Picture: Melting Tarmac in Heaton, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK


The UK is experiencing a major heatwave these days. The above picture (credit: ncjMedia), taken in Heaton (no pun intended), in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on July 5, 2018, shows a man with his leg stuck under semi-molten tarmac. It gave way to his foot as he stepped on it. It seems that there was a small sinkhole under the pavement - and so there was nothing under the layer of tarmac to hold it up against his weight. The firefighters had to come out and rescue the young man after about twenty minutes. Note that this happened at 10.45am, not even during the hottest part of the day. A glimpse of what the future may hold more of, with climate change in mind.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"East of a Known Galaxy" (an Anthology of Romanian Sci-Fi Short Stories)

Image
By Péter MARTON ** Join the  European Science Fiction group  on Facebook for related discussions. ** Review of "East of a Known Galaxy" – An Anthology of Romanian Sci-Fi Short Stories , edited by Daniel Timariu and Cristian Vicol. București (Bucharest): Tritonic, 2019. Get ready for a journey... into the unknown. A journey into the known is a semantic paradox, of course. You can only journey into the unknown. The long-established greats of sci-fi can certainly take you on such a journey and, if you're a fan, no doubt many a great English-language work has already done that for you. But — exactly in the same vein as this blogzine's introduction did back in the day — the editors of this anthology of Romanian sci-fi challenge you to read what people from very different cultural, social, political and historical circumstances might tell you in the framework of your beloved genre. No one should be so naive as to think that one only finds talent for sci-fi (
Read more

Review (#1): "A House of Her Own," by Bo Balder (Escape Pod, 2017; F&SF, 2015)

Image
By Péter MARTON ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** Used as illustration above is a detail of Anton Semenov's cover art for the 2012 album " Army of Mushrooms " by Infected Mushroom, a psychedelic musical duo from Israel. Bo Balder's story strongly reminded me of it, hence its inclusion here... Speaking of infections: before we delve into Balder's work, the very first story reviewed here in our series, imagine the following scenario. It will be worth it, the detour... We are in a small village in the Democratic Republic of Nowhere. A small team of medical personnel and members of what passes for the "local" police force (ordered in from a town fifty kilometres away) approach a house where several sick patients are thought to be suffering from hemorrhagic fever. Those who feel healthy are ordered to come out. Those who are sick at bed should stay inside, they are told. The medical team moves
Read more

Interview: Meet Bo Balder, Author of "A House of Her Own" and Other Stories

Image
We are happy to present the following interview with Dutch author Bo Balder, whose short story “A House of Her Own” (published in Escape Pod in 2017, originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in September 2015) we recently praised here in EUtopias and Other Futures . Bo lives and works in Utrecht, the Netherlands -- see her own intro here. She talked to us about some of the challenges of publishing in English, fellow European authors to recommend, and the themes in the story mentioned above. ** Join the European Science Fiction group on Facebook for related discussions. ** ◄► Q: As far as I'm aware, you are not only the first but the only Dutch author to have been published in Clarkesworld. I found this surprising, in a way. Which small European country, if not the Netherlands, would have an internationally visible sf scene...? Is this primarily indication of the difficulty of the obstacle course leading to publishing in English? A: That
Read more