What are we going to do when we get there?

Look what arrived in the post yesterday: my contributor copy of Where Are We Going?, an anthology edited by Allen Ashley and published by Eibonvale Press. It looks very nice indeed. And it has an excellent line-up too. And here’s my story, ‘The Way The World Works’. It’s my bathypunk one – see here. It’s [...]

Don’t Look Back In Wonder

Andrew Wheeler gives a run-down on the Hugo fiction shortlists here, but it’s some of the comments he makes in passing that I find interesting. He first complains that Peter Watts ‘The Things’ is a “backwards-looking story … which retells a famous old story in a new way” and that “there have been far too [...]

Let’s do the meme

I seem to have been strangely busy the past week or so, and, I have to admit, somewhat short on inspiration for a subject to write about here. So here’s some cheap content: a meme. This was originally put together by Charles Tan. As usual: bold it if you’ve read it, italicise it if you [...]

Alternate reading material

My story ‘Disambiguation’ is now up on the website of Alt Hist, the magazine of historical fiction and alternate history. It was originally published here on my blog a couple of months ago, but now it’s found a better home. It’s something of an experimental piece since it’s constructed from a series of real and [...]

A portrait of the writer as a young man

I have always been a science fiction writer. I remember filling an exercise book with deck-plans for a starship when I was twelve years old. I wish I could find that book, but it has long since vanished. During my teens I played RPGs, and wrote up the sessions as fiction. After joining the British [...]

The door of perception

Yesterday, a review of Alt Hist 1 was posted on The Portal here. The reviewer said of my story in the issue, ‘Travelling by Air’, that the “story really embraces what, for me, is so entrancing with alternate history”. Which makes me happy. Incidentally, the second issue of Alt Hist should be out in the [...]

A veritable bargain… or two

Old stories never die, they either sit and moulder in old magazines, or they get republished again and again. But not anymore. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, they can live again. Just reformat that Standard Manuscript Format, slap on some cover-art, and publish it for the Kindle. Which is precisely what I’ve done [...]

A science fiction story – with flying boats!

A week or so ago I set myself a challenge: to write a science fiction story in which a flying boat featured prominently. I was hoping to come up with some heartland sf story, something with spaceships and aliens and such. And flying boats, of course. But I couldn’t think of a plot in which [...]

Anatomy of a Story: A Cold Dish

Back in October 2009, I wrote a piece on my first Euripidean Space story, ‘Thicker than Water’ – you can find it here. ‘A Cold Dish’ was the second of my stories set in that universe, and it too was published in Jupiter magazine – in Jupiter 28, April 2010. ‘A Cold Dish’ is based [...]

woof!

Des Lewis has started a “Real Time Review” of the Winter 2010 BFS Journal (see my photos of it here). So far, he’s read the first eight stories from New Horizon. Which includes mine, ‘Barker’ – about which he writes: “A claustrophobic vision, this time in a punch-drunk comic-strip rocket. Real history and real names [...]

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