Dr Elizabeth Blackburn, who pioneered the study of telomeres, has become the first Australian woman to win a Nobel Prize.
I even know what telomeres are, thanks to Scott Sigler’s Infected and Contagious, which I’ve been listening to on my walks to and from work. And who says that sci fi about terrifying triangle monster diseases [...]

Continuing my promise made a few months ago that for the rest of the year I’d only buy second-hand or remaindered books, with purchases based mainly on their covers rather than previous knowledge of the author etc, I picked up a copy of Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells last weekend. The version I picked up [...]

I’ve started iisting to podcasts and audio recordings of stories.  A bit slack of me, I know, given the way in which webzines hosting podcasts and so on have been proliferating over the past couple of years (and given that one of my stories was recorded for Pseudopod last year).  But with my crazy schedule [...]

I spent the day in bed reading, as I’m wont to do when I’m all sniffly and sick.  I finished off M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, which was mostly brilliant (the book, not my finishing it*), and started on Charles de Lint’s Widdershins, because de Lint is, like Haruki Murakami, perfect sick-in-bed light reading.
I’m about [...]

Whilst squashed between hordes of my fellow commuters on the tram this evening, I looked out at the gridlock of cars on St Kilda road, and happened to notice how many of the drivers of these cars were sitting there with novels splayed open against their steering wheels.
How whimsical, I thought, if traffic jams were [...]