Al Robertson's Blog

So I’ve just watched my way through ace Scandi-noir chiller Black Lake, aka Svartsjön. It’s at times deeply thoughtful and always beautifully made, so I’m a bit surprised that it hasn’t built up more of an online following. The reviews I could find missed much of what made it so interesting.

Seasons one and two rhymed with and pushed against each other in interesting and carefully thought out ways, while critiquing a certain kind of infectiously toxic masculinity and playing subtle games with th...

I’ve been podcasted! Many thanks to Steve Aryan for having me on the ever awesome Crash Landing over at Geek Syndicate. Steve and I talked about the five novels I’d want to have with me if I was stranded on an alien planet.

Some of the books I chose are SFnal, some are magical, one comes from tenth century Japan and all of them are unputdownable. We had a great time talking about them all and much more – I hope you enjoy our chat:

The post Crash Landing with five of my favourite novels appear...

I’ve been podcasted! Many thanks to Steve Aryan for having me on the ever awesome Crash Landing over at Geek Syndicate. Steve and I talked about the five novels I’d want to have with me if I was stranded on an alien planet.

Some of the books I chose are SFnal, some are magical, one comes from tenth century Japan and all of them are unputdownable. We had a great time talking about them all and much more – I hope you enjoy our chat:

The post Crash Landing with my five favourite novels appear...

So a week or so ago, we were fortunate to welcome Justin Hopper to The FuseBox to read from his new book, ‘The Old Weird Albion’, and then – as part of an open, round table conversation – talk about how its understanding of the past can help us look forward into the future.

Memories of Balsdean

Justin began by reading chapter VII of ‘The Old Weird Albion’ – ‘Ruins’. It charts a walk through Balsdean, a deserted, highly evocative, perhaps even lightly haunted space on the fringes of Brighton....

So a week or so ago, we were fortunate to welcome Justin Hopper to The FuseBox to read from his new book, ‘The Old Weird Albion’, and then – as part of an open, round table conversation – talk about how its understanding of the past can help us look forward into the future.

Memories of Balsdean

Justin began by reading chapter VII of ‘The Old Weird Albion’ – ‘Ruins’. It charts a walk through Balsdean, a deserted, highly evocative, perhaps even lightly haunted space on the fringes of Brighton....

Alors aujourd’hui ‘Crashing Heaven’ est lancé en France comme ‘Station: La Chute’. C’est une merveilleuse édition de Denoël, magnifiquement traduite par Florence Dolisi et avec une belle (et très précise) couverture de Manchu. Donc, tout d’abord, bienvenue lecteurs français au monde de Jack Forster, Hugo Fist et tous les autres.

Si vous voulez en savoir plus sur le livre et ses inspirations, j’ai fait une interview avec Gromovar Wolfenheir, où nous parlons de tout cela et plus. Et voici ses...

Having written a fair bit about the ‘Do Androids Dream…’ event at The FuseBox, I thought it was time for a change of pace. So I got together with the event’s co-host, Dr Kathleen Stock, for a chat about it all. And here it is:

Towards the end of our conversation, I said I’d put up some links to Kathleen and her work. So, first of all, here’s her website. Click here for her blog post about sexual objectication over at the LSE and here for her ‘Philosophy Bites’ podcast on fiction and the emot...

(I was rooting around in the files the other day and found this blog post. I wrote it back in 2015, for the launch of ‘Crashing Heaven’, but it was never published anywhere, so I thought I’d put it up now. Enjoy!)

I used to walk the family dog in fields by the Thames, just over the river from J. G. Ballard’s house. He set part of ‘The Unlimited Dream Company’ there. The people of Walton-on-Thames come down to the river’s shore to wonder at the transfiguration of Shepperton. The view never cha...

There’s one part of the ‘Do Designers Dream of Electric Sheep’ afternoon I keep on going back to. One of the classic current AI discussion points is the problem of the out-of-control self-driving car.  If one’s had some sort of glitch or accident and is about to crash into (for example) a bus stop queue, how does it decide who to avoid and who to hit, who will survive and who won’t? Who will it seem to feel most empathy for?

And that led to this –

One very reasonable response came out in an...

So, we had our ‘Do Designers Dream of Electric Sheep’ afternoon at the FuseBox, and it went very well indeed – so well, in fact, that I’ve had big problems trying to boil down everything it made me think about into a single blog post. As it turns out, when you combine ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ and ‘Blade Runner’ with a room full of designers, technologists, philosophers and creatives, you end up with an awful lot to think about.

But that’s actually quite useful. For the next coupl...