When I started writing Fermi’s Progress, it was with a clear mission statement. Planet of the week adventures. Just as the star of any Columbo story was a well-regarded character actor playing a pretentious douchebag who believed they had committed the perfect murder, the star of each Fermi story was going to be a new world, whose aliens were as …
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Only three days to go until the tenth Edge-Lit Derby, “an event which celebrates the best in Horror, Thriller, Fantasy and Science-Fiction writing”. It looks like it’s going to be a fantastic day, with tons of stuff on, but just to keep things easy I thought I’d write a quick summary of the most me-centric events that are going to …
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Was going to do a quick “Where I’ll Be” post about this weekend’s upcoming Edge-Lit convention. Instead, that will be coming later this week. In the meantime, it seems we have to do this. Next Saturday, at Edge-Lit Genre Fiction Festival, I am going to be running a workshop called Who Killed NanoSessionMo? where a group of strangers collaborate to …
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Flogging a book is difficult, particularly if you’re going the indie route and your marketing team consists of your tweets and your girlfriend dutifully retweeting them when asked. Ideally, it’s not about selling the book. It’s about selling the first couple of pages of the book, and then hoping that the story you have put years of your life into …
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Come with me, if you will, back to the days of 2015. It was a time when the USA could honestly say it had never had Donald Trump as a President, a time when most normal people didn’t know what a “Brexit” was, when the 2012 Olympics were just a thing that had happened and the MCU still had seemingly …
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Continuing my look at the history of the Star Trek universe as seen from the perspective of Norwich, England. Last time we saw the long road getting to the Federation in the 22nd century. Now we turn to the 23rd and the 24th centuries, far from the frontier… It is 2259 in Norwich. The solar panels and windmills are completely …
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Continuing my look at the history of the Star Trek universe as seen from the perspective of Norwich, England. Last time we saw how Norwich fared through the darker chapters of the 21st century. This week we enter the 22nd century, and it has been a long road… It is 2100 in Norwich The skies are filled with fireworks and …
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This is a Star Trek fan fiction about a place that will never appear in Star Trek. It is 2024 in Norwich. The pavements are lined with parked cars, mostly petrol but a couple of electric are starting to show up. Some houses have solar panels on the roof. There are ranks of app-powered electric scooters on street corners. People …
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My partner has often bemoaned that I will spend hours travelling from openworld shop interface to openworld shop interface, carefully browsing the inventories of each NPC, to assemble the perfect outfit in a videogame, while in real life I will spend the minimum possible amount of time selecting “something grey” to cover my nakedness with. At the same, my brain …
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One of the most boring opinions you can have is “Superman is boring because he’s too powerful”. In science fiction (Is Superman science fiction? If you like, we’re not here for that today) the nearest equivalent is probably Star Trek, particularly its 24th-century iteration. What can possibly be a threat to our heroes, who have sidearms that can vaporize you …
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