Aliens of The Lenticular Series

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 …

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Knowing the alien

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 …

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2 Bodies – Origins

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. …

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Hellburner – CJ Cherryh

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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The Rings of Power

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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Society from mythology

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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Themes

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 …

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Origins

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 …

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C3PO – Slave or Tool?

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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Life in the extreme

 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 …

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