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Michael Crichton
A year or so after we moved into our current house we had a bookshelf collapse that was a consequence of a) the urge to display far too many cherished hardcovers on a screw-to-the-wall track system, and b) my total inability to put a secure screw into a plaster wall. One of the most cherished,…
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Wickered
I came across my old autograph album when I was straightening the study a couple of weeks ago. Back when I was a child I used to study the end credits of my favourite shows and write to the stars at the addresses of the TV studios. It’s not a huge collection. Getting autographs was…
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What the Filk
Got to share this… Every now and again I used to walk 200 yards up the lane to my village local where I’d meet with a bunch of fannish mates who, once a month and in a more central venue, constituted the core of the Preston SF Group. PSFG meetings were open to all; the…
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Step Aside, Mister Bond
If ever you needed someone to save the world, I was your guy. Mind you, I was only nine at the time. I think it was an ad in one of the Man from Uncle tie-in novels that gave an address where you could write in and be recruited as an UNCLE agent. The card…
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Granada
Good Dog mentioned a couple of classic series and broke a memory… I was a Presentation trainee in Granada’s Manchester studios when they were making The XYY Man, and one of our control room monitors was hooked to the studio feed. So I saw everything the studio cameras saw, both during and between takes. I…
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Characters that Stick
“Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you into a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon and his sympathy had no warp.” When I was fifteen, I thought that writing couldn’t get any better than John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. I thought that no ensemble could ever be sketched…
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Valley of Lights
Once again, a question in the comments spawns a post… Stan, people are gonna start talking. The true answer to the question (about which of my novels I’d most like to see adapted) is The Spirit Box, for reasons I’ll go into another time, but for now here’s an extract from my afterword to the…
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Deadwood
Last year we made one of our US road trips. It’s by far our preferred kind of holiday; pick a part of the country we’ve never seen, book a flight, rent a car, and then launch. We’ve never been disappointed, and I’ve always come home with notebooks loaded with ideas and material. A couple of…
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Interview
I’ve been away on Crusoe business – two good days with the incoming writers followed by three equally productive days scouting locations for the UK scenes – and I find on my return that the WGGB site now carries the interview that Tom Green conducted with me back in January. (No word of Crusoe in…
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A Book by its Cover
In a recent piece in The Financial Times, James Lovegrove cites Raymond Hawkey’s 1963 Pan cover for Thunderball as one of the all-time greatest paperback designs. (In case you’re not familiar with it, those ‘bullet hits’ are actual holes in the cover.) I so agree… although for me it’s one of those cases where your…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
