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 […]
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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The End-Times of Markusz Zielinski (or End-Times 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 universal laws are not constant. All this is
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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
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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
Publication Log – October Read More »
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
Publication Log – September Read More »
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Life in the extreme Read More »
In my post Engage engines, I talked about the theoretical drive that boosts the explorer ship to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light in order to reach the Iota Persei system in a reasonable time — i.e. before my ‘stellarnauts’ grow too old. It was important for the story that the world of
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a lot of the grunt work in good science fiction goes into imagining the worlds that space travellers visit. The way I see it, there are four key elements in creating a believable world to serve the needs of the story: spatial location physical attributes geological past, and current environment. To make sure my crew
One of the most interesting themes in science fiction, and one of the most exciting advances happening in medical research today, is how humans will become augmented through interfacing with technology. In the real world, there are amazing advances that enable paraplegics to control the environment around them. In 2012 in the UK, a woman
Inside a transhuman Read More »
Science fact and science fiction walk hand in hand, and this particular cross-fertilisation affected me directly. Imagine planet Earth locked in a never-ending ice age: a giant, lifeless snowball encased in 3-kilometre-thick ice sheets with an average temperature of minus 50 degrees Celsius at the equator. It almost happened a number of times in our
In Horizon, each of the stellarnauts have their own PAL, a ball-shaped personal assistant that hovers in the zero G environment using small fans and allows the stellarnauts to talk to each other via video and audio link as well as acting as a recorder. It’s a cool concept and, like pretty much everything in the
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Themes of environmental disaster and climate change support a lot of the action in Horizon, so let’s get one thing out of the way upfront. Anyone who still believes the jury is out as to whether humanity is having a lasting and negative effect on Earth’s climate is plain wrong. That rocket left the launch-pad long
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Heavy Time by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Klondike days of asteroid mining are long over and it’s getting harder to make a living with the government and corporations slapping regulations over routes, assays, claims, flight certification. A lot of it the name of safety, but really it’s all about Earth
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The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin My rating: 2 of 5 stars When an SF book wins so many awards for best novel, it must be really good. That’s certainly what made me pick up Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem. And the first scene was really vivid: that body dangling on the fence! I know very
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When I imagined the mission of the explorer ship Magellan to the Iota Persei star system thirty-four light years from our own planet, I knew I had to work out how the ship could get there. I wanted the trip to be short enough so the crew would still be relatively young when they reached their destination.
While the main focus of Horizon is the tense drama that plays out between the crew in the cramped confines of the ship, a lot of the grunt work in good science fiction goes into imagining the world of the future and how future events shape characters and create a believable background. The explorer ship
