ON BECOMING (OLD) BATMAN

There's a profound interface between physicality and cognitive/creative prowess. That's maybe a buried but insistent theme in my books. Too bad that my 65th birthday is only a matter of weeks away and time has taken its toll... but that's not enough to stop me working out 6 or 7 days a week.

These days, I'm more likely than ever to be frightening my neighbours by doing some of my training bare-chested in the back garden. I'm just in from whacking out some punches and cossack squats in the rain and wind. I blame this young chap (young by my current standards) called Adam Sinicki, better known to the world at large as The Bioneer:

Want to become Batman? Or Black Widow? Arrow? Check him out on his YouTube channel.

While I'm here, the latest book I've read from an SF author is Island Reich, but it's not SF: a World War II thriller underpinned by a vast amount of research. (From writing the historic timelines in the Ragnarok trilogy, plus On The Brink and even New Jerusalem, I know how much effort goes into creating this kind of verisimilitude.) It works really, really well, with a nice what if? embedded in the story.

 

The author is better known to SF fandom as Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I haven't seen him for many a year. I do recall a little nunchaku challenge between the two of us at some convention, using a makeshift weapon I constructed out of a shoelace, a hairbrush and a pen. Or something like that.

Mr Grimwood won.

I have two books in progress right now, so more to come from me...