News for 2020

I live in South Africa, a country known for its capacity for forgiveness and its horrendous murder stats. Every day on the news, women and children go missing and turn up mutilated in forests and rubbish dumps. But this is also the place of Mister Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where apartheid killers cried broken tears with the families of their victims.

Just before writing Malachi, my life led me to a strange...

In September 1963, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee were at the height of their powers: well into their run on the Fantastic Four, they’d also recently launched the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor, among others. Their Marvel Universe portrayed the world outside readers’ windows, unlike its Distinguished Competition, and it would have been disingenuous to show an America in which civil rights was not a central issue. Whether it was out...

Gene Roddenberry famously pitched Star Trek to NBC executives as “Wagon Train to the stars”. He was referencing, of course, the TV series about a group of settlers forging their way westward across 19th-century America. Wagon Train was hugely popular in its time, running for eight seasons between 1957 and 1965, although nowadays it is largely remembered for its role in inspiring a markedly more successful SF franchise.

‘It’s the greatest thing that’s happened to us since Maggie took us into the Falklands.’ This is the voxpop that sticks in my mind: a Benidorm resident quizzed on Brexit, one of many in the days after the 2019 election and just before our EU membership expired quietly in a corner with barely a whimper. Never mind whether the Falklands was triumph or absurdity nor whether Thatcher was hero or villain. What surprised me...

Let’s talk movies… sort of.

Okay, let’s actually talk movie deals and taking books to the silver screen.  A thing that authors get asked a lot is, “Why don’t you make your book into a movie?”  Ah, if only it were that easy.  There is, of course, a lovely complement contained in that question.  The reader is saying, “Hey, I think your book would make a great movie,”...