The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I’ve just realised that the FPI blog is a whole three years old today! Happy birthday us! We were just setting up on a basic Blogger account on February 25th 2005 and as you can imagine the first post was really just a ‘hello, here we are’ kind of thing. I had a quick look back over the first few weeks worth of posts today and back at the end of February, start of March 2005 we were getting all excited by the approach of Doctor Who, our staff thought the Mr Potato Head Darth Tater was the coolest thing ever, we were talking about Iron Man (in that case Orson Scott Card’s take on Ultimate Iron Man), Hellboy, the BSFA and Arthur C Clarke awards and I was saying Charlie Stross was one of the coolest new wave of British SF writers on the scene among other things. Completely unlike this year where we’re all excited for a fourth season of Doctor Who, gagging to see Guillermo Del Toro’s second Hellboy flick, thinking Robert Downey Jr may be perfectly cast for Iron Man, we’ve been chatting about the BSFAs and Arthurs, been delighted with Charlie’s brilliant new novel Halting State and thought the Taters of the Lost Ark was one of the coolest things ever. Plus ca change, as they say!

Of course, there have been some changes – not just moving to Word Press for a blogging platform but expanding the blog, making new contacts and then talking about (and to) many of those contacts, especially in the British small press community; I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of those folks we talked to on the blog in person at Bristol and Inverness as I covered them for the site, we’ve had some great guests share their thoughts with us and our blogging family has expanded with Wim ‘the Ephemerist’ Lockefeer, Mr Propaganda Richard Bruton and most recently Katherine “honest, I’m not really a manga character, I’m a real girl!‘ Farmar who have all brought us a wider range of coverage and some much-appreciated diversity of opinions and tastes to the blog. One thing that hasn’t changed though is that we still like blogging – we love good comics and good books and like a lot of people who love something we want to share it, to make other readers aware of good new titles they might not know about; one thing better than reading a really good book or comic is sharing that delight with others and finding some of them pick up that comic too. I don’t think that’s something that’s going to change for us.