While we usually restrict ourselves to articles on science fiction and fantasy films, books and TV, I can’t pass up this opportunity to reveal details of Apple’s “latest creation” just announced by Steve Jobs. I woke up amazingly early in Australia to watch Steve Job's presentation and give you the news first.

Apple’s new iPad (pictured below) is a 9.7-inch multimedia tablet computer (half way between a laptop and an iPhone) running a new 1GHz Apple A4 chip developed by Apple and includes WiFI, 3G, Bluetooth, a microphone and speakers and 16GB, 32 GB or 64 GB in flash memory. However much you love your Amazon Kindle e-reader, Apple's iPad eclipses this and every other e-Reader or tablet that has come before it. The Wifi only option starts at US $499, a lot cheaper than some predicted.

Ursula K. Le Guin, a science fiction and fantasy writer most famous for her Earthsea trilogy, The left hand of darkness and The dispossessed, is taking on Google’s right to scan and sell millions of books online after the search engine giant reached an agreement with the US Authors Guild. According to The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, Ursula Le Guin has submitted a petition to a US judge signed by 365 other writers opposing the legal settlement. The petition asks the judge to exempt the US from a revised legal settlement reached between Google and US authors and publishers.

If you're a fan of the science fiction writer John Wyndham, most famous for his novel The Day of the Triffids, and believe that there’s nothing more to enjoy, you may well be mistaken (or perhaps not?). More than 41 years after his death, Penguin has published a new John Wyndham novel called Plan for Chaos. According to the Irish Times, Liverpool University Press, holders of the Wyndham archive, published Plan to Chaos last year as a specialist book with a high price tag but has now released it to mainstream booksellers. Wyndham wrote Plan for Chaos in 1951, just before he wrote his walking plant masterpiece, The Day of the Triffids.

Death has been kind to the everlasting memory of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), one of the most influential and perhaps also one of the most eccentric authors of the twentieth century. Since his untimely death at the age of 53 there's been nothing short of an explosion of interest in the man and his work and as each year passes, his remarkable influence on other writers, in cinema and mainstream culture becomes more apparent. Such posthumous success and wide-reaching influence is unprecedented for any previous writer of science fiction and it's further evidence that Death has a genius for irony: only in the afterlife has Phil Dick enjoyed the wide success he deserved and craved throughout his life!

First published in 1988, the biography Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been revised and refreshed to cover the feature film (unfortunately not as successful as fans hoped), Adams' untimely death in 2001, and the publication of the sixth novel by Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing. It also covers the 30th anniversary of the novel that kick-started Adams' rise to stardom, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Hitchhiker's was 30 years old in October 2009.

Science fiction authors have long been outcasts from the literary world, in some cases critics using the worst examples of the genre as ammunition against it. Unfortunately though, at times even science fiction authors themselves can turn on their own kind: "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space,” mocked Margaret Atwood (The Guardian, 28 January 2009), one of her many attempts to convince people that she is not a science fiction author, even though one of her most famous novels, A Handmaid's Tale, is exactly that.

There’s a better than average chance that you’re asking yourself two questions right now: who the hell is Chris Beckett and what is the Edge Hill Short Story Prize? Until we received the press release announcing Chris’ win, I must confess I’d not heard of the author or the competition. So now you’re probably asking a third question: why announce this win at all?

All good questions and worthy of an answer!

The 68th World Science Fiction Convention (Aussiecon 4) will be held in Melbourne, Australia from 2 to 6 September 2010. The acclaimed US science fiction writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, most famous for his Mars novels, will be the Guest of Honour. Kim Stanley Robinson won a Nebula Award for Red Mars in 1993 and Hugo Awards for Green Mars in 1994 and Blue Mars in 1997.

If there's a god watching over the universe in which James Murdoch wrote Gray Apocalypse, his debut novel of men in black and alien conspiracy, I suspect that god looks a lot like author Matthew Reilly (Ice Station, Area 7, Temple). I have to say it's only a suspicion as I've only ever managed to get through a couple of paragraphs of Reilly’s popular potboilers. Reilly is an amiable author with no illusions about the literary merit of his fiction and a confidence born of hard won success to care less about such trivial considerations as literary merit. But in the end it's a matter of taste and conspiracy theories, alien or otherwise, simply ain’t mine.

More successfully than any other novel I've read recently, Bernard Beckett's Genesis epitomises the investigative ideal of science fiction. By any standards it's a short novel and at 150 pages is perhaps more truly a novella, but in a genre given to overinflated, ponderous tomes screaming out for an editor wielding a samurai sword, there's a refreshing efficiency to Beckett’s writing. Nothing is superfluous, nothing wasted.