Fat Pigeons

Author: piersb

  • #solcomms

    Last night, 15,000 civilians tried to save the world from an alien invasion. We failed. If you’ve been following gaming news at all, you may be aware that Mass Effect 3 came out out in the US today. Here’s a trailer to bring you up to speed on the background for the game. So a […]

  • Workfare: Stupid or Evil?

    There’s a saying in which I believe and attempt to live my life by: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. With that in mind, let’s run a little thought experiment. You are the manager of a company, and your objective is to maximise the profit for the company. You […]

  • Gender Equality and the Nuclear Option

    So, Paul Cornell has done an interesting thing. A little bit of background: I’ve met Paul at several conventions, and we’ve been on several panels together. That men and women are and should be treated as equal, and that in today’s society (both in general and in the particular subculture of SF Fandom) they are […]

  • Rocket Science (Fiction)

    Well, if you haven’t seen me for the last four or five months, it wasn’t because I don’t love you any more. It’s because I’ve been working on a magazine called “Spaceships of Science Fiction”. My copies arrived on Thursday. (Technically speaking it’s a bookazine, yes. Hush there at the back.) It costs £7.95, is […]

  • Happy Birthday, Chuck

    This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Now I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Charles. As well as being an absolutely brilliant writer, he helped me to get my start in the business. The first theatre play I wrote that was professionally performed was an adaptation of […]

  • Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

    So I’m just after reading the introduction to the complete Works of Shakespeare (published 1623), and what’s this I find in the front? An introduction written by the editors asking people to please stop reading it in the bookshop and just buy the damn thing already.

  • Nanna

    I said goodbye to my Nanna this evening. For a significant part of the evening she thought I was called Bill, but that’s neither here nor there. Bill, I told her, was a perfectly good name, and would be just fine for tonight. Mostly, though, we just sat companionably watching the Christmas television. She was […]

  • Our First Broadsheet Review

    And it’s a good’un, too. Today’s Times has a short review in the Arts section for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. “My three-year-old […] also enjoyed the low-theatre approach of Red Table Theatre’s retelling of some of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales (three stars, at the Pleasance, N1 – and strictly speaking for ages four […]

  • A Christmas that’s Just So

    And the last theatrical Christmas announcement this year (unless someone is putting on a production of mine in secret somewhere and hasn’t told me about it) is that Red Table’s production of The Just So Stories, as seen at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, is going to be touring to St Albans this Christmas. Here are […]

  • A Dickens of a Christmas

    I’m pleased to be able to say that my adaptation of A Christmas Carol will be on again this year, this time in a production by the City Lit Rep Company. This is the third production of A Christmas Carol in four years, so I must’ve done something right. Oh, and you can buy the […]