Science Fiction stories on your mobile

Interesting find for mobile/cell phone users: www.wattpad.com

It's a very small downloadable app for your phone, compatible with most modern handsets - simply bluetooth it from your PC to your phone and then you can read stories on your mobile. The text size is decent for small screens and the navigation of the site as good as it can be.

A lot of the content is user-generated, but the Gutenberg Project(to digitise books that are out of copyright and make them available free)is to put 17,000 books on the Wattpad user-generated content service.

As the mobile content news site MoCo News commented, That should improve the quality of legal content available on the service.

The Good Soldier Art for sale

Another lot for ebay, this time a page from a three-part Cyberman story "The Good Soldier". This page was published in Doctor Who Magazine #177, cover dated 4th September 1991.

Written by TV Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel, drawn by Mike Collins, I think this is one of the most chilling comic strip pages featuring the Cybermen I ever edited during my time as editor of Doctor Who Magazine.

The strip spanned three issues and was, I recall, one of the first that new-installed Marvel UK Editor-in-Chief offered strong views on in terms of offering inking tips to then newcomer Steve Pini.

You can view a larger-sized version of the page on the main web site

Life on Mars, Who get Saturn nominations

Let's hear it for the Brits - again. Nominees for the 33rd annual Saturn Awards, which celebrate the best SF&F and Horror movies and TV work, include Doctor Who and Life on Mars, with Daniel Criag's outing as James Bond in Casino Royale and Aardman's Flushed Away - which despite some critical panning and being described as a box office failure, had pulled in over $175 million in box office receipts by last week - also in the mix.

On the US side, good to see Heroes, Stargate SG1 and the light-hearted Eureka in the nominations, and great to see Star Trek: The Animated Series has made it into the nominations for Best Retro TV DVD Release. Star Trek fans overwhelmingly voted to see this series released on DVD during my second period of editing Titan's Star Trek Magazine, and it would be icing in the cake if the show won this category after all the delays releasing it.

One for Morecambe fans...

I compered the monthly Spotlight Club at the Yorkshire House, Lancaster on Friday night (yes, it was me who welcomed a bemused audience with "Ladies, Gentlemen and dolphins -- you know who you are...")

Finishing the bill, which included four writers from Dumfries, was local musician Kriss Foster, whose song "Morecambe" anyone who's ever been to the seaside town will enjoy. I clipped it a little, so check out his myspace site for a fuller version.