On Friday I went to see Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s adaptation of Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey 7. It’s a great movie that justified the hype it’s received. It made quite a few changes to Ashton’s novel, Bong clearly had his own story he wanted to tell, but faithfulness to the source material isn’t actually a virtue in itself (even if, …
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When I first told a writer friend that I was going to do a “Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror” for the next round Fermi’s Progress stories, he laughed. “I love that. You’ve got characters telling each other stories that reveal their character on a long journey and your go-to isn’t ‘Canterbury Tales’, it’s ‘Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror’?” he asked.This friend is …
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Earlier this week, at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference, the CEO of publisher HarperCollins, Brian Murray, talked about the possibilities of AI in the publishing sector. One of the ideas he floated, which has drawn a lot of attention, is this:“One idea is a “talking book,” where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to …
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“I like sand. It’s good for making castles and burying people in up to their necks then sculpting a fake body for them that’s really muscley or has big boobs and it feels nice when you dig your toes into it,” is what Anakin Skywalker might have said if he had had a happier childhood with less slavery and abduction …
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We are two days away from the Fermi’s arrival at a forest moon that shouldn’t exist. So what’s the harm in giving you a little peek at the opening pages? Doctor Naomi Grant had visited Gordon at home a few times. Gordon treated her people, and Naomi bristled to realise she was now very much one of her people, like …
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I’m not a writing advice guy. There are a lot of writing advice guys out there, and a small number that will tell you practical, actionable things that you can put into practice, but in my experience, the vast majority of it is somewhere between Draw The Rest of the Fucking Owl and just… vibes. Most writers, including extremely talented professionals, do …
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I wrote Fermi’s Progress, and its sequel, Fermi’s Wake, because I was missing a very specific kind of old school TV sci-fi storytelling. But as I was writing a series of novellas, rather than a TV series, I felt that it was only fair to do everything in my power to make it completely unfilmable. The premise, a prototype faster-than-light spaceship that …
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If there is one thing I love it is a rag-tag bunch of misfits, each with their own agendas and emotional damage, who are forced to live and work together aboard a spaceship having adventures. And it is no surprise that my love of the spaceship-bound band of misfits is a big part of why I wrote Fermi’s Progress, my series …
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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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