Patricia Manzella's Page

Hi Patricia, isn't Newport News the place where the 'vanishing' battleship supposedly reappeared in Charles Berlitz's 'The Philadelphia Experiment'?
If you want to know more about bookselling and books in general you could visit ebay.co.uk and become a member of the 'Booksellers Cave' group (not all members are entirely sane, but I doubt they're dangerous either), the Books Board (a lot of teachers, retired teachers and book enthusiasts - a nice bunch and very approachable) or, if you intend to become really serious about it (getting into pre-15th century manuscripts, illuminated documents and incunabulae) seek out 'Fine Books' and one or two others on the ebay.com Books Board (calling this a bookselling information source is like calling a treatise on multi-dimensional geometry a math book).
I, too, am reduced to plain 'bookseller'. I'd have liked to have been able to add 'author' but I seem to lose interest: I have half a dozen unfinished novels hanging around, and I'm too keen a critic to imagine any of them are worth finishing.
Are you an SF reader? Just wondering about your choice of pic - Trinity from the Matrix movies. If so, take a look at the works of Alastair Reynolds (if you haven't already). Iain M. Banks is due another 'Culture' novel anytime now. If you're not keen on violence I'd give Richard Morgan's latest, 'Black Man' (entitled 'Thirteen' in the U.S.) a wide berth, but if you can handle 'Terminator' without the robots and with more nastiness give Morgan's novel a try.
Nice to speak to you anyway. It still astonishes me that hitting little plastic buttons in Devon, England results in someone over 4,000 miles away becoming aware of the thoughts that lay behind the pushing of those buttons.
That reminds me of something I read several years ago - if we can survive the next 14 years or so we have a shot at immortality. In his book 'Engines of Creation' K. Eric Drexler believed that the first 'assembler', a nanotechnology device, would be possible. By around 2020 the technology would advance to the point where such devices could be designed to enter human cells and reconstruct them to the blueprint of the cell's genetic code. Anyone undergoing treatment with such machines could be rejuvenated to any age they wished. Forever. Like having a bet on a 200 to 1 shot in the Grand National (a major annual equestrian event over here), I have placed £1 (at the moment about $2) in a bank account. If I can leave it there for 500 years, and be there to collect, I can retire on the proceeds.
Have fun.
Steve.