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Have you ever pondered what may be for the future of gardening? Imagine a world in which simple things like growing tulips are complicated by roaming borlotti beans and bumble bees, where the weather is affected by a traditional board game and where pigs have genetically evolved to walk upright and behave more like homosapiens. Well, that's exactly what Jonathan Cauldwell has done, and the result is Quantum Gardening for the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

With the pig breeding season over, green-fingered Eadwig Addlethorpe has turned his attention to growing Tulips. In what I can only describe as a piece of malevolent genius, your task is to guide poor Eadwig around his growing area as he is being pursued by mutated borlotti beans and giant bees carrying out what is known as 'quantum gardening'. To explain this, Eadwig's universe is one of two, both of which interact and both come out with alternate consequences. For instance, in Eadwig's alternate universe, last years crop of borlotti beans haven't mutated and behaved as they should, but the only random constant in both is the weather; that is until Eadwig finds out how to control it, to an extent.

Encompassing the play area, therefore, is an all-powerful board game. Dice fall from above, and a marker is moved around the board accordingly. The square it lands on has a direct effect on the weather, varying the conditions to suit (or not) the growing conditions. A quick look at the board will therefore tell you where the marker is going to next land. However, either dice can be rolled again by removing the trellises below it, unless the dice is at the lowest point of the screen. Rearranging the trellises can also trap the evil roaming beans, but the giant bees can do or undo your work, which can prove to be rather unhelpful.

Er, are you following this? Quantum Gardening takes a little while to get into, not least because of the somewhat warped plot and unusual gameplay aspects to it, but also just because it's already quite difficult to start with. The full release is expected sometime before the end of June, and will be published by Cronosoft (for the real-media cassette version) and Retro-Soft (as an emulator file), so keep an eye on www.cronosoft.co.uk and www.retro-soft.co.uk respectively. However, I'm currently in the midst of playtesting this game, so a full review will follow within the next couple of weeks. Until then, you can take your imagination on a journey with the screen shots.

Russian Speccy enthusiasts are currently working on getting the mighty rubber-keyed beast onto the Internet. This is, of course, something that has been possible on the Commodore 64 for quite a number of years one way or the other, and with Sinclair's humble machine joining the party, 8-bit web browsing could become a favourite pastime of mine.

The programming involved to connect to the net is just an NTP (Net Time) client currently, and it retrieves time from the server to set a real-time clock. It uses a piece of homebrew hardware known as the ZX-Multicard, which has an RS-232 interface, with a real-time clock (obviously) and PC keyboard and mouse connections. There is a disclaimer that the Multicard is incompatible with the Sinclair Interface 1, but the code is said to be adaptable to work on any Sinclair machine with 48k of RAM or more. Details are currently only in Russian, but I'll have more on this exciting news as it happens and is translated. Until then, there's always the World Of Spectrum forums (over at www.worldofspectrum.org/forums) which should point you in the right direction if you're eager to find out more.