The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey My rating: 3 of 5 stars It gets better after the first half. James SA Corey is, of course, the author of the hugely successful The Expanse Series, a galaxy spanning space opera of interplanetary war and alien threat that played out over nine books and spawned […]
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I’ve had some amazing covers for my past novels, but – as publisher with coeur de lion publishing – I’ve also designed some covers myself, most notably for Pyrotechnicon and Anywhere But Earth. For The End Times of Markusz Zielinski, I had a pretty strong concept for what the cover should be, so I decided
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It’s been a little over ten years since my first novel – Horizon – was published by HarperCollins, so I thought I’d share a few insights from that experience. In 2014, HarperCollins Australia put out an open submission call for manuscripts. They’d decided to dip a toe in the emerging electronic book market and they
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The Escher Man by T.R. Napper My rating: 4 of 5 stars TR Napper returns us to his dark cyberpunk future Endel ‘Endgame’ Ebbinghaus is an enforcer for the Macau drug cartels. He often meets unsavoury people and sometimes he has to kill them. Endgame is a violent abusive husband, and he keeps away from
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Space elevator crashes are classic SF fare. We see a devastating crash in the first episode of Apple TVs Foundation series. After a terrorist bombing, the whole structure topples to the planet’s surface, smashing buildings and creating a deep trench around Trantor. See for yourself: It’s thrilling stuff to watch, but – from what I’ve
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Jonathan E is not the hero you’re looking for In 1975, my dad took 13-year-old me to see Rollerball at the Odeon Cinema in Renfield Street, Glasgow. The queue for the box office stretched right round the block and we ended up seeing Dad’s Army instead, which was quite a tonal shift from what I
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter My rating: 4 of 5 stars A worthy sequel to The Time Machine HG Wells’s The Time Machine is rightly acknowledged as a Science Fiction Masterwork. It’s spawned two movies and two TV series (and counting), the best and most faithful adaptation being the 1960 George Pal movie, and
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I’ve casted my novels before (see Dreamcasting the Lenticular). It helps me establish and differentiate mannerisms and speech patterns between different characters. Plus it’s a lot of fun imagining who might play the characters I create in a movie or TV adaptation. And the cast for End-Times is particularly glorious. Markusz Zielinski Tom Hiddleston A
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Scavengers by Robert Hood My rating: 5 of 5 stars A vivid Aussie crime thriller with supernatural elements Robert Hood is best known as a writer of horror and fantasy and he’s been described as ‘Aussie Horror’s wicked godfather’. But he began his publishing career in crime fiction and also commissioned and co-edited the anthology
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Worldbuilding is an essential part of any science fiction or fantasy novel. Any world a story is set in has to feel real and believable to draw the reader in and make them feel they’re in the world of the book’s characters. With my current work in progress – The End-Times of Markusz Zielinski –
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 4 of 5 stars Tchaikovsky’s creativity and ideas are on full display On the future Earth of Alien Clay, society is in the grip of a bunch of ideological zealots that would give the Spanish Inquisition a run for their money. The ‘Mandate’ insists on a scientific orthodoxy
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Conquist: A Novel by Dirk Strasser My rating: 5 of 5 stars A rip-roaring lost world adventure For more than a century our collective imaginations have been set alight by tales of lost worlds and the brave or foolish explorers that stumble into them. Stories like Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot, Conan Doyle’s
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Instagram user @literaturelylost is running Aussie Author Month this April with daily shoutouts to some amazing authors. Read my short interview for this event And follow @literaturelylost for more Aussie authors. Did you always have a desire to be an author, or did it occur spontaneously? I started writing short stories for my class newsletter in primary
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The titular end-times in my current work in progress encompass the end of the universe. You can’t get more end-timesier than that. Trapped on the last planet, my hero – mathematician Markusz Zielinski – and a dead engineer are trying to work out how to stop it. The universe isn’t ending all at once but
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The Final Shroud by Nathan Burrage My rating: 5 of 5 stars After creating a lived-in world in The Salt Lines Book 1 – The Hidden Keystone that is at once historically accurate and vividly realistic, Burrage doubles down on the more fantastical elements of his story in the series finale The Final Shroud. In
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Aliens: Bishop by T.R. Napper My rating: 4 of 5 stars Feels like a middle episode in a longer story. Writing a tie-in novel has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are that the writer gains exposure to a broader readership by producing a book in an already established and popular intellectual property. If they happen
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I could probably have done this a lot cheaper, but I was determined to make the Lenticular books equal in quality to anything a major publishing house could produce and there was also a degree of experimentation in using the various promotional tools on offer to indie authors, some of which proved to be worth
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Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars For a novella, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Firewalkers” contains a whole novel’s worth of ideas as well as a densely imagined world which is wholly original and at the same time completely inevitable. We’re in the endtimes of the climate crisis and the people of the small
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A lot of negativity has been directed toward this movie and the women in it for months – years even – before it opened. As far as I can tell that negativity comes from boy-men who are terrified of people with vaginas or angry that they don’t have a girlfriend, or both. It’s the same
Jeff Brown has created another amazing cover for The Lenticular Series Book 2 and you can see it right now! Learn more about Traitor’s Bargain below. Who can a traitor trust?Earth’s Hegemony controls the surrounding alien civilisations with ruthless force. Their aim: dominate the galaxy to protect humanity.Horribly mutilated during the invasion of Homeworld, Udun
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If you’ve ever read a huge fantasy series of a multi-book space opera you’ll know that those glossary lists at the back of the book are indispensable for helping you remember that – for example – Neg Dendra is a member of the Rem’Jaha Faction, as well as reminding you what the Rem’Jaha Faction is
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36 Streets by T.R. Napper My rating: 5 of 5 stars TR Napper paints a vivid picture of a cyberpunk future Vietnam in 36 Streets. In TR Napper’s 36 Streets, part of Vietnam is again under occupation, this time by the Chinese military, but a protracted battle still rages in the south of the country,
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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
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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
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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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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
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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.
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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!
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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
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