No Blog Like Home(page)

Babel Clash was a nice place to visit for a fortnight. The weather was great, and the company very affable, and the nightlife - man oh man! Between us Graham McNeill and I turned our stay as guest bloggers on the Borders US SF and F site into a record breaker - they got more traffic than during any previous guest tenure. So if you’re joining me here because you met me there, howdy! Let’s see what we can get nattering about.

Two cultural things for today. First, I see that Steve Jobs is finally marketing the dataslate I invented at the start of the Gaunt's Ghosts series ten years ago. B-dam tish!

Second (and I realise that this time I’m way late to the party) I went to see Avatar. Very groovy indeed. I was genuinely relieved to see Wayne Barlowe’s name in the end titles because, you know, otherwise he’d have every reason to feel intellectually raped. But doesn’t JC owe a fat old thank-you payment to the estate of Burne Hogarth for the jungles, and Roger Dean for... everything else? (Except for the Colonial Marines, which JC took from himself.)

And was it just me, or did the score from Oscar-winning composer James Horner* keep sounding either a) like the driving Colonial Marine music from Aliens, or b) like it was a note or two away from soaring into the main theme from Titanic?


* That’s James Horner, Oscar-winning composer of the music from James Cameron’s movies Aliens and Titanic.