To celebrate the release of the audio edition of “The Writer’s Pen and Other Poems”, on 29 November, (www.audible.co.uk/pd/The-Writers-Pen-and-Other-Poems-Audiobook/B07KPPQ2K2), I am offering 2 free copies of the audio edition to readers who are based in the United Kingdom. I hope to run a similar offer for readers elsewhere in the near future.

The rules:

1. There are 2 free audio downloads of “The Writer’s Pen and Other Poems” available to readers based in the UK.
2. The first 2 people to email me with the correct answer to the question posed at the end of this post will receive a promotional code enabling them to download my book free from audible.co.uk.
3. Emails should be sent to newauthoronline (at) gmail dot com with the subject line “competition to win an audio download of The Writer’s Pen”. Please note, the email address is rendered thus to defeat spammers!
4. Please do not provide…

One of the main tropes of science fiction has to be the self-aware robot or computer – one mobile, the other not, but both presented as self-aware and able to think as we do, although often better.

I think, therefore I am a slide rule.

Often, Frankenstein-style, the AI develops malevolence. That was a trope long before HAL; virtually all of Asimov’s robot stories from the 1940s onwards were designed to counter the notion of the AI turning on its creators. Asimov’s answer – which, apparently, was proposed to him by John W. Campbell – were the ‘laws of robotics’ in which machines simply couldn’t harm humans.

Inevitably, these laws didn’t work, and Asimov knew it; a lot of his stories involved finding ways that the laws failed. He spelled out the main point of failure in one of the final robot novels: all the builder had to do was…