controversy, jingoism and prejudice!   A bold statement, you might think. I mean, anthropology, yes. One can see how debates over the history and development of the various races(1) of man could be turned to a number of political ends, and generally highly undesirable ones, but go back far enough for palaeontology to […]

Before I get on with the main business, a digression, also a confession.  While moving house I uncovered some mouldering old books, buried since the antediluvian eras when first they was writ. For long ages of man they had slumbered, the nightmares within their pages lost to recall, until I was fool enough to empty all those boxes that I’d […]

Actually, before all that, what was that about insects?   After promising some manner of insectery, which in itself is a monstrous and unwieldly neologism (1), I appear to have failed to deliver. The thronging hordes in their millions of species have been conspicuously absent. Even the affectation “the insect man” is currently unsubstantiated.(2) Why, then, “theinsectman”?(6) […]

But I digress: specifically I digress to consider this disturbing new phenomenon that is currently rife (and it’s rare to get a chance to use the word ‘rife’) on our streets: the blog. It’s a strange condition that prompts people who are (one assumes) otherwise sane to actively perpetrate a kind of personal reality television on any unsuspecting passer-by who […]

Considerably harder than, say, breaking up, no matter what Neil Sedaka has to say about it.   This has nothing to do with writing, insects, fantasy or blogs, save in that it accounts for the somewhat scattershot nature of entries at this end. Second post and already subject drift has set in. Never mind. It’s spleen-venting […]