Neal Stephenson at Gresham College in May

Thursday 8th May - keynote speaker, Symposium: Science Fiction as a Literary Genre.

Given the amazingness-density of The Baroque Cycle, and the intricte overlapping with history and mainstream fiction, this looks fascinating.

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP

I remember hearing about Asimov's death, and Heinlein's. Now the third of the Trinity has broken the bonds of earth.

I don't think I read everything he'd written before I was 16, but it was very close to it - and of course he cheated obliged us by carrying on writing, if mostly with collaborators, for a long time after that.

He spun tales for us - he told us we could make friends with dolphins and surgically uplifted killer whales, build a ladder to the sky and live there for the rest of our days, delve the depths of the sea and find stars inside a monolith on the moon. We could do anything, given science, and determination, and faith in mankind.

The incredible, wonderful, way he had of crowbarring your mind wider wasn't anywhere near the limit of his talents. If you saw science in his work, you could be sure it was right according to the best ideas of the day. He was an accomplished scientist and engineer, too - he worked on the new radar technology during the Second World War, which helped to save uncountable numbers of lives, and he was one of the very first to envision a geostationary satellite, an unsleeping home-made star which would bring all the peoples of the earth closer together.

He shone with ideas like a star, with the same wonderful, unpredictable twinkle. And now another of the Names of God has been spoken.