Sam Tyler

I have been a fan of  Star Trek  for a long time and am happy to overlook many of the  contradictions   and technobabble that it has a habit of spouting but one thing I can never get my head around is why. Why are they on these ships? Why  risk  their lives? For a  scientific  vessel the turnover is...

I like to read a  collection  of short stories on occasion as they act as a wonderful  palette  cleanser after so many  full-length  tales . The authors need to be  succinct  with their ideas as they have 20 pages to get their point across, rather than 400.  An anthology  like   Escape Pod  can also...

The timeline is fragile. Stand on a butterfly in the Jurassic Era and you may end up returning to a world in which we all have seven arms – useful for multi-tasking. If time travel were available not everybody wou ld respect the past and therefore, it needs to be policed. A subtle and intelligent te...

The way that humans treat each other in real life is far darker and harrowing than any science fiction book that you can create, but this does not stop some authors from exploring the depths of the  human  condi tion. If we are only as good as how we treat the weakest in society, the people who inha...

As a superhero fan, the last couple of decades have been fantastic . The comics have had countless film  adaptations and prose novels. This  abundance  of content has allowed content creators to explore the idea of  super power s  more. We are no longer  in the age of Gods, when Superman fought othe...

I am not someone that goes in for Conspiracy Theories, I just don’t have the energy for t hem . 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 are  all pretty...

Modern life has highlighted the plight of The Other. People are marginalised for all sorts of reasons and from what I can tell it is more noticeable than ever. If you are different but can blend in with everybody else, would you keep it a secret or not? The Nobody People are hidden from view for now...

I am not a big fan of train travel. The route I take is usually into London on a packed train. I have been made to suffer by standing all the way and having no access to the t oilets. I have considered putting this into prose form in a science fiction  thriller but  needing the loo and having sore f...

As a football fan it is sometimes hard to understand that some people just don’t care about it. They see it as a  frivolous  game of kicking a pig’s stomach around a patch of grass.  In the context of life and death, it is just something to keep you busy on a Saturday afternoon. That is unless you a...

I am not an argumentative fellow and the only two full on blowouts I can remember are well within the geek sphere. Who was the actor alongside Harrison Ford at the start of  Raiders of the Lost Ark  and how does time travel work? I may have been wrong about Alfred  Molina  but I am right about time...

If you read enough Near Future fiction you will start to see a trend. The future is not orange at all but bleak and a little depressing. It could be giant robots, aliens or the undead. There always seems to be something around the corner that is more dystopian  than utopian. I can take all the UFOs...

There is a certain type of film that I love. It has a central character wronged in some way and this gives them the flimsy premise to basically kill all the bad guys.  Death Wish ,  John Wick ,  The Equaliser , to name  bu t a few.  Red Noise  by John P Murphy is the science fiction  equivalent  wit...

If you look at the Star Wars timeline from afar it can seem a little depressing. An Old Republic falls only for an Empire to rise. That goes and you get The New Order. It seems that the rebels are always having to rebel against something.  However, for the Sith to rise, there  must  be moments when...

The idea of a virtual reality  being  superior to  the real thing reoccurs  often  in  science fiction. Why live in the slums  of   Ready Player  One   or  the battleship grey halls of  Red Dwarf , when things can be Better Than Life? The issues arise  because  these  simulated  utopias always seem...

The Butterfly Effect is a device used to explore alternative  versions of our world. The simple action of a time travellers going back to the time of the dinosaurs and standing on a butterfly would alter everything that followed, ripples expanding from that one point. Robert Ferrigno  decided to exp...

  Having read more than a few  S tarship  loads of science fiction in my time I am  particular about  what type of aliens I like. I have a fondness for the  Star Trek  tactic o f gluing some plasticine to the forehead of a humanoid but in today’s fiction I like something truly alien. What  does that...

There are many things that I want to be in life, but I don’t want to be the relation of a famous Star Trek character. You are only there to be killed off at some point  e.g.  Kirk’s Son or  Father depending on what Universe you are in. Now in  Star Trek : The  Captain ’s  Daughter  by Peter David it...

Luddites are a group that used to destroy the machines that were taking their jobs. The term is now used as a derivative  way to  talk about someone who does not get  technology but ,   did  they have it right ?  All us smug computer literate people may have the best jobs  now , but how lo ng until...