A Way To Come Up With Sci-Fi Story Ideas

Of Shadows, Stars And Sabres ready to preorder!

We’re talking about the speculative fiction anthology that’ll define a decade. Just check out the goddamn line up… Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ai Jiang, Alice James, Antony Johnston, Cynthia Pelayo, D.K. Stone, David Quantick, Dennis K. Crosby, Eugen Bacon, Gemma Amor, Greg van Eekhout, Helen Glynn Jones, J.L. Worrad, John Wiswell, Jonathan L. Howard, Kali Wallace, KC […]

So I’m In An Upcoming Anthology…

…with all these awesome authors… Adrian Tchaikovsky, Cynthia Pelayo, Stark Holborn, Ai Jiang, Paul Cornell, Bonnie Burton, David Quantick, Eugen Bacon, Peter McLean, Ren Hutchings, Renan Bernardo, Greg van Eekhout, Pedro Iniguez, Jonathan Maberry, Dennis K. Crosby, D.K. Stone, Sarah L. Miles, J.L. Worrad, KC Grifant, Antony Johnston, Mya Duong, Helen Glynn Jones, Alice James, […]

What I’m Watching: Freaked (1993)

Bill & Ted made another movie and almost no one saw it. FREAKED (1993) was the brainchild of Alex Winter (Bill!), a full throttle FX-laden belly laugh comedy in which a former child star agrees to promote a toxic fertiliser and ends up mutated with a whole bunch of mutants, including Keanu Reeves (Ted!) as […]

Mind-Blast From The Past…

An advert for my Feral Space sci-fi novels in an Eastercon guide (can’t quite remember when or where). The ad was written and designed by Jay Eales who totally understood the assignment. Awesome work sir!

What I Watched: The UFO Incident (1973)

THE UFO INCIDENT (1975): James Earl Jones utterly sells this made for TV film about the first alien abduction claim. It’s more of a human drama than a creature feature. The abductees, Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial married couple in early sixties America (something I never knew when I read about it in […]

This One Weird Mecha Trick Protects Me From Bad Weather!

With temperatures plummeting like a hammer off a high scaffold and the rains splattering the streets like someone beneath said hammer I think its time I revealed a secret about myself: in bad weather I often pretend I am a robot. Let me ‘unpack that’, as Buzzfeed columnists inevitably used to say by the second […]

Buy Me For Charity!

So I’m auctioning signed books and a critique of your first 5000 words of a novel or story for charity. I was approached by Anna Smith Spark– the Queen Of Grimdark herself–to be part of a British Fantasy Society gala bid for Save The Children. How could I say no? Besides, Anna technically outranks me: […]

Kevin O’Neil and Blitzspear

The passing away of Kevin O’Neil has hit me more than I’d ever have thought it would. His comic art blew my little mind back when I was a kid. Today I was thinking how overlooked his design of Blitzspear (the living spacecraft of Nemesis The Warlock) is. It never makes any top ten of […]

What Is Science Fiction? (1979)

A Sunday afternoon flashback from 1979 with Douglas Adams, Harry Harrison, Peter Nicholls and Ian Watson, all interviewed by comb-over BBC titan Cliff Michealmoore. It captures SF at a moment: very male (albeit tempered by fantastic facial hair) and with a crisis as to what SF should be. Harrison is absolutely adamant SF should avoid […]