Articles and Stories

The articles and stories below are short, less than 2,000 words, and are published either on my blog or, in the case of longer ones, here on the site.

Cruel and Unusual

I am a warrior for the cause.

I used to be a post-doc in the nuclear engineering faculty. While I worked on reactor design, my brothers were being shredded and burned by the invaders of our lands. I volunteered as a common soldier, training with weapons, but the brotherhood was smarter than me, my recruiters too aware of my skills. I was soon working with more potent tools than Kalashnikovs.

And then one night, out of the blackness, insect-eyed storm troopers came into our compound and lifted me out. Blindfolded and trussed. Out and into the sky.

They say I was badly knocked around in the extraction. But soon I’ll be better. ... read more.

Standing Wave

We’re doing Mach 2 fifty metres over the Amazon jungle. I address the pilot.
“Hey, Juan, are we gonna come out of this?”
“Sure Peter. Stories to tell your grandchildren. We’ll be bragging over cold beers tonight. They’ll be lapping it up.”
I call for a second opinion from the navigator.
“Hey, Louis, we gonna make it?”
“I estimate that we have a greater than 20% probability of making it home. And that’s based on the assets currently supporting us.”
Great. So who would you rather believe?   ....   read more.

Sister and Brother

Once upon a time, a very long way from anywhere else, there lived a young prince. He was whippet-thin but athletic, and delighted in weapon-play. He first learned the rapier, practising in the castle grounds surrounded by forest, which grew so thickly in that part of the world. Later he progressed to the hefty broadsword, which could with one blow deprive a man of his head.

The stealthy crossbow also pleased him. He would lie against the trunk of an ancient elm for hours in complete repose, musing on issues philosophic and historic, until a baby boar happened by. Whoosh! Thwack! The bolt would fly home. An infant life, wild and free, transformed into dinner.        ....    read more.

True Romance

Back in the nineteenth century sea-going navy, it was the custom for captains to take their wives along. I know this from Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’. The other ranks had to settle for Mansfield Park's ‘rears and vices” unless they had the privilege of escorting female prisoners, or happened across more-or-less willing natives. Later on, the world got smaller and even more dangerous, and sailors had to cache their women in each port of call.      ...    read more.

The GO Codes

The new president had always been calm under pressure; a preternatural, even supernatural calm. They had said he would be tested in his first few months of office and, as I looked around that Cabinet table, I knew we were in the presence of the mother of all crises.       ...       read more

We Were Once Like You

It had been there a billion years. We registered it first as a field anomaly from a passing lunar orbiter. High-resolution imaging gave us an opaque sphere, while the lander revealed the object, about two metres across in full sunlight, levitating statically over the rolling lunar regolith.

And then it spoke with us.    ...         read more

Diary: Open University Summer School 2008 (Electromagnetism)
...   I knew that dinner would be uncomfortable. A big refectory crammed with people from four separate summer schools, none of whom knew each other. I tried to time my arrival to when I thought they’d all be leaving (45 minutes after opening time). Imagine my horror, finding it absolutely full of people, many of whom did not look ready to leave. I sat on a relatively empty table, which filled up slowly. In these circumstances I notice there are two responses. One is to sit in stressed, painful silence; the other is to gregariously make conversation like a chat show host. I believe this personality distinction was first formalised by Drs Freud and Jung, who noted that the two styles do not interwork well.    ...    read more

Quantum Dot

Here is where the mystery begins. Imagine the smooth flat surface of a black granite slab. Just in front of you there is a circular pit, about 20 cm wide, maybe twice as deep. It could be used for storing a stack of small dinner plates. This imagined reality has been magnified one hundred million times. My circular depression is a quantum dot, two nanometres in diameter. And in the centre, I am going to trap an electron.     ....     read more

Occupation 1973

In 1973 General Pinochet launched a military coup which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende. The aftermath was terrible, with widespread atrocities, torture and disappearances conducted against the Left. At the time I was a leading member of the International Marxist Group, and headed the so-called ‘Red Defence Force’ (RDF) which stewarded our demonstrations and did various revolutionary stunts. Under the influence of our French sister organisation, the Ligue Communiste, which had a history of special forces-like operations which they conducted with characteristic élan, we decided to occupy and hold the Chilean Embassy in London just before a major demonstration against the coup, which would pass it.   ...   read more

The Strawberry

The bomb exploded in the forward compartment, I guess about 12 rows ahead of me. First the raw sound, so loud it hurt. My seat rose up as if on a see-saw – I was actually looking down on the carnage when slowly the plane tore in half and I was projected - through gut-wrenching pressure and unbearable force - into the night. Some moments of tumbling as my seat righted itself – I was falling bottom first with the air howling around. Shielded from the blast, I entered a curious state of peace, despite the whistling of the wind around me, and the constant chaotic buffeting.   ...   read more

Asteroid Impact Effects

They both turn round on the log, and, with the sun on their backs, look towards London. Right on the horizon, Stephen can just make out tiny skyscrapers, a distant toytown.

“That’s right,” says Emma, “you can just see the towers at Canary Wharf, next to the Thames in East London. Do you know how far away they are? About 30 kilometres from here.”

Emma is warming to her theme.

“You’re trying to divert the asteroid to just miss the earth - what we call a grazing trajectory. You want to leave it as late as possible to minimise the chances of countermeasures, so you’re going for a very, very close encounter, right?”   ...   read more

Failure or Mismatch?

Tuesday evening we drove up to Cambridge, where I had an interview the following day with a consultancy company. I have to say I did not have a good night: the bed was small and lumpy, and the sheet did not properly keep the blankets off - when will hotels get their act together on duvets? Strictly speaking it was not an interview - I was to turn up the next day at 10.30 to take two screening tests. I whiled away the time in the hotel lounge after breakfast listening to ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ and feeling increasingly nervous. I was not expecting these tests to be easy.    ...   read more