Via Tez Burke, here’s a five-CD set of ‘toytown music’, that style of English baroque pop which combined piccolo trumpets and lyrics about toy soldiers and childhood. Follow the rapidshare links but also have a look at their notes. This contains all the usual suspects (The Move, The Idle Race, The Kinks, Keith West, The Bonzo Dog Band) and all the tracks you’d expect if you’ve got Nuggets II or any of the Ripples volumes (such as The Bitter Thoughts Of Little Jane by Timon, one of my all-time favourite tracks), along with enough less-well-known songs (including of all things a fantastic solo track by Gerry Marsden) that anyone who likes this sort of thing will have good stuff to listen to for days. The only problem is the appaling tagging on the MP3s.

Rich Johnston has some details about BBC Scotland’s ‘Doctor Who killer’. It’s called Bonnyroad (as in the start of Thomas The Rhymer), and is a collaboration between Grant Morrison, Stephen Fry and director Paul McGuigan. It sounds absolutely fascinating from the tiny amount of information we have…

DC have announced the art team for The Return Of Bruce Wayne (as well as confirming Frazer Irving as the artist for the next ‘arc’ in Batman & Robin) – it’s almost a Seven Soldiers reunion. This is A Good Thing.

A fascinating piece about the way memory is reconstructed after the fact, and what this means for designing user interfaces.

Big Finish have finally persuaded Tom Baker to do some stuff with them – Lis Sladen, Louise Jameson and Nick Courtney have all already said they want to get involved.

Marc Singer looks at Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner

And Gavin B has a great response to my Joseph Campbell post.

A couple of days ago, two teenagers died. This is, unequivocally, a bad thing. It’s also not, unfortunately, that unusual.

These two teenagers were, by all accounts, taking methadone, a highly dangerous opiate. They were also, apparently, drinking a large amount of alcohol – which is not only dangerous in itself, but which when combined with methadone can lead to respiratory problems and even death. They were also taking a substance called mephedrome (4-methylmethcathinone) but which the press, for God only knows what reason, are referring to as ‘miaow miaow’ (a large number of people have as a result also been asking if they’d been taking yellow bentines or clarky cat) – an amphetamine-type stimulant. It is suspected that one or more of these substances may have contributed to their deaths.

So far, so reasonable. It’s the kind of thing that happens all too often, but it *does* happen, and there appears very little we can do about it.

The press, however, have been stating that ‘miaow miaow’ – and that alone – *definitely* killed these two people. This is entirely possible – having spent a couple of years working with mental patients with substance dependencies, I am all too familiar with the damage amphetamine-type stimulants can cause (even caffeine, in sufficiently large doses, can do some alarming things to you, as I discovered myself about eighteen months ago – caffeine is an amphetamine-type stimulant too). However, given that as far as can be discerned only one other death has ever been caused by use of the substance, which is used by (at least) thousands of people, I would suggest the burden of proof is on those making this claim.

The response of the Conservative Party to this has been instructive. It hasn’t been just to suggest criminalising mephedrone (I wouldn’t agree with this, but given the drug’s pharmacology it would at least be consistent with current drug policy), but to say they will criminalise ‘all legal highs’.

This has led to many jokes on Twitter about coffee and chocolate being banned, but to be honest I don’t think we should be giving them ideas. Just because something sounds insane and unworkable doesn’t mean that the current political classes won’t try to do it anyway, as the history of the last thirty years should show anyone. Just because it’s pretty much impossible to formulate a legal definition of ‘legal high’ doesn’t mean they won’t pass such a law.

Now, I’m voting for the Liberal Democrats this election, because I agree with the majority (though far from all) of their policies, because I think their elected representatives are generally doing a good job, and because the other two major parties are, frankly, evil.

However, given that the Lib Dems are unlikely in the extreme to form the next government – and I’d be very surprised if we even get in in my constituency (which has, allowing for boundary changes, had the same MP for forty years, and apart from a four-year period in the thirties has had a Labour MP since 1922 or 1906, depending on which of the old constituencies that make it up you look at) – here’s something that could make me vote for either of them.

If they’d just promise to *DO NOTHING* for five years.

I would gladly vote for a government that I knew was – unlike every government of my lifetime – not going to actively make things worse. Even if things stayed just as bad as they are, just *NOT MAKING THEM WORSE* would be good enough for me. No new legislation passed, no big organisational changes, just let everyone get on with it for five years.

A government that would say “We’re not going to start any more wars of aggression, or torture any more people. We’ll keep the current ridiculous drug laws, but if someone discovers a slightly different method of getting off their tits, good for them. If the DEBill gets passed before the election, we’ll keep it, but not criminalise all the trivial technical ways round it that will become popular two days after it passes. We’ll keep all the laws against ‘extreme pornography’, but if someone somewhere discovers a new way of getting themselves off, we won’t stop them. The schools and hospitals will continue to be crap, but we won’t, for example, get rid of two more mental health beds every single day on average, like Labour have since 1997, so they won’t get any crapper. The BBC will keep producing crap that you don’t watch, but it’ll still be there for at least another five years and its executives won’t have to grovel to us and chop bits off in order to keep the service going. We won’t deliberately inflate any massive economic bubbles that take money from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of ‘growth’, and if any bubbles happen and then burst, we won’t take money from the poor and give it to the rich in the name of ‘recovery’. Things will still be bad in five years – but they won’t be *WORSE*”

If either of the two main parties were to say that – and mean it – they’d get my vote.

But as it is, I’ll be voting for a party which not only won’t make things worse, it might even make things slightly better if it’s given the choice. Why not join me?

(Thanks to Tilt BTW for pointing me in the direction of the Daisy Door track…)

Simply, my Scribus problems escalated – at some point a system update replaced a load of my fonts with similarly-named ones, and confused it enough that I didn’t just have to redo the last 15 pages and add in a missed line from Plok’s article, but had to redo the lot – and not only redo it, but try to redo it so it still looked more-or-less like what I’d done the first time. I should be getting – soonish – the proof copy though. This *WON’T* happen with PEP! 2, so expect the print copy of that not long after the print copy of PEP! 1…

Anyway, links…

Millennium gives a very thorough look at the Lib Dem Conference, while Jennie, who isn’t named Sue no matter what her latest subtitle thinks, has the first in a series of posts on why you should vote Lib Dem.

(I’ve actually taken two weeks off in April/May – a week for sleep and reading, to try to overcome my current exhaustion, and a week for non-stop pre-election campaigning for any cause I can find – Lib Dem, No2ID, Hope Not Hate, whatever…)

Double Articulation is back, and Jim has reposted this, on Steve Gerber’s Thing…

George Monbiot thinks if we name more plants and animals, we might think twice about making them go extinct.

James Graham absolutely eviscerates a recent Fabian leaflet over on the Social Liberal Forum.

LessWrong have a very good piece on ‘undiscriminating skepticism‘ – which sums up a lot of my problems with a lot of the darlings of the ‘new atheism’ very well.

And some of Ronald Searle’s drawings as a court artist in the trials of John Bodkin Adams and Adolf Eichmann.

In the comments to my Doctor Who Pop-Drama post he wrote:

Andrew, I’ve been thinking about heroic hyping the X-Men pretty much all year, but have been put off by the horrible facts of Morrison’s experience on the book. In conversation with Amy yesterday it occurred to me that, fuck it, we should go further and write something that fits our vision for the title. Mine our thinking to its core so that whatever we find doesn’t look sue-able and get that bad boy out there into the world – I can guarantee it won’t smell like any other superhero comic (as long as we can get the right artist!). I think you should do the same with this. You have the passion, the skill and the vision. Write a better Dr Who, call it something else, and sell it.
Should we form a pact?

And I have been unable to think of anything else since. In particular, I’ve recently realised that I have a setting in my head. Unfortunately, the setting is derivative.

Put bluntly, since I read Richard’s article in PEP! – and more recently the Faction Paradox books – I’ve realised that I’ve got my own ‘monomyth’ in my head, a combination of Jack Kirby, Grant Morrison and Doctor Who. An entire fictional universe, with a war between Gods that has disrupted time and causality, of which Final Crisis and the Time War are both echoes…

I have some *GREAT* ideas, but using that as a backdrop would be steering close to the boundaries of fanfic. Frankly, if I write this thing (which isn’t – quite – the Doctor Who revamp I wrote about, but is a different thing sort-of connected to it), in my head it will be happening in the same fictional universe as Seven Soldiers and Genesis Of The Daleks and …Of The City Of The Saved and a lot of other mutually-incompatible stories I love. It will never *mention* any connection with them, but I’ll know it’s there.

So, should I do it? Should I write this novel? Please say no…

The concept of ‘the Hero’s Journey’ has done more to ruin fiction and popular culture than any other concept I can think of.

I’m not talking here about its role in ‘the Men’s movement’, though it’s hardly surprising that a narrative form that’s all about how some people are born special and are just specialer than anyone else and that’s all there is might be tied to ultra-reactionary politics (via people like Minnesota ‘poet laureate’ Robert Bly – himself far from a reactionary, but his “Iron John” writings have inspired a lot of them, and it’s no coincidence that he was appointed to his position by Tim Pawlenty, one of the most vicious and stupid politicians in what is a fairly politically vicious and stupid country). Nor am I annoyed by Campbell’s Jungian justification for his ideas – a good idea can come even from such unpromising soil.

What annoys me is that something that was intended as a *description* is instead increasingly being taken as a *prescription*.

Campbell is in a weird position, culturally. Among the ‘geek demographic’ he is hugely known but little-read, quoted to give a veneer of academic respectability to their prejudices, while among academics themselves he is largely dismissed. To the general public, he’s barely known at all.

As I (perhaps optimistically) tend to assume that the readership of this blog is closer to ‘the general public’ than ‘the geek demographic’, I’ll summarise Campbell’s work briefly. In essence, Campbell studied a lot of myths, and saw that many of them followed the pattern “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

So far so normal – that does, indeed, sound like almost every story ever, because it’s completely lacking in content. But Campbell went on to point out a lot of other elements that are seen in many (but by no means all) stories, before putting these all together into a ‘monomyth’ – a description that supposedly all myths and legends fit, though in fact none fits exactly.

If you want to know what that monomyth was, just watch Star Wars. George Lucas very consciously followed Campbell’s books, hit every single point that Campbell described, and had a huge hit. And this is where the problem started.

For some reason, the success of Star Wars was not put down to the idea that kids like to see robots and spaceships and light-saber fights and that there hadn’t been any exciting, fun, pulpy SF in the cinema for more than a decade. Nor was it ascribed to Lucas’ careful world-building. And nor was there a sudden boom in people stealing wholesale the plots to Kurosawa films, even though that had worked well for The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful Of Dollars as well. Instead, it became received wisdom, for God knows what reason, that it was following Campbell’s ‘rules’ that made Star Wars a hit.

And so *EVERYTHING* from Hollywood – or aimed at becoming something from Hollywood – now follows that rule. And so the Matrix is the same story as Harry Potter is the same story as the Star Wars prequels are the same story as…

I’ve actually had arguments on comics message boards (before realising what a horribly stupid idea that is) with people who have insisted, against all the evidence, that it is literally impossible for a story to be told that *doesn’t* fit the monomyth. This is to be expected from people who define themselves as ‘geeks’, who generally like more than anything else to have things be the same as other things, and nice little boxes to put everything in.

But what’s annoying more than anything is that actual *writers* fall for this. Neil Gaiman does it all the time, and it’s a shame because at his best Gaiman really is as good as his reputation ( some of the short stories in Smoke & Mirrors are absolutely superb), but whenever Gaiman starts going on about THE POWER OF STORY, it’s always *this* story he’s talking about.

But what really surprises me is the fascination the monomyth has for Grant Morrison. Morrison tends for the most part to have a healthy disregard for rules – except when those rules have a veneer of new-ageyness, when his critical thinking goes out of the window. And so told that there are rules about how stories should go, but that those rules come from JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES! and are based in ANCIENT MYTHS!, suddenly Morrison starts following them, and we see the monomyth underlaying almost all Morrison’s writing (with notable ‘experimental’ exceptions such as New Adventures Of Hitler – and even there, someone will be along in the comments to talk about how it follows the pattern exactly).

Luckily, he’s a good enough writer to get away with this for the most part – something like All-Star Superman is simultaneously as formulaic as a Patrick Troughton Doctor Who story and as personal a work as anything ever created – much like Bach, in fact, Morrison manages at his best to turn his strict adherence to a restrictive formalism into an advantage.

Morrison has not yet done this in Joe The Barbarian, though to be fair he’s only had two issues.

Joe The Barbarian is a mini-series by Morrison and Sean Murphy (though only Morrison is credited as ‘creator’ – and incidentally, the name of the associate editor is Pornsak Pichetshote, which has now overtaken Wade Von Grawbadger as my favourite comic-person name of all time), and for a Morrison comic it’s had surprisingly little criticism, positive or negative, as yet online (I mean proper criticism, not stuff like this, which is one of the most comprehensive examples of point-missing I’ve ever read), other than one memorable comment which said the comic (about a kid hallucinating from diabetes) made diabetes seem a lot more fun than it probably is…

Because so far, the comic, while good, has definitely been lacking. Sean Murphy’s art is gorgeous, as is, of course, Dave Stewart’s colouring (though it will probably look better on better quality paper), and the story definitely has potential… but so far it’s seemed very much like Morrison doing a few of Grant Morrison’s Greatest Hits (the hallucinations being very similar to Flex Mentallo, the Dead Dad stuff…) over a basic Hero’s Journey skeleton.

Now it’s entirely possible I’m missing something ( I know Joe is going to be a key ingredient in David A’s article for PEP! 2, which suggests there’s a lot of interesting stuff to say about it), and I’m *certain* it’s going to get better – Grant Morrison has never done anything I’ve found uninteresting, even when the work has fallen completely flat there’s something interesting about it. But right now, to be honest, this feels *exactly* like a Generic Early-90s Vertigo Title (as opposed to the *actual* early-90s Vertigo titles, which were often more interesting at the time than they seem in retrospect). It could so far have *VERY* easily have fitted in as an early Sandman ‘arc’, but not in a good way.

It’s still worth reading, and I’m sure that in a month or two I’ll be astonished at how Morrison has turned my initial lack of enthusiasm round. And on a purely craft level it’s never short of very good. But as Morrison’s first new creator-owned work since 2004 (Seaguy: Slaves Of Mickey Eye doesn’t count here as it’s a sequel to the 2004 series) it’s not yet as good as I’d hoped…

Incidentally, anyone who likes comics and good writing should be reading Too Busy Thinking About My Comics, because it is good writing about comics, by someone with enough taste to list Guess I’m Dumb by Glenn Campbell and You Don’t Know Me by Ray Charles in his profile (which is a lot of taste). Read it.

Via Laurie Penny, whose article on it you should read, The Give Your Vote campaign exists for people who don’t want to vote, because they don’t think it changes anything or whatever. If you don’t want to use your vote, and you sign up, they’ll let you know how one person in a country affected by Britain’s foreign policy would vote had they the option. As someone married to an immigrant who can’t vote, and also as someone who’s often wished he could vote in the USian elections (because their foreign policy dictates ours to such a large extent) I think this is a fantastic idea (assuming the people are picked more-or-less randomly).

Lesswrong have a post on Goodhart’s Law, which states that “once a social or economic measure is turned into a target for policy, it will lose any information content that had qualified it to play such a role in the first place.” Quite fascinating stuff.

Someone – Wesley, I think – posted a link to this in the comments ages ago, but I’ve only just got round to reading it – a free online version of Newtons Sleep, the most recent Faction Paradox novel. I haven’t finished this yet, and won’t be doing an ABC post on it as that’s only for books I read in paper form, but it seems pretty good and I’m about 2/3 of the way through.

The Mindless Ones have another post on the identity of Doctor Hurt, given the extra information in the new issue of Batman & Robin.

A great post on Science News that talks about how “in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims”, due to unscientific nonsense like meta-analyses. (The basis of much of the talk about ‘evidence based medicine’ by people like Ben Goldacre, who refer to Cochrane reviews as ‘gold standard’, meta-analyses as currently practiced are the least scientific things I’ve ever come across. If anyone’s interested in why, I could forward them a copy of the paper ”Implications and insights for human adaptive mechatronics from developments in algebraic probability theory” (S. Hickey, A. Hickey, L. Noriega 2009), or they could take my word for it, but this article covers *some* of it…)

A judge has ruled that Echostar, a manufacturer of Digital Video Recorders, must send all its customers an ‘update’ that breaks their machines, after it was found to infringe on a patent. Not only does this show the stupidity of software patents, but it also shows why DRM’d, non-free-software devices like the iPad or the Kindle are such bad ideas. If I buy a computer, then I don’t want the manufacturers to have the power to break it any time they feel like it, or any time they’re given the order by a court. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, the people who bought that device did so in good faith, and don’t deserve to have it broken .

And finally, Holly has pointed me to this masterpiece – someone’s Amazon reviews of the Mister Men books. “If ‘1984′ or ‘The Trial’ had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them. ” Genius.

Miles is clearly influenced by Morrison, in much the same way the Morrison himself is influenced by Alan Moore – I recently read a message board thread in which a fan had written to Miles asking if he’d ever read Doom Patrol, to which the reply was just ‘how do you think I learned to write like that?’ – but he has his own style, one far more suited to novels. (Miles is also as abrasive and – quite often – irritating in his public persona as Morrison was twenty years ago, when for a long time I wouldn’t read his comics because his interviews put me off. I was eleven at the time, so can probably be forgiven)

The problem is, much as Morrison does most of his work using the mythology he grew up with – superheroes – as the basis for his stories, Miles uses Doctor Who, which limits his readership enormously.

The TV spin-off novel is not somewhere where one naturally looks for literary merit, and if TV spin-off novels are often poor, then spin-offs of those spin-offs could be expected to be truly horrible, full of terrible writing and fannish in-jokes, aimed at only the most insanely obsessive completist.

So when people hear that Dead Romance is a book originally written for the New Adventures, a series that started off as Doctor Who spin-off novels before continuing on based on a supporting character when they lost the Doctor Who license; that it doesn’t even feature that supporting character but a new character who is possibly connected to her in an initially-unspecified way; and that this edition of the novel is a reprint as a semi-apocryphal part of the Faction Paradox series, a series of novels that span off from *another*, unconnected, line of Doctor Who books, one might forgive them for assuming it was illiterate dribble fit only for consumption by Ian Levine.

In fact this is one of the most interesting and intelligent SF novels I’ve read in a long time. If, as Millennium’s Daddy Richard once said to me, The Book Of The War is the BBC/Doctor Who version of The Invisibles’ ITC serials, Dead Romance is volume 4 of Zenith, seen through a filter of Doctor Who rather than old British adventure comics, and written by Kurt Vonnegut.

In fact, the Vonnegut comparison is very valid. There’s a similar fascination here with the actual physical page, the actual text itself, the same slightly distanced tone, the same ‘big picture’ view of human beings as being only (or possibly less than) their component parts, the same slightly non-linear, rambling structure. It came as no surprise to me to find an interview with Miles (and quite a fascinating one) speaking of Vonnegut as one of the few writers he admired – one of the few who was trying to actually *write*, rather than put films onto the page.

And you could read this without having ever heard of Doctor Who and come away without ever knowing it was connected to something else. It’s just a science fiction (or really science fantasy) novel. The few elements from the Who ‘mythos’ included are so radically reworked that someone who didn’t know where they came from would think the influence was Lovecraft or Philip K. Dick rather than Doctor Who.

Apparently Dead Romance is regarded as in some way an ‘experimental’ novel by fans of the Doctor Who novels. This says *far* more about the Doctor Who novels (which can roughly be split into four groups – those by hacks who’d worked on the TV show and needed a quick pay cheque, those by fans who wanted to answer all the continuity questions they’d been bothered by, those by fans who wanted to show that Doctor Who was really grown up adult entertainment by mentioning bare ladies and the spliffs and the young persons’ rock and roll music, and those by people who could actually write and wanted to do something interesting. Sometimes these categories overlapped.)

The ‘experimental’ nature of Dead Romance only extends as far as Miles doing things like having a slightly unreliable narrator, having the story be told in a discursive manner rather than a strictly linear one – in short, the things I would think of as being basic for anyone who wants to do actual *good writing* rather than just being interested in the plot and ideas. Certainly, the writing is no more ‘experimental’ than, say, anything in PEP!, and a lot less ‘experimental’ than Sean’s piece… it’s on the level of a rock band who know how to play a diminished seventh or minor sixth chord, rather than being Stockhausen. It’s sad that fans of Doctor Who – a programme that at its best was all about pushing boundaries and experimenting – could be so illiterate (there’s really no other word for it) that they’d see this as experimental (which is not to say that all, or even most, Doctor Who fans are that illiterate – this often topped polls of the best books in the New Adventures series – but enough are that it’s saddening).

And while this book is full of SF Big Ideas, it’s not really *about* them. Rather, it’s about the changing of the sixties to the seventies, the death of the spirit of optimism in popular culture, the Manson murders, growing older, the way Britain fictionalises and romanticises its past, both the Victorian and Swinging London eras. It’s about serial killers, and fantasy lives, and about the aching sense some of us have that the world we’re living in simply isn’t as interesting as the one we were promised. It’s about how fundamentally shallow much of the Sixties’ counterculture was. It’s about Bobby Fuller and Jack The Ripper and people who create their own pick-n-mix spirituality. It’s about identity.

In his introduction, Miles refers to this book as The Spy Who Loved Me of the New Adventures line (the book, not the film), and this is a very apt comparison. It’s an intriguing example of how you can turn pop-culture mythology into genuine art. It’s not the greatest novel of all time or anything, but it’s a *very good* novel, and that’s *FAR* more than anyone would have the right to expect of it, and it’s very sad that its existence is only known to a subgroup within a subgroup within Doctor Who fandom, rather than Miles’ work being as mainstream as, say, Iain Banks (with whose work this shares a number of characteristics. Miles is better).

As the original novel was rather short, the reprint is rounded out with a few other pieces. There’s Miles’ introduction (“The original Dead Romance had commas in places where commas should never be, and anyone who knows me will know that I’d rather have an editor give a story a happy ending than let him fiddle with the punctuation.”), a rather lovely short story called “Toy Story” which *is* set firmly enough in Doctor Who continuity that it won’t make much sense to non-fans, an essay on the way the universe of the Faction Paradox works (containing a number of ridiculously good ideas) and a beautiful short story called Grass, unconnected in any obvious way to any of the other material, but *well* worth reading.

At this point, having read three books in the range, I am now convinced that the Faction Paradox range of books is the best multi-author fictional universe I’ve ever read. I would suggest that anyone who enjoys my blog – or who enjoyed PEP! 1 – would almost certainly enjoy these books, and I plan to purchase the rest – and the audios – as fast as my credit card will allow. You don’t need to be a Doctor Who fan to enjoy them, any more than you need to have been a Charlton comics fan to enjoy Watchmen, and I think it’s a real shame that, partly because of their origin and partly because of the abrasive persona of the main writer, they’re not reaching a mass audience.

The Faction Paradox books can all be purchased from Mad Norwegian (who publish all but one of them). I recommend just buying the lot…

13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brook is one of the most interesting – and recommendable – pop-science books I’ve read in a long time (and I read a lot of pop-science books).

One of the things that worries me about the New Atheism and the Rationalist movement is its attitude to what Charles Fort referred to as Damned Data. A lot (by no means all) of the media representatives of this movement seem to regard disagreement with the current scientific consensus as being heresy – which seems to me to be a fundamentally unscientific attitude. (Richard Dawkins, for example, has condemned a creationist documentary that interviewed him under false pretences and re-edited the footage in ways he disagreed with, but he did exactly the same to Rupert Sheldrake. I happen to think that Sheldrake is wrong, but one should still use intellectually honest arguments, even against those who *are* wrong…)

(Which is not to say the majority of such disagreements aren’t cranks and quackery – they are. But some are very far from that. I *MUST* at some point get round to blogging about orthomolecular medicine, for example…)

Brooks, a consultant to New Scientist, takes the opposite – and to me, more scientific – approach here, by looking at anomalous results – the places where our theories and the data don’t quite match up.

Opening with a quote from Isaac Asimov – “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds most discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘that’s funny…’” – Brooks takes us on a tour through most of the major scientific disciplines and looks at what we *don’t* know. He divides this into thirteen ‘things that don’t make sense’ as follows:

The Missing Universe – he looks at ‘dark matter’, ‘dark energy’, and various not-yet-accepted physical theories that do away with these concepts.

The Pioneer Anomaly – the Pioneer probes, sent out in the 1970s, are now thousands of miles away from where the theory of Relativity says they should be.

Varying Constants – the growing evidence that the ‘universal constants’ used to be different.

Cold Fusion – the growing body of evidence that suggests Pons and Fleischmann found *something* – maybe not cold fusion, but *something* – in their career-ending experiments.

Life – why have we not yet been able to synthesise life from elementary chemicals?

Viking – the Viking probe found evidence of life on Mars – one of the experiments that it ran gave *exactly* the result predicted if there were living organisms in the Martian soil. This has never been followed up on.

The WOW! Signal – a brief (sub-second) signal that looks very much like the work of intelligent life, but has never been repeated.

A Giant Virus – a virus found in Bradford that appears to be an evolutionary ‘missing link’ (sorry for the term) between bacteria and viruses.

Death – why *do* we die? Can it be stopped?

Sex – why all the current evolutionary explanations for sex fall down.

Free Will – scientific evidence that it doesn’t exist, and what this might mean for society.

The Placebo Effect – the evidence that it’s much stronger than thought when it comes to depression and pain, but has *no effect whatsoever* when it comes to physical problems, and what this means for the current medical orthodoxy of double-blind placebo-controlled trials.

And most controversially of all, Homeopathy – he shows that there is a *tiny* bit of evidence that a *small* proportion of homeopathic ‘medicines’ might actually work, and some suggested physical mechanisms for this, even while clearly showing that most of it is the nonsense we all accept it to be.

Looking through this list, some of it is probably explicable by experimental error or outright fraud (my guess is that the evidence for homeopathy falls into that category), but at least some of these things will radically rewrite parts of our understanding of the universe.

But the good thing about this book is that even when he’s talking about these things, Brooks is *NOT* doing it in a new-agey, ‘there are things that science will never understand, wisdom of the ancients’ kind of way. He is motivated by an excitement in discovery, and in the scientific method. For him, the idea that there are things we don’t know, or things we’ve got wrong, is not a threat, and it’s better to waste time on a wild goose chase occasionally in order to find something genuinely revolutionary than to dismiss out-of-hand any anomalous data or wild hypotheses.

My guess is that at least seven or eight of the things talked about in this book will turn out to be wild-goose chases of that nature, but that among the others is an account of someone who in a century will be spoken of in the way we now speak of Einstein, Darwin or Newton (or at least Crick or Watson or Curie or Pauling).

This has fired up my imagination far more than most books of its ilk, and as long as you accept (as Brooks clearly states) that the stuff talked about in it is the very opposite of ‘established fact’, I can guarantee it will be a fascinating read for anyone interested in science.

A short list of what’s been proposed for the issue – bear in mind that *NONE* of this is confirmed yet, life gets in the way, people’s plans change etc…

Alix Mortimer on ‘the neutering of political personalities’
David ‘Vibrational Match’ Allison, with what promises to be another standout piece, on “80s Transformers comics, Morrison’s Zoids, various Transformers and Pixar movies, All Star Superman, Joe the Barbarian, maybe Oh Fuck I’m 40 [the Richard Herring show]” and *possibly* a second piece, on ” The Prisoner, Jack Kirby’s Mister Miracle and Prisoner comics, Morrison ’s Mister Miracle, and Seven Soldiers #1.” if he has time to write both (unlikely, but here’s hoping…)
Debi ‘Innerbrat’ Linton on prehistoric animals that sound like band names
Holly on The Clangers and rugby.
Gavin Robinson on ” how gender ideology is a lie that makes itself true.”
Richard “Millennium’s Daddy Richard” Flowers on Babylon 5 and/or Zoids
A comic by Wesley Osam on band names that sound like prehistoric monsters.

Along with possible contributions by Gavin Burrows, Alex Wilcock and Bill ‘Pillock’ Ritchie.

I’ll be contributing at least three, possibly four bits – an article on Cerebus, one on the Beach Boys’ Smile, and possibly one on Seven Soldiers. I’ll also be doing introductions to everything, in the form of a surrealist play entitled “Rassilon And Omega Are Dead (Or, Waiting For The Other)”.

PEP! 2 – the magazine for people interested in interesting stuff – will be out in May…