Cipher Mysteries

"Can you stop being so goddamn Voynich?" Dan shouted down the phone at her continued silence. "I'm sick of reading between your lines, playing guess-what-Marie-means like our whole off-line life is some afternoon quiz show. Since our shared New Haven hajj, you've been no fun - zero fun - and all I'm getting from you are stupid little clues that even the Cipher Mysteries guy wouldn't ...

Now here's something that doesn't pop up every day: ex-Mormon cipher fiction. In "Latter-Day Cipher", Latayne C. Scott has crafted quite an interesting piece of work, combining the US police procedural genre (where in this case the main protagonist is a female journalist parachuted in from outside) with a kind of veil-lifting piece on the inner workings of the Mormon ...

I hate to admit it, but Brett King's new book "The Radix" has very nearly pushed me over the edge as far as Voynich-themed novels go. OK, if you like your cipher mystery fiction spiced up with implausibly steel-chinned Secret Government Agency action heroes with PhD-level history credentials and who the US President just happens to owe a favour (basically ...

When you have a hobby as intricate and time-consuming as cipher mysteries, once in a while it's rather nice to get away from it. And so for a bit of low-key escapism, I settled down the other day to watch Roman Polanski's recent film "The Ghostwriter" (based on Robert Harris' novel). This stars Ewan McGregor as a ghostwriter drafted in ...

(I'll declare my hand: back when my 2008 History Today article on the early history of the telescope came out, Enrique Joven very kindly translated it into Spanish for the magazine Astronomia, so I know Enrique pretty well. That said, Cipher Mysteries reviews don't have star ratings & I'm not one to hide what I'm thinking, so this connection shouldn't ...

There are colours in my eyes, history flickering and sputtering as a beautiful infinity reaches out to hold my bloodsoaked hand... * * * * * * The Brazilian girl's plan is stone-cold in its vision, fractal in its detail, awesome in its thinking. Yes, the organizers have put the necessary overnight protection squad in place: but the two guards merely ...

For a change, here are some links to short-ish Voynich stories not actually written by me. ;-) Mataoaka has posted up two chapters of "Infernobella's Adventures: the Voynich Manuscript" you might enjoy. Here's Chapter 1, and here's the (only-just-posted but fairly short) Chapter 2 - if you want to read more, tell the author to write some more! And yes, ...

I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an "easy in". Just saying "code" conjures up... Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really) Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of 'The Secret') A central McGuffin that is ...

A couple of days ago, an entrepreneurial Scot put out a call on Gumtree for... "...a Scottish historian, cryptographer or world class crossword puzzle solver. If you can do the Times Crossword in less than 10 minutes I want to speak to you. If Charles Babbage interests you, if you hang out at Rosslyn Chapel. Know who Fibonacci was ...

So there I was in my first awesome week working at the B: my room mate Lynina kept saying that I was so 'Legally Blonde', and I was like "but do I have a dog? No? Well, I don't think so". And then she just kept on about the East Coast / West Coast thing, and I'm like "so now ...