Author Archives: James - Page 56
Editing Perfects
Over the last few weeks I've been editing Perfects for a second draft. I finished it over two years ago and it has sat in the metaphorical drawer waiting until I had time between uni courses to focus on it and apply what I learned from A215 to it. As a re-cap, Perfects is an evolution of Exodus, which was my multi-threaded NaNoWriMo 2012 story of a mid twenty first century exodus of people from Earth into space as space travel became an order of magnitude cheaper. I decided when I re-looked at it that there was an interesting world there, but that the strands needed loads of work to knit together. One of the strands became the novella Crisis Point, which I released in 2013. Perfects followed a group of genetically engineered teenagers and twentysomethings living mainly in Cambridge.…
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Book Review – Allegiant by Veronica Roth
Having already read Divergent and Insurgent I put Allegiant on pre order for when it came out in paperback. It arrived a few weeks ago along with The Annihilation Score. I'd intended to wait until I'd read some of the ARCs I'd been sent before reading Allegiant, however I couldn't quite resist knowing how the trilogy ended. The whole trilogy is like an onion, there are more layers beneath this one and it can make you cry. Mainly it made me cry because the world building looked poor, and then Roth revealed this as another layer which can only be peeled back when you spot its flaws. Spoilers If you haven't read the books then some of this review might spoil them. (more…)
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Book Review – Dark Eden by Chris Beckett
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is an interesting book in many ways, linguistically, sociology and the convincing alien world it is set on. The premise is that the main characters are the descendants of two people stranded on an alien planet. The Family (as they refer to themself) are waiting for the day when the rescue mission will come to take them all to Earth. The world is the familiar story book jungle with a strange alien weirdness to it. For a start the sky is dark and the trees and animals luminesce. The typical body plan is six legs and very large eyes, as one might expect on a dark planet. Metal is known but unavailable to the Family, they only have primitive technology despite folklore of the advanced tech. The family…
Edinburgh Zoo
Lucy and I went to Edinburgh Zoo with my brothers and their kids yesterday. It was a pretty good day out despite the torrential downpour that soaked us at four ish. The highlight was the Pandas, although we only saw the male panda. Tian Tian, the female panda was hiding somewhere in the enclosure. Seeing the pandas was well organised, with timed slots and efficient queuing. We were also lucky to be in the indoor viewing room, which meant that we were very close indeed. Our day started with the meerkats just inside the entrance. The zoo has a fairly new enclosure and there are a number of baby meerkats in the group. This greatly excited Lucy as she loves baby animals and also they kept running around which made her run back and forth to follow them around the…
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Digital Transformation in Government
The purpose of government is to serve its citizens, it should do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. The extent to which any specific government serves its people should depend very much on the needs and wishes of those people. I very much doubt that many people in the UK would disagree with that statement. Almost everyone that I have ever worked with in the public sector holds the first sentence as a core belief. You cannot work effectively for long in public service if you don't. However we seem to have gone astray a little. I think that the reasons for this is rigidity of institutions, exacerbated by thirty years of ideology that the private sector is better than the public sector. The fad for outsourcing on long-term monopoly contracts stifles change. I've seen this first hand in more than one central…