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 […]
I wrote other spec scripts and sent those off to production companies and the BBC but no one was interested. I thought about evolving a novel out of one of them, a non-science fiction story set in a boys’ school, but the story was incredibly dark and I had become wary about wasting yet more […]
One of the many satisfying things about this novel is that the usual everyman point of view character, FBI Agent Joseph Newcomen, as actually more of a nemesis. He’s an all-American jock but the America of the novel is a puritanical, reactionary state whose neo-Victorian values are depressingly easy to believe as a near future […]
Adapting ‘As Good As It Gets’ and hearing Charity’s unceasing voice in my head gave me the idea of writing ‘Diamond Roads’ as a novel so, over six months, I did. It was hugely exciting. Every day I would look forward to finding out what each character did. The evolution of the story came to […]
An epic fantasy novel that actually has an ending! That alone would get it an above-average helping of stars but this novel is also a multi-faceted adventure that gleefully subverts a number of beguiling but insidious conventions, like the expected appearance of the main female character and tedious notions of manhood associated with warriors. We […]
I’d wanted to write a piece of TV science fiction for some time. I thought about ‘The Psychometric Man’ but I couldn’t call it that. In the meantime, ‘Engines of Creation’ by K Eric Drexler, a book that posited the idea of nanotechnology, had gradually been popularised since its publication in 1986. I started to […]
Life in Sci-Fi 