I have a confession to make: I really enjoy science fiction. Oh no, such a social stigma! But wait a moment, please. I’m not talking about Star Trek Voyager, or Star Wars, and especially not those awful books which always start out with a seemingly random premise involving a war, except in space, and progress into the worst pile of pseudo-technological nonsense you’ve ever read. These things aren’t just inextricably linked with the worst aspects of geekdom, they are also often associated with fantasy - and all the stereotypes that invokes - because of an identical “anything can happen” philosophy in their writing.

I’m not interested in dwarves shagging elves, or whatever it is they get up to. I’m especially not interested in the analogue taking place in space, which somehow transforms “fantasy” into “sci-fi”. I’m interested in real science fiction: thought-provoking visions of the future.

You might call me a bit of a pessimistic fatalist, to put it mildly. I like my visions of the future to be rather gloomy, in a “we’re all going to die through our own stupidity” kind of way. And for people living in an age of incredible technological and social advances, nobody did gloomy better than the Victorians.

What led me to make this post today is The Machine Stops, a short story from 1909. If you read nothing else, read this! It’s great and seems disturbingly prescient - will there come a point when we become too reliant on machines? Irony of ironies, I had to look up some of the words on Google as I read.

Other suggestions? HG Wells was a great writer, specialising in unnerving scenarios which seem idealistic on their surface, but unwind into nightmares before the reader’s eyes. In The Time Machine a Victorian gentleman travels thousands of years into an apparently decadent future, to a time when mankind has forgotten either his basic humanity, or all the accumulated knowledge of his ancestors, depending on which side of the utterly divided society he has ended up on. There’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, a scary vision of the consequences of genetic engineering, way before its time. Oh and don’t forget War of the Worlds - not so much destruction by our hands, but a reminder that we - or even Martians - are not all-powerful.

John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids - in which Man creates a plant which eventually takes over the Earth - is a favourite too. It even has a great BBC series.

Read the books or in one case, listen to the musical version - they’re great! Just avoid the terrible film adaptations at all costs, especially The Island of Doctor Moreau. It still makes me cry.

And stop associating science fiction with Star Trek. Please. There is more to it than that.

Hello! This site is back from the dead, apparently. Yes, I finally decided that the effort of fixing the site actually outweighed the effort of typing in a terminal window to update a minimalist HTML-only page. That’s how painful it was.

What better way to reopen the site than with a bit of moaning? Well, exactly, there is no better way.

Microsoft. They’re BLOODY BASTARDS.

That’s me being banned from Xbox Live, that is, by the capitalist pigs of the Establishment. Er, or something. The terrible crime I committed was to install a larger hard disk in my Xbox, enabling me to run games directly from disk rather than mucking about with CDs all the time. I did know ahead of time that this would cause me to be banned from Xbox Live - although, as it didn’t happen immediately, I thought I might have got away with it - but it didn’t make it any less annoying when it happened.

Why, Microsoft, why? Why can’t I muck about with my Xbox if I like? Piracy, that’s why. OK. Fine. Piracy might just be a problem for a company that’s been selling its console at a massive loss since it first went on sale, so depends on software sales to scrape a bit of cash back.

Here’s the thing that annoys me. Microsoft, in customary fashion, have stolen all the good ideas made possible by modifying one’s Xbox and trumpeted them as killer new features in the Xbox 360. Xbox Media Centre? Check! Expandable hard disk? Check - but you can bet it won’t be anywhere near as cheap as a bog-standard PC hard disk, and you can also bet that using such a foul, common hard disk will get you banned from Xbox 360 Live. Pirating games? I doubt they will pick up this one. Downloadable games, albeit ones that you pay for? I suspect so.

Until the Xbox 360 comes out and I can fail to buy it - ridiculously overspecified as it is - I’ll stick with my modified Xbox. Just not on Xbox Live. The sods.

Mojo recently added a flashy banner imploring me to preorder the excellent game Psychonauts, so tonight I decided to perform my civic duty and do as I was told. I presume the game will be released in North America long before Europe - so I might as well order it from some American site, like EBgames as suggested by Mojo, thought I. Big mistake!

The first problem: the United Kingdom was just about the only country conspicuous by its absense from the massive dropdown in the ‘International Shipping’ section. Uh oh! Instead I checked the shipping price for a handily nearby country, France - and guess what! EBgames wanted to charge half the price of the game itself for postage. Sod that then. ¬

Luckily I decided not to give in, because next I journeyed to Video Games Plus, which I’ve heard good things about. There the Xbox version of the game costs just over £30 - including international shipping! That’s less than the game will cost via mail-order once it officially arrives here, and much less than it will cost in an actual shop. In other words, after flying all the way across the Atlantic in some kind of jet plane, Psychonauts will still be in my possession sooner and cost less than if I wandered down to GAME. Jeeeeze. This country. ¬

All of us, apart from a few misguided individuals, know that Linux is horribly inadequate for the average computer desktop. (Litmus test: can your granny use it? Answer: no). Now, I’m not some big Windows advocate - guess what operating system this web site was developed on? - but the fact is that an operating system that can be used comfortably by ‘developer’ types is far, far removed from an operating system that’s suitable for public consumption. Anyone who claims that Linux is “ready for the desktop” just means that they can use it - but as they generally turn out to be experienced computer users with slight masochistic tendencies, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

What’s brought this mini-article on, anyway? Two things: first, the BBC’s Click Online programme has been showing off the power of the supposedly newbie-friendly Linux distribution, Mandrake, over the past few weeks. Their hardened technology journalists have been unable to get it working. “Incompetent fools!”, you might scoff, but the point is that these people are just the kind of incompetent fools who use computers, day in, day out. They want it to work, and work straight away, not after they’ve spent hours recompiling their kernel until they find a setting that works, or editing XFree86Config because their mouse wheel actually causes the pointer to skitter across the screen like a frightened bee.

Secondly, I’ve just had to edit php.ini to turn the security hole disguised as a feature, register_globals, off. That wouldn’t normally be worth shouting about - I’m not the most competent administrator in the world, so overlooking that for over a year wouldn’t be a big thing - but the thing is, it was definitely off before. Yet when I upgraded my PHP installation, using the handy Debian package manager, it decided to overwrite my old configuration with this new one. Not the most intuitive of things to happen, but this illustrates one of the major problems with Linux today. Either you do everything by hand (something your average granny isn’t going to be too happy about), or you abdicate some of the responsibility to the package managers, which manage to be inconsistent, over-reaching and often impenetrable, all at the same time. With a thousand and one different versions of various applications, all dependent on a billion other libraries, which are of course, in turn, dependent on other things too, you can’t blame the package managers for sometimes throwing their hands up in the air and overwriting half your stuff just to make things sane again.

Linux is a programmers’ and a developers’ operating system. With all its many and varied distributions, braches and versions of the core applications, no computer novice can keep up. Linux zealots are wont to call these people “idiots”, but the truth is that they’re normal people going about their lives, unwilling to spend hours learning the intricacies of their operating system just so they can get on with some Web surfing, email or whatever. They use Windows because it works for them - they don’t have to recompile their kernel or upgrade bintools every few months - but the Linux programmers, writing the operating system for themselves, fail to see that not everyone is like them. That’s no problem - it’s the evangelising “Linux is for everyone, honest” people that annoy me. Linux is not for everyone. Fact!

N.B. OK, I wrote this a months or two ago while I was preparing the site on a Linux system - nothing compelled me to post it now other than laziness. Anyway, it’s just as relevant as when I originally wrote it for testing purposes. :-*