Also in the Office

Following on from my previous post, I also found out last week that someone I work with in our Dublin office is the cousin of Eoin Colfer, author of the Artemis Fowl books and the sequel to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, among other things.

I'm wondering what other secrets I might discover in the office...

The Other End of the Office

You never know who you're working with. I spend most of my time at work on a site of about 500 people, and there are lots of people I don't know, so I was surprised when an internal email anounced a debut SF novel publication.

Simon West-Bulford works in an office a couple of hundred yards from me, across a carpark and past the restaurant. His hard SF novel The Soul Consortium has been published by Medallion Press and looks like the kind of enjoyably mind-blowing fiction I like to read:

In a future so distant that time is almost without meaning, death is defeated and immortality has been made reality through instantaneous cloning and synaptic transfer. But mankind, frustrated by the futility of timeless existence, chooses extinction. All but one man.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy.

There’s Been A Fire

In Niven & Pournelle’s Footfall, a group of SF authors are called in by the US government to act as advisers during an alien invasion. Similarly, in a short story I read years ago (possibly by David Brin), an SF author is called in as a special advisor to investigate a strange phenomenon. In that story the author is summoned by two Secret Service agents who come to his door and announce:

“There’s been a fire.”

So, you can see why I was quite excited when the phone rang Saturday morning:

“This is Security,” the voice said. “There’s been a fire.”

Of course, it turned out to be Security from work and there really had been a fire. I was called in to advise on contamination and disposal issues. Not as exciting as an alien invasion, but probably safer!