Author of science fiction, fantasy and horror
I have a new short story, “Rusty Sue“, just published over at Drabblecast. Drabblecast features stories on the weirder side of speculative fiction, and they regularly produce podcast episodes each month featuring a new story.
Rusty Sue is available in audio and print formats, and features as part of Drabblecast’s run of “Weird West” stories.
I stumbled across this webpage put together by Nature, listing the top 100 science papers of all time. There’s a great interactive tool that lets you cycle through the papers and see graphs of their citations per year.
There are tens of millions of papers on the record. Only around 15,000 papers have ever been cited more than 1,000 times.
Naively (or maybe arrogantly, given I was trained as a physicist), I expected the most cited papers to be related to physics. It’s the most fundamental of the sciences, after all. I expected the other sciences to lean on physics.
Failing that, I imagined the most cited things would be famous papers, like Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers in 1905 or Watson and Crick’s 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA.
But the most cited papers by far as either biology lab technique or physical chemistry. Which makes sense, in hindsight. That’s where the big business is. That’s what the big labs focus on.
The most cited paper in history, from 1951, is about measuring proteins, and has 305,000 citations at the time of writing.
I’m pleased to announce that my story “The Withering Sky” is a recipient of the Writers of the Future Award 2022. The space horror novelette will be published in the upcoming Writers of the Future Volume 39 on 16th May 2023.
Click here to order the anthology from your preferred store.
The Writers of the Future anthologies are an excellent way to discover up-and-coming writers in science fiction and fantasy — not to blow my own trumpet (okay, maybe a little bit). The contest and associated publication have been running for decades (with 39 volumes at the time of writing). Many genre-leading writers such as Nnedi Okorafor, Patrick Rothfuss and Ken Liu got their start in these pages.
You can find all the previous anthologies here.
This post is inspired by Kate McKean’s recent newsletter article, which I thought was a great way to visualise, rather than just list, books read last year.
I read 50 books in 2022, which makes me very happy. It’s been a hard year at work and in my personal life, but I’ve still found time for reading. That’s an average of almost a book a week — though I definitely squeezed a final few in there over Christmas to give a satisfying round number.
58% fiction, 42% non-fiction. I’m not surprised that sci-fi tops the list of fiction, nor by the tie between fantasy, horror and literary fiction. I haven’t done this kind of analysis on previous years, but that pretty much aligns with my gut instinct about my reading tastes. More unusually for me, thriller/crime are >0% — I’m trying to branch out a bit into what is usually a dull genre for me. My guess is that I’m drifting year-on-year from a fiction-dominated appetite to something more balanced.
Looking closer at non-fiction, it’s obvious that ‘Craft/Creativity’ was a hot topic for me. These were mostly books about writing or about artists. I’ve enjoyed reading more essays and memoir this year, and my reading list for 2023 is leaning into that. Self-help reading centred around creativity, productivity and introversion/sensitivity.
I’m shocked by how few audiobooks I listened to this year. Over the last 10 years I’ve usually had an audiobook on the go most of the time. But this year I’ve been listening to so many podcasts that I haven’t really had time for audiobooks. 24% ebooks sounds about right, though also might be a reduction from previous years. I do tend to mostly read paperbacks, so there’s no surprises here, but there are definitely more hardbacks than I anticipated (lots of these were gifts — if friends/family are reading this, yes please, more hardbacks for my birthday next year).
This analysis is definitely reductive. I haven’t researched people’s identities in detail. In any case, artists shouldn’t have to divulge details of their personal lives to further their careers. I’ve gone with ‘white and/or cis-gender male’ as the easiest questions to answer. A 60/40 split isn’t bad, but it’s not brilliant either. I think it’s better than previous years, but the trend will be clearer if this analysis gets repeated in future years.
I count books as ‘read’ on my log even if I don’t read them cover to cover. Sometimes books lose momentum or I lose interest, but I still feel that I’ve absorbed the essence of the book. As a rule of thumb, if I get more than halfway, I’ll count it. But it looks like I read 84% of books cover to cover this year. That’s 42 books completed, 8 partial reads.
For reference, here’s the list (see the Book Log for previous years):