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I love an Arthurian Legend retelling, Perilous Times by Thomas D Lee is not even the first one that I have read this year, but it shows how flexible authors can be with Old King Arty. Lee does not retell the tales of yore but extrapolates into the present and the future. When Arthur was...
I love time travel stories as you can tie yourself in knots figuring out what is going on. A writer can choose to do one of two things about the complexity of it all. Explore in great depth and try to make the inherent paradox work, or just go with the flow. Joshua David Bellin’s Myriad...
I have never wanted to travel to space. THUD. Not only would it be physically challenging, but also mentally tough. THUD. The knowledge that the only thing between you and the infinite void is a sheet of metal. THUD. The great expanse making you question your tiny existence and the insignificant...
There are two ways of writing a trilogy of books. One way is to produce three separate novels that can be read independently or viewed as a whole. The other way is to start each book as soon as the last one ends and power through the tale a great speed. This is how P. J. Flie’s Darkness...
A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what?s real and what?s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since
I am not someone that goes in for Conspiracy Theories, I just don’t have the energy for them. Take for example the idea that nanobots are being injected into people so that the Deep State can track our every move. Why would they spend trillions of pounds on such technology when we...
Keeping it in the family sounds like a wonderful idea. Surround yourself with people you can trust, blood is thicker than water, but do family businesses work? Why do so many fail by the third generation? The first generation build the company from nothing, the second grow it further, the third...
There are many reasons that I am a reviewer and not a writer and one of them is that I do not have that thing in my brain to produce simple, but great ideas. Speculating about the future or past and giving it a twist has made for some great science fiction and fantasy. What about a French...
What is the near future going to be like, utopian, dystopian, a bit of both. Chances are that it will be just as messed up as the past and the present. The future may be a little grim, but that does not mean it cannot be fun. Aubrey Wood’s future is as bright as neon, but also as dark as...
Most of us have a subject at school that we struggled with more than others and for me that was languages. Maths, English, Science, I was fine, but my brain does not feel designed for languages. So, if someone offered me a chip that would allow me to instantly understand all languages on Earth,...
It's 2118 and humanity has not only got over the coronavirus, but have reached out into space - colonising the Moon, Mars, Ceres and Europa. It's still early days of mankind's expansion though and the ship Khidr is part of a small fleet who travel between the different colonies, assisting the...
In the aftermath of the global pandemic, there is a darkness to the world that has yet to retreat. The way in which writers approach their craft in this moment is crucial. Some are electing to ignore it in the stories that they create, whilst others embrace the context directly in their...
I am all for a retelling of a classic story, but some of them are not that close to the source material. Pinocchio is having a renaissance with two recent film adaptations and now a new cyber future take in T J Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets. I can see a puppet like creature,...
I thought it went without saying that we live in a patriarchal world, but then I went on Twitter. And the number of people (or bots) who tweet daily that the modern world is a matriarchy – and are mad about it – truly shocked me.
But the truth is, it’s not just a patriarchy. It’s a male-default world. The deeper you get into every aspect of how we use gendered language, from suffixes to idioms to profanity, the...
There is something about Low Fantasy that makes it such a good genre. It is not the violence, swearing or muckraking, it is the people. Reading a fantasy book where the heroes are not in white and the villains in black. In J. L Worrad’s The Keep Within the nominal hero is one Sir Harrance...
Freedom is just chaos, with better lighting
Science Fiction is one of the best genres because you can explore subjects via a prism of the future. Writing a book about how we treat others does not have to be told via a historic story, or the present, you can look far to the future and draw parallels between that world and ours. What would...
A long running series is a mixed blessing. You can return to the same characters over the books, but too often a series becomes stale quickly and the characters seem to live in statis were they never change. This can never be said of the excellent Rivers of London novels by Ben Aaronovitch...
I really enjoy a retelling of the Arthurian Legend, which is a good thing as I have read a fair few. Each author tackles the story in a unique way looking to put their own spin on a well-known tale. Do you follow the classic beats making the likes of Morgana the villain? Perhaps it is Merlin's...
I do not like to think too much about the Large Hadron Collider, I let better minds than mine consider hurtling atoms at each other at considerable speed to access some sort of God particle. I get nervous enough around the toaster. Other things go on at CERN too, the invention of the internet...
There are at least two sides to every truth and somewhere in the middle is what happened. All relationships contain lies, they oil the machinery of compromise, but for a better relationship you want to keep them to little white lies. Things can quickly spiral out of control if you start to hide...
There is a reason that you should avoid tackling the multiverse in a story as the very nature of them means that the possibilities are infinite. Every decision ever made split off to make two different pathways and so on. A story that spans multiple Earths will have to pick which ones to visit....
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