Mark Charan Newton

I saw this news article and laughed a lot.
Budget airline Ryanair has been told to withdraw an advert featuring a model in schoolgirl-style clothes and a headline “hottest back to school fares”.   
 What really made me chuckle was the response from the airline:
…the airline said the model’s clothing reflected what was currently fashionable among young women…   
Um… [...]

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This is going out from my agent today:
John Jarrold has concluded a two-book World rights deal for new UK fantasy author Mark Charan Newton with Peter Lavery of Macmillan/Tor UK, for a good five-figure sum.The first book is titled NIGHTS OF VILLJAMUR, and will be published early in 2009. An impending Ice Age looms over [...]

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I would very much like to own some of this technology.
An electronic contact lens has been developed that will enable maps and videos to be beamed before the wearer’s eyes. The bionic lens has microscopic circuits fixed to a flexible plastic. The scientists who created the device say the lenses could eventually provide computer-aided vision [...]

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Superb article from the Onion, via Bookninja.
Sitting in a quiet downtown diner, local hospital administrator Philip Meyer looks as normal and well-adjusted as can be. Yet, there’s more to this 27-year-old than first meets the eye: Meyer has recently finished reading a book. Yes, the whole thing. “It was great,” said the peculiar Indiana native, [...]

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I’ve been working on proofs this week, hence the nothing that has gone on. But I had some good news about a short story I’ve sold for an anthology called Darkness on the Edge. It’s full of dark tales inspired by the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen, and as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’m a bit [...]

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The BBC reported here that our Stalinist government hope to build more nuclear power stations. (No, I don’t like Gordon Brown by the way.) It’s lauded as a great way to tackle carbon emissions. It doesn’t produce any carbon, they say.
Well, firstly, nuclear power is not a zero carbon process. Every stage of the process, [...]

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I’m part of Fantasy Book Critic’s round up from a writer’s perspective. Many fine folk there. I’m about half way down, waffling on more than most…
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I’ve started reading Latro in the Mist, a omnibus of Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete, by SF and Fantasy legend, Gene Wolfe. What a superb concept, about a Roman mercenary who gets a head injury that deprives him of short term memory. He can see gods and goddesses who roam the landscape, [...]

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Much to pick apart here. This point in particular stayed in the mind:
…prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in EO Wilson’s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d “L’Oreal” already exists well [...]

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Fancied a bit of crime reading this festive period, so I went to the old faithful writer, someone who has never yet disappointed me, Henning Mankell. The Kurt Wallander mysteries are superb novels, set in the bleak countryside of Sweden. Miserablist fiction here, a particular favourite of mine, and done superbly. Wallander is a superbly [...]

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