Today's cultural icon

Last night's BBC2 was particularly good value: double Heroes, Newsnight and The Wire. However, greater than all these was Lauren Laverne reading John Keats' 'On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour' as a promo for the upcoming Poetry Season! I could have swooned… Unfortunately, Youtube has failed me and the BBC hasn't posted it yet (but watch this space).What's not to love about Lauren? Kenickie were a great band, she genuinely loves poetry, and she called the Spice Girls 'Tory Scum'.

Today in history

Pepys (1633) and Handel born today. Keats (1821) shuffled off his mortal coil (that's a Hamlet reference, kids). 

I read Paul McAuley's The Quiet War yesterday. It's good, solid space opera, in that it debates all the problems facing us (environmental destruction, the ossification of democracies into oligopolies, genetic engineering) by sticking them into a near-ish future and playing with the possibilities. McAuley is part of the hard-sf genre, also known as 'mundane SF' - scientific realism and a pretty downbeat assessment of our chances.

If you look down on SF, you're missing a genre which deliberately tackles all our social, scientific, philosophical and moral problems head on. Perhaps you're lumping fantasy in with it - and that's bad.