I see that Charles & Camilla are going to be in the Grassmarket on Thurday 5th June – down the other end at Dancebase.
Hope they manage not to trip over the assorted ongoing roadworks! There will be dancing in the street apparently, but probably not by them! 
No, I’m not going to dig out my vinyl copy of Throw the Warped Wheel Out!
I got hold of a book called The Fiction Factory which is a collection of collaborative stories by Jack Dann with authors such as Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick & Bary Malzberg. I’m a big fan of Swanwick, like Dann a lot for his early novels, and also own 2 or 3 collections of short stories by Dozois…
They were all written a while ago but some of them are crackers! Annoyingly, though, I already own Slow Dancing Through Time, which is a similar title featuring stories co-written by Gardner Dozois. Also great stuff!
The trouble is, about half the Dann book consists of stories co-written with Dozois, and thus already in his book! Bah!
Anyway, everyone involved (excepting Jack Haldeman, who’s died in the interim) wrote fascinating introductions, etc. for all the stories and the remaining stories I hadn’t read before were very good, if not for the squeamish in some cases (Zebrowski). Thought the tone of the ending of Cities (Dann & Swanwick) let it down a little, and Barry Malzberg (indeed, all of them to some degree) was still writing stories that were New Wave at heart…
Excellent collection; just wish I didn’t already have so much of it!
Raffles reads his biography!
Originally uploaded by miketransreal
Last Sunday was World Tapir Day, so obviously Raffles wanted to visit his big cousins at the zoo…
As expected, they were having a lie down!
For the first time, we sat and watched the ‘Animal Antics’ bird display near the top of the hill – good fun, with the stars being an owl, a hornbill and Audrey the Kune Kune pig!
