Outside The Box Audio Podcast

My short story "Outside The Box", first published in Spicy Slipstream Stories is now available as an audio podcast. The story was shortlisted in 2009 for the Sir Julius Vogel Award.

It's the first episode in BrokenSea Audio Productions' newly launched Twilight Theatre, which promises to deliver a high caliber of fiction, and if the fantastic production they did on Outside The Box is anything to go by I can't wait for what they'll deliver in the future.

You can download the podcast, or listen online, HERE

Literature and Technology

As ever more text becomes transferred from the paper to the digital page, what effect will the digitisation of fiction have on the way we relate to stories? How will our perception of The Writer change—will the fundamental differences between what a screen can offer and the static nature of the written page of a book forever change the way we read and write? How we use our imagination?

As part of research for a postgraduate paper, I am doing research that aims to interact with both readers and writers on this topic. My aim is to include some of this feedback from the virtual reality of cyberspace in the final paper, the focus of which will be on themes that relate particularly to this course.

Contextually speaking, the set texts are:

· Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
· Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
· Philip K. Dick, Simulacra
· Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Dream Country, Vol. 3
· Russell Hoban, Angelica’s Grotto
· Pat Cadigan, Tea From An Empty Cup
· Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
· William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

Specific references to issues in any of these works also welcome. Head on over to PoweredBook for more and to add your view.

Winter Olympics 2010 - Signing Off

It's been fun watching! Thank you Vancouver and congrats to all the athletes taking part. See you in Moscow!

Canada confirms what those in the know already suspect - Canadians are awesome.