Writing 'Afterglow' causes me to think a lot about long-term nuclear waste management. I hope that as technology improves, we will be able to generate less waste and that nuclear fission will just be a stop-gap technology, but as things are, it's essential to meet our growing energy demands while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.


Now a confession: the NIMBY syndrome is what turned me on to both the peace movement and the green movement. West Germany at the time was at the fore-front of the Cold War, with several American-run missile deposits within cycling distance of where I lived. As for nuclear power, the issue was surrounded by propaganda and spin which taught me early on to mistrust the government. I went to the library, read what I could and discovered that I'll never be a nuclear physicist. So be it.

But we have all grown up, and my world has expanded beyond what was then my backyard. What are the actual consequences of not using nuclear energy? And has the European stance against genetically modified crops caused harm in Africa where such crops could be grown more efficiently, with less ecological damage? But then I'm a biologist and I not only consider genetic engineering useful, but essential. We better hop to it, because agroengineering will be as important as the Green Revolution if we want to feed the world tomorrow with less water and more degraded land on our hands. The precious European stance may mean that in part we are already too late, although I'd be the first to tighten the thumb screw on the patent vultures buying into the likes of Monsanto.

But that is a whole other topic.

The NIMBY syndrome was thrown in my face when our moving truck passed the idyllic village of Aldermaston in Berkshire and trundled along the road towards the county boundary opposite our new home in Tadley. We passed a flood-lit stretch of barren earth, lined with a double row of razor-wire fences with what I imagined watchtowers placed at regular intervals. I had suffered a time-warp; I thought I was back at the border with East Germany.

But this was merely the site of the Atomic Weapons Establishment which covers 750 acres of a former airfield within strolling distance of where we would now live.

So, do I have a problem with having a bomb factory in my back yard? Duh, I'm with the peace movement.

Is it dangerous? Let's just say that the 2007 flood resulted in a near-miss event at the nearby Burghfield site. The report was redacted, the company did its best to cover up the incident and the spin engines are spinning at full throttle. Not a way to make friends with the neighbours.

But...

Whatever I feel about the bombs in my backyard and the outrage that is the Trident upgrade, AWE Burghfield is also a decommissioning site. And when we finally come to dismantle the horrible legacy of the Cold War once and for all (Obama is making promising noises and Britain—America's lapdog—will come to heel), then those things will have to be dismantled somewhere.

And I'm more than happy to have that happen in my backyard.

The New Yorker has taken note. But apparently, we're still at the level of eighties' hype about designer babies here <rolleyes />:

'I wondered how much of this was science fiction. Endy stood up. “Can I show you something?” he asked, as he walked over to a bookshelf and grabbed four gray bottles. Each one contained about half a cup of sugar, and each had a letter on it: A, T, C, or G, for the four nucleotides in our DNA. “You can buy jars of these chemicals that are derived from sugarcane,” he said. “And they end up being the four bases of DNA in a form that can be readily assembled. You hook the bottles up to a machine, and into the machine comes information from a computer, a sequence of DNA—like T-A-A-T-A-G-C-A-A. You program in whatever you want to build, and that machine will stitch the genetic material together from scratch. This is the recipe: you take information and the raw chemicals and compile genetic material. Just sit down at your laptop and type the letters and out comes your organism.”'

Is the guy talking about expanding oligonucleotides into genomes? No wonder he got a D in biology!

All throughout the article, bacteria are being mixed up with eukaryotes, and I'm not talking about C. elegans, but babies and wooly mammoths (!).

Sheesh...

[EDIT: just below that paragraph, he owns up to oversimplification (to put it mildly), but the nascent science of genomics seems to have passed him by. He muses:

“If the cells in our bodies had a little memory, think what we could do,” [...]"...Wow, this cell has divided two hundred times, it’s obviously lost control of itself and become cancer..."

Well, duh, cells do have memory (genomics again, although I confess to not having read up on it yet). Cancer is what happens when it, and associated control and repair pathways, fail. For synthbiol, people ought to take a closer look at the existing work on slime molds.]

[ANOTHER EDIT: it's been a while since I dropped by here (and since I've read that essay), just to say don't even get me started on the field of immunology he so completely ignores further down...]

So, we're back to the floating ads problem that drove me away from my previous hosting service. If people insist on uglifying their users' homepages, they cannot expect loyalty in return. I don't mind discrete ads or links, but I do mind if visitors crinkle their nose in disgust at in-yer-face advertising in what is my online reception area.

So hubby and I are trying to make our own widget feed reader, and I'll keep you posted about our progress, with a howto to follow (I hope). But I have wasted so much time on this that I didn't even wash up or cook dinner yesterday, let alone work on my novel, so it may take a while.

A note before I start: I spent a whole afternoon messing around with php* before finding out that my hosting service doesn't support it. It speaks volumes that none of the developers in that company have their own sites there. One of them recommended Dreamhost or Webfaction to me, but if you just want to display your blog content, Posterous is more than happy to host your domain free of charge (!). You can even choose your own theme.

Which rather begs the question as to why they partnered with a horrible site such as Widgetbox just to add some more basic functionality.

*Note that php is required, even the Javascript to RSS conversion services use it—those that are still active. For this workaround, we'll probably have to stick the code on our ISP page and point my useless DNS at it.

[EDIT: For now I'm happy with FeedWind, although it does need some tweaking.]

Argh, I know I said no instantaneous viruses, then I'm doing it myself. Of course these critters are mean engineered bionanites, but still...

It was happening too fast. Talia could hear shouts from outside even as the High Priestess spoke. She focussed on her briefly, her eyes glittering behind her mask, and Talia sprung into action. She saw the parrot rise towards the ceiling in a flash of green and red as she grabbed Lara's hand and ran, the Wanderer close behind.
The guards moved aside to let them pass, then retook their position in front of the chamber doors, stingers at the ready. Prepared to die for their lady.
Soon they would all be dead.
They ran back across the courtyard, rounding the granite throne and pyramidal steps—the site of Maro's sacrifice—and threw themselves at the tunnel entrance as the walls began to shake. The biolumes in the caverns were streaked with angry red swirls, triggered by seismic disturbances. They were half-way across the inner chamber when the outer cavern collapsed with an ominous rumble, throwing out big plumes of dust.
In the dying light, Talia made out the pool's shimmering surface, the source of the Temple's holy water. Without a moment to think about the sacrilege, she jumped, shouting at the others to follow.
The water clamped her heart in an icy fist. She sank into blackness, then her feet touched ground. She groped blindly, feeling scraggy rock, kicking against water and stone. A big hand grabbed her and pulled. Retching and gasping she emerged into absolute darkness.
"Lara!"
"I'm here!"
Another voice, deep and resonant. "That was a damn tight fit!"
Talia felt something push against the small of her back, propelling her to scrabble out of the water and onto the rocky ground. Lara's hand took hold of her arm and pulled her all the way. She'd always been the tomboy, but even so Talia was amazed at how assuredly she dealt with the situation.
It was utterly black. Unable to see where they were, they felt around with the flat of their hands for a place smooth enough to sit. Talia couldn't help imagining snakes and scorpions all around them, although there was unlikely to be any food for the creatures down here. After a while her breathing slowed.
Gradually, a dot of light became visible, turning brighter as the sun outside reached its zenith.
"That's the exit," the Wanderer said, "but we'll wait here for now. If Lativa is right, the Bloodfever will kill everybody in Torala and it will continue to spread for another day or two, hopefully infecting the marauders camped outside the city walls before the warriors from Aran get here. It's a terrible risk to take, and a terrible sacrifice. And it's only the opening salvo in this war."
Talia—who had barely regained her breath—felt it catch as the meaning of his words sank in. "No!" she screamed. "Mother!"
"Shhh," Lara grabbed her arm and shook her. "It's too late for them."
Talia didn't know how long they sat down there in the dark—didn't care—as she wept for all she had known.
#
Screams cut off by the sound of carnage; shuffling footsteps silenced as their owners fell; the clanging of swords interrupted by wet slaps where they struck; flesh sizzling where stingers found purchase...
Gradually, the sounds of battle faded. As night fell, velvety pools of blood mingled with softly oozing luminescence from shattered globes in the great courtyard.
In the chamber of the High Priestess, the great cat lifted its head from the throat of its victim, steel reflecting briefly in its amber eyes as the sword struck its neck. It fell next to the crumpled form of its mistress, her mask ripped from her face to reveal a perpetually startled frown.
The dead were the lucky ones.
Dust descended through airducts like vapour exhaled by the reaper himself, enveloping the marauders and their victims alike. Mothers breathed it in as they cowered with their bodies wrapped around their babies. Children breathed it in as they hid in nooks and crannies, waiting with their eyes scrunched tightly shut and their fists dug into their ears until it would all be over. The dying drew it with in their last breaths, exhaling it into the faces of their killers.
Silence fell in the doomed city and on the battlefield outside.
Then, in the morning, the real dying began.

Cafédirect is our favourite brand of coffee. It no only tastes better but it was there long before other fairtrade-labelled brands lined the supermarket shelves.

Gradually other producers followed suit, but it's been a long slog. Despite their astronomical profit margins, for many years Starbucks required customers to pay a premium for fairtrade coffee, and until very recently, it was a long way from being standard:

This year, for example, Starbucks will buy a million pounds of Fair Trade coffee, less than 1% of the company's total purchases. BBC News, Feb. 2002

However, the PR payoffs of selling ethical products didn't pass the producers by for long. I remember the prominently-labelled Percol 'Coffee Kids' brand. Reading the small print on the pack revealed that only a tiny percentage of the sales price—much less than accounted for by the price differential—was passed on to the Coffee Kids charity. To its credit, the brand raised awareness. But it also detracted from brands that carried the Fairtade mark.

Nowadays, this isn't good enough. Consumers are more aware and insist on minimum standards. Being ethical is good business, and it seems that everybody wants a slice of the pie. But while the Fairtrade mark has become more visible, not everybody is playing fair. Many leading brands and outlets make use of 'fairtrade-lite' schemes to con their customers into believing that they're paying for ethical products.

Part of it—as usual—is caused by the public confusion about labelling schemes. I didn't know for instance that the Rainforest Alliance only requires 30% of product to be certified. Kenco strives to buy all its coffee from RA-certified farms by 2010, and have launched a big advertising campaign to this effect. Colour me unimpressed.

But price remains a major issue, especially in the current economic climate. When my favourite coffee brand eclipsed the 3-pound-mark, I switched to other brands for a while. The current 33% free promotion made me switch back, and after reading up on the issue for a bit, I think that I'm going to stick with it.

If you would like to do a bit more reading, it may be an idea to check out the this review about ethical standards and labels published by the Overseas Development Institute 2008. I admit that I haven't looked at it yet.

This is the bastard child of my defunct-at-inception Sandwich Selector (note: that is a demo page, and the domain is still for sale) and the raw analytical power of the Axiascope.

This year I will probably be here for Christmas and we'll be visiting a handful of friends and rellies and their friends and rellies, most of whom I will never have met before. It's hard enough to find suitable presents for the first set, but at least I know their tastes. When it comes to the dozens of people in their orbit, how do you choose presents for them, and how much do you budget?

One trick is to go for small gifts which can easily be split if unexpected guests turn up, but which you can heap on those present if you don't want to appear stingy. Also generic gifts which you won't mind keeping for yourself or pass on at other times of the year. One can never have enough socks, puzzle games or boxes of fancy chocolate.

To get around the burden of planning and last minute shopping, I came up with The Christmas Gift Engine.

Basically it's an expert system based on the input of shrinks, social workers, parents, gift shop assistants and the people who work behind the return counters of the John Lewis Partnership. You can specify the number of people in various age groups (infants, kids, tweens, adults, elders) and gift categories for each of them (non-sexist toys and accessories, gadgets, consumables etc.) and—optional—specify their respective priority rankings so that Granny's gift will have cost more than your sister-in-law's Auntie Inga's . The system then suggests/asks for a total budget, which can be tweaked, and you select packaging options etc. for that final personal touch.

Nobody would be able to tell that you didn't spend hours agonising about what to get for your friend's cousins and the neighbours' new baby :)

[NOTE: this is something I scribbled on the bus on Saturday but didn't get to blog since I spent the weekend offline. However, technology marches ever on and I see that I've been beaten to it. Still, I like my version better.]

I keep my phone in my bag and the charger plugged into the wall and rarely the twain shall meet.

This is because I don't use my phone much, so I keep it mostly switched off. But the problem would be the same if it was the opposite: you need to make that phone call—and you're out of juice.

Well, I've hear of clockwork radio and wind-up torches (I even own one of those; not that there's room in my backpack when I take the tent) so this could be the solution: the Squeezy Phone™, lined with a spongy layer that contains springs or cogwheels¹ that charge the battery when squeezed.

It doubles as an executive toy: you can phone your client/boss and imagine you're strangling them at the same time ;)

¹Hey, I'm a zoologist, not an engineer!

We've finally made it to the shops, which is always a major effort when you live in Tadley and when 'the shops' has to include at least one traditional butcher or farm shop.

There is still no decent place to get seasonal veg out here, so Morrison's had to stand in. Saying that, Morrison's veg selection is very good.

So here goes:

• Rib-eye steak with chips & mixed salad.
  We had that yesterday and perhaps the steak needed frying a little longer. I fried it hot to sear but left it very underdone, which wouldn't be a problem hadn't the meet been a little too dry. You can only do this with well-hung meat; most supermarket steak is fit only for use in curries or stews. At least it has been since we sampled proper steak in Alberta.
  
  
• Venison stew with bitter chocolate sauce and red cabbage (season's first)
  Mutti's recipe for the cabbage, natch. This goes with mash, rather than roast potatoes, as our oven is crap.
  
  
• Mutton curry
  Yes, real mutton. Probably cooked like curry goat or else according to a River Cottage recipe with stuffed vine leaves
  
  
• Chicken with fresh sage stuffing (season's last)
  Although the accompanying squash will be season's first. I've never seen so much squash at Morrison's!
  
  
• Black bean chilli with pico de gallo (season's last)
  Possibly with uchepos, since I found proper corn on the cob)
  
  
• Massaman curry
  The Rick Stein recipe is actually authentic, even if I can only find the paste online (and mis-filed under pastry). The Good Food Magazine had the original recipe and I have the ingredients from my foray into Balinese cooking. Anyway, this is what I do with cheap supermarket steak.
  

So, there you have it. Maybe one day I can return to do some real cooking...

I have surprised myself by producing a synopsis for Afterglow: hooray for outlines (and straight-forward plots)!

It helps that I have used Writer's Café throughout while writing it.

The Ubuntu upgrade (I think of it more as an upgrade than an install) will have to wait until John gets back since he thinks it will only end in tears if I try to do it myself. OK, I know I will never be a geek...

John got Ted to work! Apparently, 'compiling the source code' only takes half an hour or so although there are no cute little desktop icons as yet.

No matter: a light-weight rtf editor was all that stood between me and Ubuntu, and Ted opens a 123k novel with formatted header and preserved spacing in less than three seconds! No matter that the page number drifted off the line. I can live with that.

So, there are no more killer apps for Windows XP, although I shall miss MiKTeX and the sffms package. Shame that that never became industry standard.

Of course I'll have to see how Ted behaves when put together with Word—I suspect that I still have to do my final rtf formatting in Word but I'm having to do that now—but I now have my sleek mean editing and critiquing tool and there are no more excuses to run XP on this machine.

Oh, and did I mention that Writer's Café—which is quickly becoming group-standard—has always been cross-platform? The guy is a genius!

In other news: I'm resting 'Tree of Life' (still unhappy with the opening, still not able to let it go) and have started editing 'Afterglow' which is presumably more straightforward with conflict from the start and a handy quest. It's up to me not to make it fantasy-formulaic. It is the (far-)future, but much of the tech are remnants that look like magic to the protag.

Wow—I seem to be a 4! That's one higher than Bill Hamilton, although I'm not altogether sure that publications submitted prior to the co-author's acquisition of an Erdős Number count.

The again, nobody says they don't ;)

And since you ask (or not!), here's the link.

I've just finished processing ca. 11000 elderberries (each 15ml tablespoon holds about 100 berries and I ended up with just under 1.7l).

We were just in time: there aren't many elder bushes around and the birds fall on them as soon as the berries ripen. We ended up getting chased of some poncy estate by a game keeper with a rifle and 4WD Landrover and I got impaled on fence-posts, scratched by brambles and mauled by nettles which kept my skin tingling all night as if I had immersed myself in mildly electrified bathwater. But it was worth it, we got blackberries and sloes too. In fact sloes are as common here as elderberries were back home.

Around London the berries are just in their prime, hanging in fat glistening clusters from lush green bushes along the fences that line the A30. But there is no time to lose: go and pick them now!

The simplest way to prepare them is to strip them off the stalks with a fork and fill up bottles or jars two thirds with berries, topping up with (strong) vodka. This works especially well if you can freeze the berries first, but it's not necessary. Keep in a dark place, shaking every couple of days or so. They need at least a moth, but I'd give them until Christmas. There is no need to strain.

For immediate use, stir some sugar into the berries and leave until the juice starts to run then add a little water to just cover. Simmer to soften them up, then push the berries through a wire sieve to extract the juice. Simmer to reduce, adding 10 cloves per pint and more sugar until the cordial is quite sweet, then pour into sterile jars (or the empty vodka bottle).

I take these at the same dose as Sambucol: two teaspoons a day during flu season, 2 teaspoons four times daily for 3-4 days as soon as symptoms set in. The cordial should also be nice for use in deserts or herbal infusions. Maybe I'll add some to mulled wine for a super antioxidant booster ;)

Since we moved away from our ethnic neighbourhood—too many years ago—I've experienced a kind of nagging deprivation that is almost a form of poverty: there's no soul food to be had here.

The supermarket shelves are lined with plastic-coated vegetables and flabby slabs of meat. The pork doesn't bear thinking about, and Sainsbury's seem to think that properly hung beef needs to be in the Jamie-approved 'Taste the Difference' range and cost three times as much. The butcher doesn't agree, but there's no local butcher in Tadley. Shopping for what I regard as normal food involves at least a thirty mile round-trip.

Needless to say, there is no goat or mutton here. No tongue or hocks. There are no yams, firm-cooking sweet potatoes (the orange kind are inferior offloads) or plantains. One precious pepper costs as much as five back at the local market and vine tomatoes are expensive, not sold by the box like at the Turkish grocers'. I can't just 'pop out' to pick up a little something when friends come for dinner. But then all our friends are far away too.

There aren't many households here that cook curries and Caribbean stews and Chinese red-cooked belly of pork, with the possible exception of the handful of restaurateurs like the excellent, but oddly isolated, NG Palace which has the best beef rendang this side of Bali. It's expensive, but rightly so. These guys need to go on regular food runs back to civilisation, just as I do.

Then again who can blame the British public? They don't know any better. The eighties and nineties food-revolution has by-passed Middle England completely. Despite Hugh & Co.'s best efforts they don't know that pork sausages don't come naturally in 'reduced fat' versions and that fat-free dairy not only doesn't taste the same but isn't even particularly good for you. One reader nailed it when she admonished Gordon Ramsay for not replacing the milk and butter in his mashed potatoes with water—I rest my case (pity that the link isn't available since it was just a reader's letter in a trashy TV mag. I should have cut it out and scanned it).

We've been to London and I've filled up the boot. There's cooking to be done!

That line made my day :)

But there are many more morsels on Bruce Holland Rogers'" new blog.

...piss me off almost as much as the Guardian-reading green sheep.

But I guess it's a good thing that we have said sheep. The ascent of the environmental movement and its eventual transformation into a pseudo-religion has me chuckling since I attracted dirty looks for asking for a plastic bag in a German village shop in the mid-nineties (hint: I've been with it from the early days of the Greens in 1982/83, but turned my back on them and other movements because of their Luddite manifestos, particularly with regard to GMO).

Here's another discussion about the Guardian's most recent campaign which is apparently aimed at making us feel good by making tiny carbon savings here-and-there, as if it mattered if we fly at all. The climate change deniers are relatively quiet on that particular blog (on of my favourites) because they know they're getting short shrift. Except for the bloke who points out that he'd like to live in the tropics.

So would I. I'd give almost anything to live in the tropics, which is why I'll hop on a plane to Thailand for an extended stay before I'll return here and shiver for the next 3-4 months with the thermostat dialled down to 16⁰C (at least it gets warm in my room when the sun shines). But when I find a blurb mentioning a (sub-)tropical future Britain, I put down the book or story. That's just lazy worldbuilding. Britain isn't going to turn tropical.

Things don't look so twee in other parts of the world. I don't think I have to point out the risk of shifting rainfall patterns that will bring droughts to parts of South America, Africa, Australia and Central- and South Asia, worsening desertification to regions that are already at risk (including parts of Southern Europe)and flooding to others (yes, even here). Nor the increase in adverse weather events exacerbated by a migration of people to the more fertile coastal areas, which are in turn endangered by sea-level rise. There will be more hurricanes and typhoons, more insect-born disease, environmental refugees and water wars.

As to relatively cosy Britain, I would appreciate it if the climate modellers could make up their minds as to what will happen to the Gulfstream as it may get a whole lot chillier here before the end of the century. But climate modelling isn't a clear-cut affair as anybody who watches weather forecasts issued by the Met Office will appreciate. When it comes to the medium-long term there's plenty of wriggle room—until it is too late.

That's it. And there's room for a possible sequel.

Actually, I need to add about a further third in bulk character development, but I have the whole story down on paper for the first time.

Paul Raven made this connection on Futurismic, with the obvious interpretation that having a rare name is desirable ;)



Personas (by Aron Zinman, MIT Media Lab) runs the results of a vanity search through various keyword filters to give an impression of 'how the internet sees you'

However, if this should ever assume social significance, not only would the John Smiths of the world be tempted to go by their username handles (and we may see very interesting aliases used in the world of business and academia!) but people who share their names with undesirables will be desperate to add other distinguishing features to their profile.

Nephos—now renamed Badal—is luminous, relatively speaking. In the darkness deep below the mighty trees, bioluminescence rules.

Our heroes are on the run in the trunk's cavernous interior, chased by something unspeakable (I haven't thought about its morphology yet). They know full well that Badal organisms can see into the infrared, but they need at least a weak source of light for their enhanced vision to pick up. In the soup-like atmosphere of Badal with its weaker sun, not a lot of UV light would reach the ground, you'd think. Problem solved.

Not necessarily. Nitrogen compounds reflect UV light strongly, which is why barn owls can hunt by following the urine trails of their prey (if memory serves, many murids dribble urine on a continuous basis) and scorpions light up like Christmas decorations under UV light. UV lamps also frequently feature on television shows about the dismal state of public bathroom facilities, and it's not just the urine stains that show up, it's the bacteria and moulds that are growing on them.

So maybe it isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination to reason that the ability to see in the UV may be of use to detect tasty protein morsels on decaying matter in the deep sea, and indeed it turns out that there are UV sensitive crustaceans at least 600m beneath the surface. The only problem is: where does the UV light come from that far down?

I can't find much about the existence of potentially UV bioluminescent bacteria, but the hunt is on to discover this phenomenon in various benthic organisms. Who knows, it may be more common than we think.

But if the black light cannot hide our heroes from whatever is lurking in the deep dark interior of the trunk, at the moment it doesn't seem that anything can save them either.

A whole spate of SF authors keep writing about humans with green skin, photosynthesis taking care of (part of) their energy needs, and they make it sound as if this is a nifty new idea.

It ain't, and it doesn't work (but if that Varley novel is what I think it is, he made it work!).

If I read another novel/story about green-skinned heroes and (so help me) creatures that use chloroplasts in place of chromatophores, I'm going to throw the thing at the wall. Some of those authors seem to flaunt their lack of any scientific background, and they all seem to believe that none of the pantheon of past hard SF writers had the idea for this simplest of modifications before, which is an insult in itself.

Even assuming zero cost, chlorophyll takes energy to maintain. To get any net return out of it, you'll need to sit very still and naked in broad sunshine. The surface area required to give a net yield which plants channel into seeds and roots that we eat for energy is huge.

There is a reason why animals only photosynthesise if they are small, transparent and aquatic and it pays them to house symbionts.

So come on SF authors, desist!

Pet peeve#2: the gratuitous cloning of fully functional adult bodies. Nobody understands why my clones grow up as babies, and even the crew (who have growth acceleration and mindseed patterns guiding their neural development) have to get up and work out.

More about that later.

(Yeah, I know I'm engaging in major handwaving with the mindseeds, never mind the exowombs, but cut me some slack...)

Amazon is like a sweet shop and (as someone has pointed out, but I can't remember who) nowadays you carry your bank account in your wallet. Which is why I hardly ever go there. There is also something physically pleasant about browsing in your local bookshop and finding that they have a new book by your favourite author or a new edition of a past favourite you've last read decades ago.

However, the problem with modern bookshops is that these pleasures are few and far between. Authors you'll find on this year's, last year's or even older awards lists are simply not stocked by the large chain stores. I've got a copy of Charles Stross' The Family Trade as a freebie when registering for Orbital 2008 (probably because the publisher thought—quite rightly—that I'd be hooked), but I've never seen its successors in any of the stores I've visited, nor in the library (which has only recently acquired Accelerando). Amazon is the only way to get at these titles.

So, yeah, hooray for Amazon. However this isn't good news for writers, some of whom may be guaranteed sellers in the US, but are virtual unknowns over here or vice versa. As I've said above, I rarely order from the site, and it does little in terms of exposure for authors to have their books listed there. Many of the books I end up chasing down there have a handful of reviews at best (I'm not in the habit of writing Amazon reviews when sober and have since thought better of writing them when drunk).

When I was a kid, and subsequently a poor student, I discovered all of my favourite authors in the library. Nowadays this is still true, although I also discover them through 'best of' anthologies and SF magazines (far fewer through webzines), or else by taking a little time while browsing the shelves at Borders. I like to look at the physical product, leaf through it and read a few snippets (always the opening paragraph and a short middle section). If the publishers don't get the books into the stores and into the libraries, and therefore into the hands of the reader, I'm unlikely to buy them, unless there is a way for me to sample the authors first. It speaks volumes that three of the five nominees for the 2009 Hugo for Best Novel have a cult online following (and one of the 2007 nominees should have one).

As for shopping with Amazon UK: if I request for an item to be gift-wrapped, doesn't it follow that I probably don't want—you know—send it to myself?

[EDIT: ah crap, the gift wrap request didn't get through. Must check more carefully next time.]