I'm Back in '26
2026 has been an eventful year for me. Not that all the other years haven't been.
Having enjoyed ten years of respite from 'busy' work, while managing our 5.5-acre olive grove and dealing with domestic chores, I've had an opportunity to see my life from a completely different perspective. But, things never remain the same, do they.
In 2025, I bought a new PC with 96Gb RAM and landed myself right back in the cold, hard, outside world. With that beast of a machine I gained a new lease of computer life that put me in front of my old writing desk, and (with an AI sidekick to give me inspiration) began taking renewed interest in my old job of writing Science Fiction.
I don't know if you've noticed, but...
I don't know if you've noticed, but the whole world has gone graphics crazy.
AI has some incredible capabilities, and one of them is creating graphics. I feel sorry for the graphic artist who has to compete with this aspect of creativity, but I'm on the side of the AI in this. Its ability to create meaningful images within a few minutes, sometimes seconds, has provided something that simply didn't exist before at this scale. 
The Future Arrived While We Weren't Looking
Science fiction used to have an advantage. We could invent something outrageous, give it a few flashing lights, put it fifty years into the future and nobody could tell us we were wrong.
Artificial intelligence? Fantasy. Self-driving cars? Maybe one day. A computer in your pocket connected to almost every piece of human knowledge ever recorded? Ridiculous. Private companies launching reusable rockets? Come off it.
And yet here we are.