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Moved house: ex-landlords being, well, daft; broadband still not sorted out after well over a month; doing anything over mobile broadband on a poor laptop is painful to say the least.

Updates soon.

I have a little more faith in my fellow human beings, and it’s all thanks to science-fiction books.

I get through a lot of sci-fi, because I read for pleasure and I get a lot of pleasure out of the fantasies and escapism which sci-fi provides. The downside is that I now have a kind of “vendor lock-in” with just three authors (Banks, Reynolds (who recently signed a £10m, 10-book deal), Hamilton) whose work I enjoy and have read, re-read and re-read again, so I have nothing new to read by these authors.

It is my intention to read a lot of ‘early’ sci-fi, of the Asimov and Philip K. Dick eras, but I find this harder going than more modern sci-fi, so I thought my luck was in when totally by accident I stumbled across a promising new (to me) author who I had not before heard of and whose books I had not read. The author is Kevin J. Anderson and the books were the Saga of Seven Suns.

Well, five of  them.  The last five.

I saw the five books at a local car boot sale. They are well presented and in good condition, and the rear covers described the sort of story I wanted to read, but the first two were missing. “No bother,” I thought, “I can pick up the others on eBay.”  So I paid for the five books and left.

But the chap I bought the books from said he had the others at home, and his wife (nice passing the buck there) didn’t pack them, so I went back to him, brandished a green beer token and asked him to post them to me. Call it an exercise in human decency. I stood to lose, well, a fiver, which I had already saved several times over by buying five books for £2 when the RRP is about £8 each, and I stood to gain two more books for £5 (or so, after postage and packaging) which, again, woould have cost £8 each in the shops. Whatever the outcome I was quids in: five books for £2 (saving £38 of the £40 RRP) or seven books for £7 (which is nice, considering the title and number of the books) saving £49 of the £56 RRP…

I suppose I always knew the last/first two books would turn up, judging from the well-to-do, easy-going nature of the chap I entrusted my hard-earned cash to, but I wouldn’t have even considered doing that back where I used to live in Somerset.  Maybe I’m not giving the people there enough credit, but I think I know the people and the place well enough not to trust even a penny to someone I met 10 minutes ago.

I love it down here.

South Devon College and Paignton Community College (actually a school) are two very different entities. There is no Paignton College in the area. So thanks, impersonal media empire who is quick to report and slow to verify facts, for freaking out my mother.

Does anyone know about this?

Around the end of June 2010, or early July… …the U.S. will break into six pieces – with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

Someone should mention this to President-Elect Obama, and quickly!