When Hollywood comes knocking, I’ve already done the hard yards for them in casting the key characters in The Lenticular Series. Learn more about who these characters are and let me know via social media if you have a better casting suggestion. Fleet Cadet Pilot Rhees Lowrans (Florence Pugh) was on track to graduate at …
The Hidden Keystone by Nathan Burrage My rating: 5 of 5 stars A marvelous blend of the historical and the fantastic.In the Holy Land at the end of the 11th Century, Crusader Godefroi de Bouillon prepares to wrest the holy city of Jerusalem from the Saracens. In France in 1307, Bertrand de Chatillon-sur-Seine is about …
The part of space known as The Lenticular is home to twelve sentient species, but The Lenticular Series of books also focuses on other non-Lenticular aliens, including those within the Hegemony’s borders (and in particular in Cygnus Sector), as well as aliens beyond the Hegemony’s sphere of influence. Lenticular Space sentient species Aphsans – The …
Plutoshine by Lucy KissickMy rating: 2 of 5 stars I tried hard to finish this book. I got to eighty per cent. But in the end I gave up because I just didn’t care about how it ended. Plutoshine defies expectations, but not in a good way. Which is a shame, because on paper the …
Traitor’s Run is now available as an Advanced Review Copy on Netgalley. I’ve had a couple of friends query how to access and read the book. It’s fairly easy but there are a couple of tricks if you’re unfamiliar with ebooks or Netgalley. So this guide explains how to get reading as quickly as possible. …
This is Udun. He’s a Kresz from a part of space called The Lenticular, which holds many alien civilisations. He stands 2.4m tall (normal for his caste, but shorter than most Kresz females and certainly shorter than Defender caste Kresz) and has both an endoskeleton and a chitinous exoskeleton like laminate armour. His body plan …
There’s comes a point in any endeavour where you think you’ve taken on too much. I’m never going to get to the top of that mountain. I’m never going to pack the kitchen into the available boxes in time. I decided to finalise and publish 3 books in 18 months. I must have been mad! …
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars In his Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel, Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky began a millennia-spanning story of failed and not-so-failed terraforming projects and the manipulation and ‘uplift’ of a growing number of non-human species. The first novel in the series plotted the evolution …
Deciding to do just about everything in the production process for The Lenticular means the months since January have been very busy. Of course it all starts with the text, which my editor Nicola O’Shea has done a number of passes on at a structural level and which then received a final copy edit. While …
Now that the print edition of Horizon is well and truly out in the world, my focus is turning to the main event, which will take up pretty much the rest of this year: preparation and launch of book 1 of The Lenticular Series – Traitor’s Run. Book 1 is slated for publication on 1 …
The Second Sleep by Robert Harris My rating: 4 of 5 stars It’s impossible to talk about The Second Sleep without SPOILERS, so stop now if you intend to read the book. All civilisations think they are invulnerable. History warns us none is. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village …
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin My rating: 3 of 5 stars The cover blurb for The Dispossessed makes it sound like a thrilling exciting narrative, filled with tension and action: Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of …
The Chanur Saga by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’m working my way through a re-read of this saga. First up: The Pride of Chanur. The The Pride of Chanur is a first contact chase drama that’s told with breakneck pacing while also unfolding a complex and richly detailed piece of worldbuilding. …
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson My rating: 2 of 5 stars This is the second time I’ve tried to read Termination Shock and given up. This time I managed to get past the interminable section on the queen trying to land a plane, splashed through the truly comic book alligator attack and crashed into the …
3 stars As one of Alastair Reynolds’s more sarcastic characters, such as Scorpio the Hyperpig – or Triumvir Ilia Volyova – might say, ‘you don’t read Alastair Reynolds for the breakneck, frenetic pacing.’ His dialogue also tends towards the wordy. But you do read Alastair Reynolds for the jaw-dropping concepts. In the case of Inhibitor …
The Superficial Contact of Two Bodies (or 2 Bodies for short) is my current work in progress. The premise is a simple one. The universe is ending. Not all at once but in pieces. Vast stellar systems are collapsing in upon themselves in frighteningly quick time that suggests even the universal laws are not constant. …
Hellburner by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 4 of 5 stars Hellburner is a direct sequel to Heavy Time and, according to Cherryh, these are the only two books that need to be read in order, which says something about how she’s constructed the whole Company Wars saga with multiple entry points into the narrative. Cherryh …
There’s a lot going on in the background as I move a number of manuscripts toward publication, so this series of posts will capture some of the inputs and things I learn along the way for Horizon, The Lenticular and 2 Bodies (which is definitely a working title). Horizon is up first. Horizon For those …
There’s a lot going on in the background as I move a number of manuscripts toward publication, so this series of posts will capture some of the inputs and things I learn along the way for Horizon, The Lenticular and 2 Bodies (which is definitely a working title). Horizon is up first. Horizon The ebook …
Two episodes in and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has me well and truly hooked. The production looks beautiful. Shot in New Zealand, of course, and with an eye-watering per episode budget that means the CGI, sets and costumes are spectacular, no-one could fault the visuals. It also has the feel …
I’ve blogged before about the disturbing children’s television that you don’t see much of any more, probably because the makers would get sued. Shows like The Owl Service and Timeslip. But there are other examples, and one that was pretty surreal at the time was The Singing Ringing Tree. This was an East German movie of a fairy tale that was …
Any decent worldbuilding, particularly where it posits an imaginary alien species, needs to delve into the social structure and belief system that exists. When I considered creating ‘the alien’, I knew I couldn’t go ‘too alien’. There are – no doubt – aliens out there in the vastness of space that we will never understand …
One of the things I’ve realised in working through the development of this story cycle is just how malleable plot is. The origins of the Lenticular books led me to write a bunch of short stories – a serial in fact – published on the Nuketown website in the late Nineties. I look at those stories now …
Way back in the 20th Century, 1996 to be exact, I was on a tram, riding home from the Aurealis Awards ceremony that was held that year in Justin Ackroyd’s Slow Glass bookshop in Swanston Street (yes, it was THAT long ago) when I had a flash of an image. An alien held down on a bench …
Talking to a friend some time ago, I was reminded of some really disturbing kid’s TV shows I watched as a child which have stayed with me all these years. The show we were talking about was based on a novel called Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. My friend remembered the 1988 movie Paperhouse but I remembered the earlier …
Someone on Facebook was bemoaning the robotic slavery inherent in the Star Wars movies recently, which got me thinking: is C3PO a tool or a slave? When I watched Star Wars in late 1977, I wasn’t aware of the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’. Although ‘robot’ comes from the Czech word for ‘forced labour’, the robots of the popular …
World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ve enjoyed the single-minded investigations of Hank Palace, resolutely sticking to his job while society disintegrates around him in the face of an impending and world-ending meteor strike, and World of Trouble rounds out the trilogy nicely. Ben Winters has done a …
The Buried Ark by James Bradley My rating: 5 of 5 stars The first Book of the Change, The Silent Invasion, channelled classic YA speculative fiction like the Tripods and Tomorrow series and ended with one hell of a cliffhanger. See my earlier review on Goodreads. The Buried Ark picks up the action immediately after …
Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey My rating: 5 of 5 stars James SA Corey postponed the release of Tiamat’s Wrath so they could concentrate on getting it right. It was worth the wait. Persepolis Rising (book 7) was a difficult book, bringing in a significant time jump for the lead characters and ending on …
It seems life can be found everywhere. Recent reports from the International Space Station have even found sea plankton living quite happily on the outside of the station’s windows. While Earth today is mostly benign to life, there have been a number of mass extinction events, most famously the meteor strike 65 million years ago …
