Excerpt from a story I wrote when I was fifteen: Space Captain Wallace Andrews checked the data from his damaged starship as it drifted next to the asteroid belt. He had thirty minutes of air left. He chuckled to himself. He had single-handedly thwarted the invasion mounted by the alien Pril, not that anyone on […]
Adam Christopher’s new novel ‘Made to Kill’, a 1960s-set Hollywood private detective story in which the detective is a robot who moonlights as an assassin, is a great fun book with an inspiring story behind it. Adam had just sold a space opera trilogy to Tor in the US; Tor then sent Adam some questions […]
***** Makes you miss your stop ***** A bold and disturbing love story ***** Vivid and original ***** Fascinating and essential ***** Mind blowing stuff! ***** An exciting and original world Fast-paced, clever and beautifully-written, the first ‘Diamond Roads’ book ‘Sons of the Crystal Mind’ is a richly-imagined dystopian thriller that introduces the latest in a long line of cool, […]
The recording of ‘Wonderworld’ from journal entry Studio 6, BBC Maida Vale studios 14.00 to 18.30 8 February 2007. It was the Very Snowy Day that people had been treating like the approaching apocalypse all week. I put on my trainers instead of my boots, which later transpired to be a mistake and then had […]
The sub-title on the beautifully-designed cover says ‘The story of a murderer’, while the inner title page describes the tale as ‘A Golden Age Story’. The acknowledgements at the end go further and say that the Golden Age referred to is both that of science and detective fiction, with the book an ingenious and original […]
I look for all sorts of different things in SF: big ideas, beguiling strangeness or some kind of compelling otherworldly mystery. Not many novels combine all three elements as successfully as this one does. It’s been a while since I have been gripped to the last page without any clear idea of how the tale […]
Richly Satisfying This compelling novel was originally called ‘The Whores Asylum’ but was apparently renamed to appease a certain chain of stationery stores who thought the title a bit much, despite being happy to stock popular S&M erotica and those amateur photography mags with half-naked women on the front. I’m not knocking either publication […]
Fear the binary! Emma Newman is a successful novelist and podcaster whose work has been nominated for awards including the Hugo. Her podcast, ‘Tea and Jeopardy’, came about because Emma noticed that there weren’t many female podcasts and no silly science fiction at all. SF podcasts tended to be of the terribly serious talking head […]
CITY UNIVERSITY LONDON, 22.10.15 Authors, however their work is produced, need to act more like businesses than Romantic poets, although as we learned the two are not mutually exclusive. As part of City University London’s Inside Out Festival, three experts in this area, Heather O’Connell, Katy Darby and Mark Edwards explained how. Heather O’Connell is […]
http://www.unsungstories.co.uk Science fiction is inherently dramatic; the highest grossing movies tend to be SF, with their ability to find compelling visual metaphors for the tension between what is possible and what is not (yet). Stage productions are fewer, possibly because of the misguided notion that loads of special effects are needed, and until recently there […]
Life in Sci-Fi 