Permutation City Blog

All you wanted to know about making compost.

A look at mania and depression with reference to the life of Spike Milligan.

A robotic ship is sent to another world where it creates a new colony including babies to colonise it. The story is about later visitors to the world. They try to enforce Earth's culture but the natives cheerfully ignore them and follow a non-materialistic life style supported by the infinite resources of a robotic civilisation.

Well if you've seen the previous films you know what sort of thing to expect. There's more of it here but this time it doesn't work. This film is definitely too long and they could easy have cut out some of the sprawling complexity. There are too many characters trying to do too many things and I didn't care about them by the end. Also missing are the funny set pieces from the earlier films.

This was part autobiography of Stephen King and part recommendations about writing. An interesting read. I think the biggest recommendation is that if you want to write then get lots of practice.

Star spanning science fiction with a psychic boy again.

How to organise your life in order to make good use of your time. Basically it's about lists and forming particular habits about using them. It would take a big shift to live like this but it did inspire me to always carry a note book around.

The meeting of humans and a race of insects. This is interesting because it's told from the alien point of view.

Psychic boy comes to jungle world and finds the inhabitants. Others come chasing him and don't respect the world. I think I read this because of others in the series rather than the book itself.

A colony of humans have been lost on a jungle world. They have evolved to fit their environment. Then explorers come to exploit the world. It's full of big creatures and then even bigger creatures who eat them.