The forthcoming release of The Gospel of Judas by National Geographic will open up another round of the ongoing “controversy” about the origins of Christianity - and what really happened when the bloke from Nazareth got nailed up by the Romans.

According to the advanced publicity (as reported in the mainstream press) the book will “shed new light on the historical figure of Judas” - according to yesterday’s Australian, for example, Judas may “be on the verge of a moral makeover.”

The translation is due for release around Easter, and the advance publicity is sure to maximise sales - as the Da Vinci Code proves, anything which reflects on mainstream Christianity is likely to prove a best seller, particularly if a controversy can be attached to it.

But what will the book actually contain?

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I recently re-read H.G. Wells’ 1904 novel The Food of the Gods — and was thinking what a damn fine film it would make, now that the technology exists to do it properly. The problem is, anyone who took it on would want to contemporise it, adding lots of nifty technology, government conspiracies and covert hi-tech commercial research interests, and it would lose its charm and believability in the process — changing the thematic structure utterly.

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Serif or sans serif? When and where is it best to use one or the other style of font? Which is most readable?

Among the many dilemmas currently plaguing mankind, this appears to be the least dire. But the answer is crucial, for it involves us as writers not only because our priceless verbiage will appear in print on a page (and readers should receive our words in a format that puts them in a good mood right from the start), but also because we spend a lot of time staring at screens covered in text — and again the look of it will at least partly affect how it is received.

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Stanislaw Lem sold over 30 million books in 40 languages, mostly in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Lem was a Polish Jew who survived both the Nazi occupation and the Stalinist puppet regime. He completed medical studies in Krakow in 1948 but refused to sit his final examinations so as to avoid being conscripted into the army medical corps. He was never to practice medicine, but his scientific training and his constitutional skepticism came to inform his work deeply. A Jew raised as a Catholic, he eventually embraced atheism. He was a fierce believer in rationalism with the rare gift of knowing the limitations of his principal philosophy. Most of his fiction explores the boundaries of rationalism, where logical thought begins to break down as a useful tool, but Lem never gives in to mysticism. To Lem, the universe was far too big and strange to be encompassed by human thought, but that was no excuse for disavowing what limited knowledge our brains can conceive.

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Cat Sparks drew my attention to this article from Wired Magazine.

While it’s nice to see Kraftwerk and Gary Numan getting up, as a list of SF concept albums I think it’s selling the subgenre radically short.

Where are ELO’s “Time”, Styx’s “Kilroy was Here?”, Donald Fagen’s “Kamakiriad” and Jeff Wayne’s “War of the Worlds”? Wasn’t there one Hawkwind, Vangelis or Tangerine Dream album worth mentioning? Doesn’t dystopian political satire like Frank Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage” or Roger Waters’ “Amused to Death” count? And what about Alan Parsons, whose Project had no fewer than four albums that might qualify–”Tales of Mystery and Imagination”, “I, Robot”, “Pyramid” and “Eye in the Sky”?

No doubt I too am missing many potential titles. Musicals like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Phantom of the Opera” have a good case to put forward. More experimental albums like “The Orb’s Adventures in the Ultraworld” surely deserve a mention. Somewhere out there (maybe right here) there’s a complete list just waiting to happen…

Welcome to Talking Squid. This is a group blog of a poorly defined nature. For my own part, I intend to roll over my old Frankenstein Journal readers to here and very slightly change my tone of voice. What the other contributors want is up to them.

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And it’s all downhill from here…