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
The real life PALs Read More »
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
Stormy Weather – climate change and planetary development Read More »
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
In my post Engage engines, I talk 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. But the drive is only one part of the ship,
Welcome aboard Magellan Read More »
Horizon is my debut science fiction novel published by HarperVoyager Impulse. It’s an SF thriller centred on a deep space exploration mission that goes very wrong, with repercussions for the future of all life on Earth. A lot of the action in Horizon takes place inside the cramped confines of the Magellan explorer ship, so the interactions
Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth’s classic novel The Space Merchants posited a future where it was impossible to escape advertising, with marketing messages beamed directly onto our retinas. But they didn’t foresee how big data could be used, or misused, in the real world. Or how lethal the whole system could become. Your mobile phone carries a
The internet is not your friend Read More »
Richard Cowper’s 1974 science fiction novel The Twilight of Briareus is one of the weirdest alien invasion stories I’ve read. It made a big impression on me as a teenager, and the central idea of the book is still very strong (although when I re-read it recently its storytelling hadn’t stood the test of time).
Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge My rating: 5 of 5 stars In 1984, I read Vernor Vinge’s Peace War when it was serialised in Analog Magazine. Years later elements of that story still stayed with me and – since this was the age of e-books – I decided to read it again. For obscure reasons,
Across Realtime – Vernor Vinge Read More »
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an element of creative writing that isn’t often spoken about. It’s the writing equivalent of ‘ask and ye shall receive’. And really it’s what I like to think of as a matter of trust. I’ve been writing for quite a number of years now and in the past
There’s a lot of fear around about Artificial Intelligence. South Koreans recently flipped out when Google’s AlphaGo defeated their Grand Master at the national board game. But will AI usher in the end-times for humanity? Certainly Hollywood seems to think so. Cue: Skynet, Age of Ultron, Transcendence, The Matrix, War Game; or, even earlier, Colossus: The Forbin Project; hell, even as
Will AIs Want to Kill Us? Read More »
For me, the key to ‘worldbuilding’ is what your characters take for granted.” Ian MacDonald, author of Luna and Brasyl On the face of it, worldbuilding is closely associated with science fiction and fantasy. Think of the millennia-spanning mythology of elves, dwarves, ents and human tribes that informs JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books, or Iain M Banks’s
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Back in 2003, I wrote ‘Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?’, an editorial for Aurealis #31, where I interviewed a number of Australian speculative fiction authors about the well-spring of their creativity. The answers were diverse but also shared a common thread – the ability to be open to the world around us and to
You can’t plan to be creative Read More »
The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Stars Are Legion is refreshing on so many fronts. Firstly it’s a stand-alone not a trilogy, so not weighed down with all that entails. Secondly the world building and technology is visceral – literally: bio-organic spray-on spacesuits, walls and floors on
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US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin dismissed the idea that robots may soon take over our jobs, saying it wasn’t even on his radar screen for the next 50 to 100 years. But experts say between 20 and 40 per cent of jobs worldwide are at risk of automation by the early 2030s. The majority of
The strange future of robots Read More »
AI is quickly becoming smarter than we are, beating our best players of games like Go and chess; and that robots in the workplace will be here sooner than most governments anticipate (especially the current US administration). Studies show that 46% of all American jobs and 54% of jobs in the UK are at high
Towards a practical utopia Read More »
In 2006 our nine-planet solar system dropped to eight when Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet. The reason for the downgrade was the discovery of other similarly sized objects in the Kuiper Belt: a region of space extending beyond the orbit of Neptune to a point fifty-five times the distance between Earth and the
Up until about six months ago I’d only used Pinterest to show scans of 20th-century science fiction book covers, many of which I’d had since I was an early teenager, and as another channel for promoting my book reviews and my first novel, Horizon. But as I’m creating the many alien beings, environments and spacecraft for the Lenticular Series
Writing and Pinterest Read More »
The 1972 film Silent Running imagines a future where Earth is so polluted that the last forests have been blasted into space in environmental domes to preserve them. Freeman Lowell, played by Bruce Dern, is forced to kill his fellow crew members to save the forests when the order comes through to destroy the domes and
Lotus Blue by Cat Sparks My rating: 3 of 5 stars World building is the real star of Lotus Blue, the debut science fiction novel for Australian author Cat Sparks. Very quickly in this novel Sparks creates a vision of a future Australia – an already ancient land – that’s further weighed down by centuries
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As the World Wide Web turned 28 years old on 12 March, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet while working at CERN in 1989, warned that the rise of fake news, political advertising and misuse of personal data threatens to damage the potential of the internet to be a tool that ‘serves all of humanity’.
I’m not talking about Ultraviolet, the decidedly B-grade movie with Milla Jovovich, which is currently sitting at 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the rather excellent UK TV series from 1998. Here’s the teaser: CJD. AIDS. Global warming. For the first time in history, mankind has the ability to destroy itself. So now vampires need to
