Chronicles

Here’s my exclusive interview with the American futurist Ray Kurzweil, while he was over here in the UK last month for the LawTech Futures 2013 event in London. This is the only interview Ray gave while he was in the country.

I'm pleased to say I've been invited to attend the Reading Writers' Day, which takes place in Sonning on Saturday 1st June. I'm going to be running a one-hour talk and workshop in the afternoon (starts 3:00pm) on Creating a Credible World in fiction.

In the course of doing some research on trademarks on the UK Intellectual Property Office website I spotted that lawyers fall into the same tradmark class as Tarot card readers!

One of the topics that has been rumbling along in the background of the epublishing debate is the importance – or otherwise – of DRM (digital rights management) protection on ebooks.

Here's some information about a one day conference taking place in London in November - if you want to pitch a proposal for a paper you have until 1st August.

Sad to read about the death of Ray Harryhausen, the king of stop-motion movie making (back in the days bfore CGI). Here's a nice obiturary.

The postcard says it all - tho we did have tea and cakes sitting at Peter Cushing's favourite table at the Tudor Tearooms in Whitstable.

The London skyline (looking east) from the top of the Park Lane Hilton - that's Canary Wharf in the distance behind the Shard.

And here's me interviewing the American futurist Ray Kurzweil earlier this week - he's explaining how in the future 3D printing will mean a clone of me can do the work while the real me stays in bed and watches myself on YouTube.

Congratulations to Chris Beckett, whose novel Dark Eden (the story of an alien planet where the incestuous offspring of two stranded astronauts struggle to survive) last night won the UK's top science fiction prize, the Arthur C Clarke award.