Sam Tyler

Are you playing the game? Made you look. The idea of a metagame that embroils a hero is not a new one, but it is hard to pull off. The amount of financial resources and secrecy that is required to convince Michael Douglas to jump off a building is beyond what the average person can afford, unless yo...

Asimov’s ‘Three laws of Robotics’ have become synonymous with any book that contains robots. Nearly all these books will not allow their robots to hurt humans, but what happens if these rules broke? In C. Robert Cargill’s  Day Zero  the millions of robots that exist have full artificial intelligence...

Of the many things that the pandemic has taught us, it is that we can work well online. I have completed projects online with never meeting my team or the stakeholders in person. What it has also taught me us is about Digital Poverty. Although I may have been happy to work in the kitchen, what about...

I have conversations with my colleagues and a surprising number of them are dismissive of Science Fiction as being too farfetched and complicated. This is not true, as it is such a wide genre. There are Sci Fi books that will cater for readers who only want a touch of the unreal, but there are also...

For many  people,  the leading writer of speculative fiction i n the 90s  and 00s  was Michael Cr ic h t on who was able to marry a level of scientific reality with some  outrageous  ideas. A theme park full of dinosaurs, intelligent apes, nanobots that can kill? He was able to deliver on all of the...

The Alien franchise can be seen as one of two things: an awesome series of Space based horror and action stories, or a textbook example of Corporate Malfeasance. The Aliens may be the most reoccurring characters, but the second is not Ripley, it is Weyland Industries. This corporation pops up in var...

Almost everything  that we see  daily  would feel strange and alien to someone out of time. Show  an  Ancient Roman a modern carrot and they would ask why it was so large and orange.  In Caroline Hardake r ’s  Composite Cr eatures   the world has changed a lot. The sky is constantly covered with thi...

When an intellectual property becomes huge it can go one of two  ways,  a homogeneous blob of the same stories on repeat, or a vibrant  universe full of different adventures. Star Wars was already massive, but  recently has branched out even wider. This included a reset of the tie in novels and rath...

The genre of Science Fiction has always been a wide one in terms of ideas. You can set a book on our own Earth with only one or two tweaks to the norm. This Speculative Fiction is Sci Fi, but so are the Space Op eras that span eons and are inhabited by alien races. Although the nature of Sci Fi can...

They all tell you that having children is not easy, but nothing prepared us for the first six weeks of having a  defenceless  little t y ke in the house. You may have read the books, been to a few classes or asked r elatives and friends, but when it comes down to it, this is all on your shoulders al...

Growing up my group of friends was obsessed with America and  all wanted to move there. They had all been taken in by the glossy American films and TV shows that suggested that even if you were  unemployed, you would own a swanky loft apartment. I had relatives who live there and was far more aware...

Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4. Drafting a book must be like standing in front of a ser...

Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others quite different. If you would like to go straight to the segment unique to this review, please start with paragraph 4.   Drafting a book must be like standing in front of a s...

Over the next three days, three reviews will stand before you. Read them in any order, some elements will be the same, others  quite different . If you  would like to go straight to the segment   unique to this  review , please start with paragraph 4.   Drafting  a book  must be like standing in fro...

I sometimes like to think about a singular change to  the  world and how  it  would affect the future. It  says  a  lot  about me that in most cases my thoughts  end up at dystopia.  Humans   are  always going to end at some point, I was just hoping that it would be a few years after I had gone. I a...

A lot of the political hustle and bustle in today’s world has its  roots  in how far you think capitalism should go. Some countries are all for state control, others are far more lais s ez faire .  Do  private companies  already  have  too much power  pull ing  the strings behind  our  elected repre...

What do we expect from the future?  I consider myself a half glass full type of person, but even my positivity has taken a battering in the past few years. A world buried under a sea of sand sounds like it may be better  in some circumstances. If we do find ourselves roaming a desolate future what w...

Making an author come up with a single science fiction  concept  is tricky enough, but to ask them to come up with an infinite number of multiverses is just plain mean. Tim Pratt only have themselves to blame  as they choice to take  Zaxony   Delatree  on an adventure across a multitude of worlds.  ...

When we colonise the planets will they send out the best and the brightest? I’m not so sure as many of the best and the brightest will be quite happy on Earth leading a succes sful life. Converting the likes of Mars into a  liveable   environment  will be dirty, cold and dangerous work. It is more l...

The Universe of Star Wars is a vast one full of unexplored planets, characters and timelines but the will of The Force always seems to drag it back to the Skywalkers.  The  brand-new   Star Wars: The High Republic  is an attempt to write Star Wars free from the restraints  of the films as it is set...