I’ll be reading from my upcoming novel Celebrity Werewolf, which is being published by NewCon Press, at the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) next Wednesday, 28 March. The venue is upstairs at the Artillery Arms, 102 Bunhill Row, London, EC1Y 8ND. Nearest tube station is Old Street. More details about the pub here. Doors are at 6.30pm and the […]
I was drawn to this book by its association with John Carpenter’s The Thing, whose alien is a uniquely visceral nightmare. Its physical distortions suggest unknowability, as if it is trying to find a form to express itself, which is a theme picked up on in Adam Roberts’s novel. While The Thing Itself is not a […]
Dreadnought: Nemesis is one of my favourite young adult novels. There is a great line early in the book about how if you’re no good at being a boy, it’s beaten into you until you either comply or have the good grace to kill yourself. It’s a long time since I was a boy, but that […]
Every six months or so, NewCon Press publishes four SFF novellas around a particular theme. The publisher then commissions a single piece of artwork that expresses an element of each story in a single panel or image. The panels are then lettered and branded to create covers, and the four books are sold as a […]
There is a complex, even thrillerish galactic conspiracy plot at the heart of Tom Toner’s debut science fantasy novel, but that’s not really why you read it. Indeed, the threads of that plot are so disparate and spread out over so many years (and light years) that the reader simply has to accept what is […]
‘2084’ is a collection of specially commissioned short stories edited by George Sandison, set a century after the titular year of George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Since its publication, the themes, stories and language of Orwell’s novel have become part of popular culture in ways even its farsighted author could not have imagined. […]
‘Gilded Cage’ cleverly blends dystopian and fantasy tropes to create a gripping narrative that so perfectly captures the absurdity of contemporary political ‘reality’ it actually made me angry reading it at times. The idea is brilliantly simple: in a world analogous to ours, a minority of people with uncanny abilities called ‘Skills’ become the ruling […]
A SciFi Sessions conversation, hosted by Glyn Morgan at Gower Street Waterstones on 9 November 2017. SciFi Sessions are monthly ticketed events (£6 inc drinks) that start at 6.30pm Mike John Harrison, a veteran of the 60s New Wave SF scene, and Gary Budden, an award-nominated short story writer whose first collection Hollow Shores (Dead Ink […]
Alfred Hitchcock once described opening a film by following a car being made in an automated factory; at the end of the process, the boot opens to reveal a dead body. Hitch never made the film because the idea was too impossible even for him, so Adam Roberts has taken up the challenge and transferred […]
Life in Sci-Fi 