Sam Tyler

Inheritance should never be something that you look forward to, but when you receive some, it can make a huge change to your life. I may be enough to pay a deposit on a house or pay for a child to go to university. It can also be a real pain in the bureaucracy. Think of the taxes that need paying, t...

Shakespeare plays have been around for a long time, and you do not need to do a straight adaptation. Many of the terms used in the plays have entered the common vernacular and the storylines can be traced throughout modern film and television. I don’t recall Romeo or Juliet breaking out into song, b...

I set a high bar set for science fiction short story collections that is in no way the fault of any modern author. Unfortunately for them I read The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury at an influential age. I rate a collection against the creepy science fiction/horror tones that Bradbury was able to cr...

Doctor Who has saved the solar system on countless occasions and planet Earth even more than this, but some of these saves felt a little.... minor. Alien races trying their arm at taking over Earth with nary a plan worth writing on the back of a psychic beermat. Sometimes though the stakes are big,...

If I have said it once, I have it said a thousand times, science fiction is the best genre as it is so wide reaching. Stories can be grandiose, epic Space Operas with multiple characters on several planets. Or, stories can be personal affairs, titbits of speculative fiction that tweaks our own reali...

The science fiction genre is open to exploring alien worlds and alien ideas, but many times you find it is a very Terran feeling society being all human about things. It may be an android as the main character, but that android is following a classic crime noir style plot you could find on Earth. Wh...

You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. For years, the Jedi have been considered a paragon of virtue, everything that is good to the Sith’s bad. But there must be a reason so many Jedi fall. The path to the Dark Side is not pathed with sex, drugs, and rock...

Science Fiction has been inspired by religion ever since it started being written, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus even has the Greek Gods in the title. The word science may be in the title of the genre, but it is also a genre about wonder, about questioning the things around us. Science fiction a...

I am a massive fan of the Target imprint of Doctor Who books. Recently they have been filling in the gaps from the older series and producing new adaptations based on the past few Doctors. Taking stories out of any given season is a risky business. It could be a standalone monster of the week story,...

It can be hard for the casual Doctor Who viewer to see the character as alien. They may have two hearts, regenerate once in a while, but fundamentally the Doctor looks human. It does not help that they are obsessed with human culture and like to hang around on Earth a lot (cheap sets). But fundament...

Some things are bigger than just us. We need to think about more than the individual or even the family unit, think of the bigger picture. The Price of Rebellion by Micheal C. Bland is the second part of a trilogy all about an inventor who would do anything to protect his family, but in doing this h...

What would you do to protect those that you love? What is The Price of Safety ? This is a question that Michael C. Bland poses in the first of a trilogy set in a troubling future. It is a story about a genius, but also a family man whose inventions gets them all into danger. At what point do you dec...

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 feels like a...

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 lif...

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 Falls , star...