Who Is Watching You?
June 18th, 2011Think the scheming and deception of the spies at the court of Queen Elizabeth I in The Scar-Crow Men is some historical novelty? Much of what I write about in the Swords of Albion books is relevant today. In fact, that’s why I write it…
A two-year Washington Post investigation has revealed the true extent of the top secret world created by the US Government over the past few years.
* one and a half times the population of Washington DC now have top-secret security clearances.
*In the last ten years, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence have been, or are being, constructed in the Washington DC area alone covering 17 million square feet or the equivalent of three pentagons.
* Fifty thousand intelligence reports are published every year, so many that a good number are ignored by time-pressed chiefs.
This hidden world has become so pervasive, so secretive and so unwieldy that “no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
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Eight Unbroken Codes
May 24th, 2011Anyone who’s read The Scar-Crow Men knows that codes play an important part in the story, as they did for real spies in the sixteenth century…and today.
New Scientist has a great article this week on eight codes that still remain unbroken, from the famous Voynich Manuscript to the CIA’s Kryptos monument to one of the final messages from the Zodiac serial killer.
Worth a read. You’ll have to sign up, for free, but you only get a window of a couple of days to check it out.
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No Hiding Place
April 5th, 2011No hiding from those drunken tweets or FB status updates. On the other hand, you may know who to avoid in the bar…
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Mushrooms That Make Zombie Ants
March 3rd, 2011The fungus can destroy entire colonies and leave behind gruseome ant graveyards, where twisted, dark corpses rest with their mandibles locked around leaf veins, a final act that secures the creature’s host in position before it releases spores to infect others.”
On the bright side, they go very nice in an omelette.
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Scientists Conduct First Successful Time Travel Experiment
November 22nd, 2010Turns out it wasn’t 88mph after all. A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has completed a successful experiment with quantum time travel.
Seth Lloyd and his collaborators “have identified a new approach to the problem that opens up the strange world of time travel to experiments,” according to a report in New Scientist magazine.
Even more fascinating, the MiT team sent a photon back to “kill” itself.
The magazine says, ‘When this experiment is done, something interesting happens: every single time the time travel works, the gun fails to go off. And when time travel fails, the gun works. To put this in the language of the grandfather paradox, as long as there is some chance of your gun misfiring and the assassination failing, time travel may work. “You can point the gun but you can’t pull the trigger,” says Lloyd.’
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London’s Secret Cemetery
October 31st, 2010In Southwark, not far from the resurrected Globe Theatre, the BFI and many of London’s arts establishments, lies Cross Bones cemetery. The graveyard is set aside for “outcasts” – prostitutes and paupers – and was in use for hundreds of years from Medieval times.
It was original the burial place for the Winchester Geese, the London prostitutes licenced by the Bishop of Winchester mentioned in The Sword of Albion.
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Invasion Of The Zombie Ants
August 19th, 2010“The parasite, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, appears to take over the minds of infected ants.
The insects are forced to leave their nests and head for a leaf that provides ideal conditions for the fungus to reproduce.
On arrival the ants are compelled to bite hard on a major vein of the leaf before dying. The “death grip” leaves the ant in a perfect position for the fungus to grow and release its infectious spores.”
A thousand authors begin a new story…
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Earth Calling All Aliens
January 21st, 2010After futile decades of listening for any signs of a civilisation beyond Earth, SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – is considering broadcasting our own message to the stars.
New Scientist reports that a meeting will be held in Texas in June to discuss if, and how, and in what form, such an attempt at communication should be made.
There is opposition. Our oldest stories tell us that it’s not always wise to let the gods notice you, which is what’s on the mind of SF author David Brin. He resigned from a SETI panel because he felt there wasn’t enough discussion of the potential repercussions from such a broadcast. He says: “I dislike seeing my children’s destiny being gambled with by a couple of dozen arrogant people who cling to one image of the alien”
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The Venus Project
January 12th, 2010Underwater cities. Space stations. City-sized ships.
The stuff of science fiction is just day-to-day business for Jacque Fresco, a futurist who’s come across my radar a few times in the past. He’s a designer and an inventor with a view on where we’re going and what we need to change to survive.
His latest work is The Venus Project – a vision of how to integrate the best of science and technology into a comprehensive plan for a new society based on both human and environmental concerns.
Click on the link above and you’ll see some absolutely breathtaking art that wouldn’t look out of place on an SF book cover. You can find out more about The Venus Project here:
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Dolphins Are People Too
January 7th, 2010About time, too.
They can perform quite complex tasks effectively. Unlike Hoon and Hewitt.
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Police Officer Sees Aliens At Crop Circle
October 24th, 2009Courtesy of Warren Ellis, the first item relating to the previous blog post, herewith known as “the pattern”.
For your consideration: the Daily Telegraph is reporting a British policeman had a close encounter of the third kind at a crop circle near the standing stones at Avebury in Wiltshire. His description of the figures he observed – more than six feet tall with blonde hair – is of a recurring type which UFO watchers have christened “Nordics”.
The police officer said: “They ran faster than any man I have ever seen. I’m no slouch but they were moving so fast. I looked away for a second and when I looked back they were gone.
”I then got scared. The noise was still around but I got an uneasy feeling and headed for the car. For the rest of the day I had a pounding headache I couldn’t shift.”
So: crop circles, aliens and standing stones – that ticks three boxes all at once. More to come…
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Countdown To 2012
October 22nd, 2009If you haven’t heard of the 2012 meme gathering pace around the world, you will soon, thanks to a new movie by Roland Emmerich. According to various sources, December 21 2012 is supposed to be either a) the end of the world as a result of a collision with a comet or asteroid/a collision with a rogue, unidentified planet/a geomagnetic reversal/a black hole/some as-yet-unidentified source or b) the end of the world as we know it, caused by a shift in human consciousness, or perhaps, a spiritual awakening leading to a long foretold golden age.
Part of this belief is based on the Mayan Long Count calendar, which, according to some academics, comes to an end on December 21 (or 23) 2012. An End, with a capital E. Typically of the academic world, there is no firm agreement on this, with some saying the calendar actually ends 4.134105 × 10 to the 28th years in the future. Which is what is commonly known as “wiggle room”.
But it’s not just the Mayans. A similar prediction lies in the myths of the Hopi Native Americans, in the I Ching, some say in a code hidden in the Bible, and in the writings of the philosopher Terence McKenna, who created a formula which predicted a singularity of infinite complexity on December 21 2012, when everything and anything imaginable will occur simultaneously. Which seems to happen in my office on a regular basis.
All New Age Nonsense, some say. Well…it doesn’t matter. Much to the annoyance of my arch-rationalist friends, things which don’t exist can often have a greater effect on the world than things that do. If enough people believe we are approaching a time of “spiritual awakening” or “consciousness change”, they will make that happen. Altering patterns of behaviour. Becoming, say, more environmentally-minded. More socially aware, or politically aware. Then, 2012 becomes a focal point for changing the world. Putting it right.
On the other hand, maybe all these predictions are right.
For that reason, I’m going to be documenting here anything and everything which might relate to this. Strange events, odd coincidences, political and environmental acts, UFO sightings, religious phenomena, scientific advances and anything else which might take my interest. Who knows – a pattern might appear – or not? And as anyone who has read my books knows, I’m very interested in hidden patterns.
I’m interested to hear of any links, sightings, bizarre occurrences – personal or global, acts of activism, and transcendence, which may or may not fit into this. You can sign up for my forum and leave a message there, or DM me through that site.
I think we can have some fun with this.
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David Carradine’s Ghost
September 25th, 2009Courtesy of Warren Ellis:
This is the creepiest thing I’ve read recently. David Carradine claiming he’s being haunted by a ghost in a closet. Shortly before he died…in a closet. A J-horror flick in the making…
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The Age of Misrule/Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol Interface
September 21st, 2009From Princeton University:
You know I’ve spent the last nine years writing about this stuff in Age of Misrule, The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent, right?
And then Dan Brown goes and writes about it in The Lost Symbol and gets all the attention. Bastard.
It’s interesting and inspiring research and like Brown says in his book, has the potential to instigate a paradigm shift in scientific thinking.
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Egyptian Temples Aligned With The Heavens
September 9th, 2009I find Egypt and its history endlessly fascinating. Don’t know how many books I’ve read on the topic, including a load about secrets encoded in the symbols and the landscape. But the fact that it’s still giving up those secrets is a source of great joy.
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The American Stonehenge
April 29th, 2009People prize what they don’t understand at least as much as what they do.
Read page 3 for a mad Puritan worldview you probably thought died out 200 years ago, and page 4 for the nuts.
We’re going to be getting a lot more 2012 apocalypse meanderings in the weeks and months to come…
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Knights Templar Hid Turin Shroud
April 6th, 2009They had the Loch Ness Monster and a crashed alien spaceship too.
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Did You Know?
March 2nd, 2009Of course, we all did know this, right?
(I didn’t make this, btw: the video on the progression of information technology was researched by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman. Google them to find out more of their work.)
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The Author




Jack of Ravens, part one of the Kingdom of the Serpent series, is now available in mass-market paperback from Gollancz in the UK.