Sam Tyler

There are many roads to enlightenment. You can spend decades mastering the art of meditation, becoming one with the universe. You can seek to achieve the divine through the depraved, in acts so vial that you push through what is acceptable into the other. Any of the routes take commitment and none o...

Think too long on the multiverse and your mind will explode. Every tiny action you take splits off into another multiverse, then extrapolate that with everything making tiny actions. There will be an infinite number of universes that only differ from the way you tied your shoelace that morning. Popp...

The public love a superhero crossover tale, the billion-dollar hauls of various Avenger movies will tell you this, but they do not always work and at this point they can feel like going over old ground. Original Sin was a comic book arc conceived by  Jason Aaron  and  Mike Deodato that brought vario...

The Trolley Problem is an interesting mental exercise that asks you would you let one person die to save many? To do so you would have to divert the trolley from the path of the five and be culpable for it hitting the one. In theory it makes sense, the many not the few, but could you really pull tha...

With the new Black Panther film arriving soon in cinemas, Marvel fans are extremely excited to see what is next for the people of Wakanda. The first film was excellent, but even with all its colour and strength it could only scratch the surface of the comic book. There is a rich history to Wakanda a...

Typography has a larger role in your life than you may think. It is important to get the right font in the right place. No one wants to have Beware of the Cliff written in Comic Sans. Advertisers spend millions on typefaces to make a brand instantly recognisable. All these things are noble pursuits,...

I read and listen to books in all formats, but still prefer the feel of paper in my hand. Audiobooks are great for the commute, but they are just not pacy enough for me, I read quickly, and a narrator often seems to go in slow motion even at 1.5 speed. 2000AD and Penguin Audio must know my brain as...

Science Fiction writers love a dystopia, there are so many ways that it could all go wrong. Overpopulation is one. It not a pleasant thing to think about, but we already use too many of the world’s finite resources and as the population grows, this is going to get even worse. In The Nursery by Roark...

Science fiction is a brilliant tool for pondering what happens after the inevitable fall of humans. There is only so long that the Earth can sustain us, but that does not mean that other civilisations may not develop after. Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley is a Sci Fi mystery told from the persp...

I am at an age where I genuinely believe that Science Fiction is the best genre there is and I have read enough books of all types to have developed this opinion. I love it because it can be so many different things. Space opera to speculative fiction. A Sci Fi book can also be a riddle wrapped in a...

Time travel is fascinating, it is also some of the most fictional science fiction you will ever get. What has happened must have happened, lest you rip apart your universe in a paradox. The scientists in A. G. Riddle’s Lost in Time seem to have found a workaround as they send the worst criminals int...

Humanity is a parasite sucking the recourses from the Earth until there are no more. Like a remora attached to the undercarriage of a shark, humans will one day need find a new host. The alternative is to change our ways, but that does not seem likely. Titan Hoppers by Rob J Hayes follows a flotilla...

H. G. Wells is a name to conjure with. Classic stories about time machines, invisible men, alien invasions and more. He was one of the earliest genre writers in a time when the idea of genres did not exist. He just wrote what he felt like. A modern author who has taken on this mantle is Silvia Moren...

It starts off sensibly with tweaking a DNA strand here or there to prevent a hereditary illness. Who could argue against that? However, it is not long before people realise that they can use the same tools to make sure that a child has their father’s eye colour and Mother’s hair. Why even bother pic...

Doctor Who is the same, but also different, in each iteration and that is what makes the characters so interesting. The Twelfth Doctor is one of the latest incarnations and one that reflected on the Doctor’s past as much as the present. The humour was still there, but also more of the historic grump...

The Target imprint of Doctor Who novels is like nectar to any fan as they offer a punchy adaptation of almost every episode of the series up to the mid-90s, but there were a few missing. Fear not, as BBC Books are not only releasing adaptations of newer episodes but are also looking to fill in the g...

Like many Science Fiction fans, I am also a fan of Doctor Who, but not of a particular incarnation of the Doctor on television. I am a Doctor Who book fan. The show is great, but it in the novels where I have always found the most interesting stories free from budget constraints and allowing the aut...

Reading about a dystopia is not as farfetched as it was once as we are living through a couple of ongoing ones as I write, but there is always space for a little more terror to add to the reality. What about a situation that is eerily possible? The sun belches out radiation daily and according to Da...