A Museum of Anchors
Dire dangers await visitors to the sheltered harbour of little Candás, near Gijón. You might be attacked by waves during rough weather. You might fall in because all is not flat. Your car might fall into the water. You might slip. Heavy things might fall on you from the sky. You might be electrocuted. And
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Finalista por un premio / Prize Finalist
Los lectores hispanohablantes pueden leer ahora mismo mi relato finalista este año al premio Sidewise Award de historia alternativa, “La Guerra de Blair,” en ‘Lo Mejor de Mí Mismo’, Marte, Stalin, Enanos Gigantes, publicado como ebook por Palabaristas Press. La ceremonia de entrega del premio tendrá lugar en agosto en Londres durante la Worldcon. “La
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Segovia and Avila
The Roman aqueduct in Segovia compels: “They Were Giants in Those Days.” That aqueduct makes modern civilisation below it look dwarfish. I have no other awed comment, really, except maybe: hooray for Vitruvius, not that he architected this personally. At the other end of town is the medieval Alcázar castle, which I might call fairytale:
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Alex Crow has the biggest SF bookshop in Europe
Beautiful Barcelona now has the biggest and most beautiful SFF bookshop in Europe, right up there with all the Gaudí architecture, the Picasso Museum, and the Boqueria food market as must-visits, for SFF fans certainly—with almost 2 kilometres of elegant and ingenious wooden shelving, including several hundred metres of books in English. Move over, London’s
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More Mysteries of Paris
Cristina has a new camera, an Olympus Stylus 1, which I would call the apple of her eye, except that she already has some important items called Apples. The new Olympus automatically recognises faces and puts little boxes around them to suggest where to focus. Inside the delightful Doll Museum in Paris (Musée de la
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Sherlocks in Spain
Great thanks to Jorge Iván and Rocio for our wedding present Detective Weekend, which we enjoyed at last, based at The Mill by which a river rushed in spate, submerging the trees, at little Tresgrandas near Llanes! (But we had our magnifying glass with us.) Various other sleuths wearing deerstalkers competed: but, despite my name,
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A Book That Made Me, and an odd bull
On a Sunday afternoon in 1956, aged 13, I was riveted for about 3 hours by a dramatisation of David Lindsay‘s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus on the BBC Third Programme (the intellectual station, finally canned in 1970) accompanied by very suitable eerie musique concrète. By the end of the performance I could recite
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Uncollected Me to launch at Glasgow Eastercon
Here is the lovely cover of THE UNCOLLECTED IAN WATSON which PS Publishing will launch at the Glasgow Eastercon at the same time as PS launches THE BEST OF IAN WATSON (cover not available yet). (De luxe boxed signed editions, with some bonus extra material, will launch at the London Worldcon.) Maybe I shouldn’t say
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You have Pigeons, We have Peacocks
Most towns have pigeons, but Gijón has flocks of peacocks in its public places such as the Park of Isabella the Catholic—she who funded Columbus, among other significant things: The principal homage in the park is to Alexander Fleming, of penicillin, along with a lad whose life he must have saved. Here is the ninja
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Best of Me & Uncollected Me & Collected Poems for Easter
For the upcoming Eastercon 2014 in Glasgow, probably on the Friday evening during an hour shared with NewCon Press, PS Publishing will launch highly desirable trade editions of The Best of Ian Watson and The Uncollected Ian Watson, and simultaneously—channeled by me—James Goddard’s Leaky Boot Press will present my collected poems, Memory Man and Other
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