I’ve been in Bristol today to help host another Women’s Outlook Show on Ujima radio. My main guest for the day was Bristol’s own Gareth L. Powell who has just launched his latest novel, Hive Monkey. Gareth and I got to spend half an hour chatting about his career, why everyone loves the sweary monkey, and some of the cool ideas Gareth uses in the book. The latter is a bit introductory for most SF readers, but I have to explain words like cyborg for the Ujima audience.

I was expecting to do a segment on the fabulous “This is not an excuse” anti-rape campaign that Bristol is running at the moment. Sadly that had to be postponed, and I ended up getting asked to host a segment on consumer rights law instead.

Those two segment make up the first hour of the show, which you can listen to here.

I spend a bit of time in the studio at the start of the second hour. We managed a brief break from tradition and did a “Lighter Look at Life” segment that actually had us laughing. After that we handed over to Paulette for some serious local politics, which she does much better than I do. That is all available here.