My solo science fiction theatre show Deviant Database finally premiers at the Reclamation EasterCon on 17 April 2022!

It’s at 9pm in the Main Room of the convention, which is at London Radisson Heathrow, Bath Road Building A, West Drayton, UB7 0DU.

The 50-minute show consists of five Black Mirror-style near-future nightmares:

The Gene Auction

The Minus-Four Sequence

Frame Swingers

The Needles Come at Night

The Locksmith

It was originally going to launch at EasterCon 2020, but, well, you know.

The show evolved from three pieces that were performed for Virtual Futures in London in 2019. I’d found Virtual Futures when I was asked by the British Science Fiction Association’s Vector magazine to cover the previous year’s shows, and ended up doing a reading when one of the authors couldn’t attend. That led to an invitation to submit my own work.

I decided that rather than read from a piece of paper I would utilise my experience as an actor and stand-up to create a science fiction performance that would involve the audience in some way. They would be people attending an auction for example, or the person a disembodied Artificial Intelligence is speaking to. I feel strongly that science fiction does not need to rely on special effects, and that it can work very effectively in the live space.

I did one Virtual Futures piece per month from February to April 2019. The first was The Gene Auction, the second was The Minus-Four Sequence, and the third was Frame Swingers. They went really well, so I started thinking about doing an Edinburgh Festival-type show. I mentioned this to Ian Whates of NewCon Press, who had published Celebrity Werewolf. Ian said that if I wanted to do a book based on this idea he was interested in being involved.

I went away and wrote a book of short fiction based on the tone and themes I’d been thinking about. These tales range micro-fiction to a novella, and I chose two of them – The Needles Come at Night and The Locksmith – to complete the theatre show.

And now the show is learned, and rehearsed, and waiting to explode onto the stage!

Watch this space for news about the accompanying book…