Steve J. Wright

@stevejwright

Arts and sciences person, very unprofessional SFF writer and reviewer, blogs at stevejwright.com. Mastodon @stevejwright@c.im

249 Siguiendo291 Seguidores2593 Publicaciones

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Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Jul 9

And that got me thinking about the "Foundation" series with its succession of cloned Emperors, and, well....

Three one-watt luminaries of the UK's dafter political groups - Darren Grimes, Laurence Fox, and Piers Corbyn - labelled, respectively, "Brother Dawn", "Brother Day" and "Brother Dusk".

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· May 14

The Tories already tried this. It didn't work very well.

On the left, a picture of Robert Picardo as the Emergency Medical Hologram from Star Trek: Voyager - a middle-aged man, balding, with a high domed forehead, dark eyes and a stern expression.

On the right - aptly enough - former Conservative Party leader William Hague, show seconds after shimmering into view saying "What is the nature of the leadership emergency?" - a middle-aged man, balding, with a high domed forehead, dark eyes and a stern expression.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· May 10

No, wait, Steve, do it properly.

The same image as the last skeet, but turned upside down, in a reference to the much-publicized image of Mussolini dead and hanging from a lamp post. I saw that one on Twitter (RIP) once. I have never understood what passed for their moderation policy on images. Picture of fluffy kitten: flagged as mature content, click to see it. Picture of decomposing fascist dictator dangling from street furniture: no problem, Twitter users, feast your eyes. Baffling. But I digress.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· May 10

It's not all bad. It does wonders for my impression of Mussolini.

Me again, having removed my glasses and stuck out my chin in a failed attempt to resemble Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945, never say my skeets aren't educational.)

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· May 10

All I could do was adopt a root-and-branch approach to the problem.

Me, a fat pasty git in a worn-out green sweater and glasses, with hair shaved down to a faint haze of stubble, staring at the camera with an expression of comical misery.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Apr 28

Challenge accepted.

An mbira (or kalimba, or thumb piano) on an ironing board.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Mar 10

Post your favourite Lord of the Rings character. Wrong answers only.

Geoffrey Bayldon as Catweazle. A thin man with a beaky nose, staring eyes, long wild hair, beard and moustaches. He is wearing a tattered brown garment, something like a monk's habit, and his arms are raised and his fingers splayed out, as if he is trying to cast some kind of spell.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Feb 25

Last, from me - #WSPit AGENT OF DAMNATION - #Dis #PN #LGBT This one hasn't yet been released into the wild, but I wouldn't mind getting some eyes on it anyway - see if the pitch below piques your interest. (Think THE MALTESE FALCON meets THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS.)

Shax is a demon from the Lesser Key of Solomon. He used to command thirty legions of devils mounted on evil horses, but Hell moves with the times, and his guys mostly get Ubers these days.

With Heaven and Hell at a sort of detente, it’s not unreasonable for Shax’s angelic opposite number to ask a favour. A mortal “client” has been acting oddly, and could Shax make some discreet inquiries?

But Shax is less discreet than he might be, and soon he’s on the run from a shadowy conspiracy which includes both demons and angels – and whose goal seems to be to let their client in on a secret that mortals are not meant to know.

And so, with the help of his demon best friend Amy, a sexy djinni, the world’s (possibly) last and (certainly) least ritual magician, a crew of increasingly baffled angels, and a modicum of strong language*, Shax sets out to trace this conspiracy to its roots – all the way up to its roots. Along the way, some secrets are revealed, such as the true nature of the afterlife, why the Devil quotes Len Deighton as well as Scripture to his purpose, how God bestows His healing grace on consumer electronics, and why the Last Trump is going to sound so, so much worse than you could possibly imagine.

*All right, a f***ton of swearing.**
**And that’s a f***ton avoirdupois – no lightweight metric f***tonnes here.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Feb 25

Next #WSPit THE NINTH KNIGHT - #P #Dis #F #LGBT Eight knights set out on quests for adventure - but an enigmatic ninth knight shadows them all. Features fights against the traditional enemies of knights - dragons, ogres, poor people, poor map reading, mid-life crises...

Cover for THE NINTH KNIGHT - nine swords, points together in a circle, with various heraldic designs in strips above and below. (They actually constitute a kind of cheat-sheet for the knights' shields in the book, which are described in proper heraldic terms in the text.)

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Feb 25

OK, let's go: #WSPit First up, FELONS IN THE EYES OF GOD - #P #Dis #SF #LGBT Two ambassadors clash with each other and the baffling AI governing a planet, while a starship captain approaches, carrying a cargo which might mean the end of everything. Diverse cast, high concepts, 'orrible monsters.

Cover for FELONS IN THE EYES OF GOD - a (rather clunky) starship zooming into the bottom right of the panel on a column of white light.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Feb 6

La granda verda orikteropo kantas al la brikon. The large green aardvark sings to the brick. OK, the Esperanto was computer generated, but the artistic interpretation is all me, baby.

Extremely crude line drawing of an aardvark singing to a brick. It's actually supposed to be a green aardvark, but, well, colour images? In this economy?

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Jan 4

Sorry, but I kept thinking about Trump's overall "strategy" for the whole Venezuela thing, and this image formed irresistably in my mind.

Screencap from "Withnail & I": Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and Marwood (Paul McGann) standing in the pouring rain. It's the moment where Withnail is saying "We've gone on holiday by mistake", only the added text reads "We've invaded Venezuela by mistake!"

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Dec 27

... points for trying?

Me (fat bloke with glasses) with a pen stuck up my nose.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Dec 26

The woolly hat is nice, but it is not as good as the one I already have, which lights up.

Me, with more of my face visible (there's always a down side), wearing a woolly hat with a LED lamp, the glare from which is basically obscuring the upper half of my head.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Dec 26

My dear sister has sent me woolly things, including one of those neck gaiter affairs, so I can cosplay as a cuddly ICE agent.

Picture of me, muffled in woolly hat and neck gaiter, with only a pair of staring eyes behind my glasses visible.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 29

If you see this, I IMPLORE you to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation.

An office. In the foreground, the top of a computer monitor, surmounted by a black and white picture of a badger. As requested, no explanation is herewith provided.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 28

"Are you sitting two-square comfortybold on your botty? Then I'll begin."

Keir Starmer, looking serious as befits the Prime Minister, making an Official Announcement at a podium. Closed captions in front of him read "there's a famous slogan in the United Kingdom"

(Also considered: "Skegness is so bracing" and "Santos Uncle Joe's Mint Balls Keep You All Aglow")

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 28

Ah, brings back fond memories of my Economy Laptop.

Palm IIIx with clip-on folding keyboard, and yes, I actually wrote stuff on it.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 24

Hey, "Institute for Family Studies"? FTFY.

Institute for Family Studies article headline, amended to read "Men Are In Trouble. Maybe Not Paying Attention To Complete Pillocks Is A Solution."

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 23

Don't think I can do a movie - how about an episode of "Hammer House of Horror", though? Specifically, the "Carpathian Eagle" one.

Screenshot from "Carpathian Eagle" where Suzanne Danielle is about to lure a very young Pierce Brosnan away for some involuntary cardiectomy. (Blonde woman in pink dress and white belt, and rather obviously braless, standing next to a hunky dark-haired guy in a blue sweater, sitting on a swing in a park.) That swing is long gone now, but they're in Lowndes Park, you can see Skottowe's Pond and what was then the Waitrose car park behind them. About ten-fifteen minutes' walk from where I'm sat right now.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 11

Convincing you to read my novel with the first sentence. Share yours if you want. (Start of "Felons in the Eyes of God".)

Header line: Felons in the Eyes of God by Stephen James Wright Page 1 of 214

CHAPTER ONE

Laura
I'm reasonably sure this guy isn't actually human, and I am dead certain that he's creeping me out. Still. I need this deal, so I'm keeping the creepy feelings well under control.
I hope.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Nov 10

Something I wrote a while back, here:https://stevejwright.com/2023/02/16/now-is-the-winter-of-our-ai-content/

Books are not fungible. But AI content is. You can order it by the yard, or by the bucketful, or whatever metaphor appeals to you. It’s bean-counter heaven – you can get as much “consistent reading experience” as you like, any time you like, at the click of a switch.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Oct 24

People have been posting consoling cat pictures. I would follow suit, but am handicapped by not having a cat. So, I invite you to enjoy this picture of the absence of a cat.

Snow, with the rather cartoonish imprint of a cat's paws (specifically, next door's cat, just after it jumped off our windowsill.)

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Oct 16

*sigh* Once again, I hate being right. From my long piece (stevejwright.com/2025/01/30/t...) about AI and its failings:

There is, I suppose, one actual, valid, use case. If you want something with a predictable format, and one for which fact-checking is completely irrelevant – well, you could certainly get a chatbot to turn out any number of newspaper opinion columns, at least from some opinion-column writers. No, “Generative AI” cannot replace genuine human expertise. No, it cannot replace genuine human creativity. But I am not the only person to observe that it can, in fact, replace Boris Johnson14. Since I think Boris Johnson could be more usefully replaced by an empty space, I don’t think this is much of a win for AI.

14. It would not surprise me in the least if Boris Johnson was already using ChatGPT or similar to produce his columns. After all, actually writing all that stuff would seriously cut into his drinking and shagging time, wouldn’t it?

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Sep 28

It's still ticking upwards. I don't think this is going to go down in history as one of Keir Starmer's greatest ideas.

Screenshot of UK government petitions website, the salient details being the title: "Do not introduce Digital ID cards" and the number of signatures: 2,360,393.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Sep 5

A little piece of Hookland has arrived!

"The Latchless Door: Rhymes & Songs of Hookland", seen here lying on a dusty carpet with the shadow of a dead orchid encroaching on the bottom right.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Aug 26

Fellow UK peeps, please spread this one around (if you haven't already.)

Graphic from the European Movement:
Leaving the ECHR won't fix migration. But it will:
- Destroy our relationship with Europe.
- Destabilise the UK.
- Put us in Putin's camp.
- Take away protection for our human rights.

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Aug 24

Haven't read "Deathless" yet, though with a recommendation like that, well, I must give it a look. I was introduced to Valente through "Radiance", which I remember reviewing on my blog. (Sample of my critical acumen appended.)

Radiance, by Catherynne M. Valente. Possibly the year’s most significant novel in the field of retrofuturistic cinematic epistolary dieselpunk surrealism. Admittedly, it’s not an overcrowded sub-genre, that.

Actually, I don’t know quite how you would classify this one, if you worry a lot over sub-genres. The author herself describes it as a decopunk alt-history Hollywood space opera mystery thriller with space whales, and, really, that’s fair enough. (I think decopunk is like dieselpunk, only without the stains.) Perhaps the best way to deal with this one is to slot it into the category of SF that Brian Aldiss helpfully named the Widescreen Baroque. (And, as the old adage has it, if it ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.)

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Aug 9

From one of my blog's long screeds:

I’ve read a certain amount of the TESCREAL mob’s output (for my sins), and entirely too much of it is along the lines of “here are all the cool things we will do with nanotechnology/AI/aneutronic fusion/whatever, just as soon as those science peons in the laboratories get round to inventing it.”

Steve J. Wright@stevejwright· Jul 27

"Oh dear. The Myrka."