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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It has been a little while since Fermi’s Progress was unleashed on the world, obliterating everything in its wake. Since then, quite a few people have had things to say about it, and so, partly for my own ability to keep track, and partly so the curious can have a browse, here is a collection of all the coverage Fermi’s …
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This week saw the release of the trailer for Forspoken. It’s an adventure about a young woman using magical powers to survive in a fantasy world while peppering her dialogue with phrases like “So let me get this straight…” and “So that happened”, adjectives like “freaking”, and, oh yeah… she prefaces the final element of a list of plot elements …
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Fermi’s Progress is, more than anything I’ve written, me having fun. It is all The Good Bit, it is me, sitting there industriously shovelling a full tub of Ben & Jerry’s Netflix and Chill into my face, leaving my vegetables well and truly on the side of the plate. I wanted to write stories where the alien planet was the …
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I’m going to take a brief break from plugging The Book to talk about the other big project I’ve got coming out this year. I’m a contributing write to the latest sourcebook for Spire: The City Must Fall, titled simply, Sin. For this book I’ve written a scenario called “Second-Hand Rain”, which is basically an attempt to make the Spire even more …
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So today marks the launch of the second instalment of Fermi’s Progress: Descartesmageddon. I’m going to be talking a bit more about the ideas and inspirations behind this story over the coming weeks, but from the outset the main thing you need to know is- it’s a zombie apocalypse story. And that makes this very special to me, because in …
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It is less than two weeks until the release of Descartesmageddon, the second instalment of my novella serial Fermi’s Progress. In this instalment the crew of the Fermi will arrive at an alien planet undergoing a very different kind of zombie apocalypse. The problem is for some reason (I don’t know what, I’m not a book trends wizard), recently people seem to …
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For the last couple of months I have been heavily plugging the first in my new series of novellas, Fermi’s Progress (you can buy it here!) but I’ve been working on it far longer than that. Dyson’s Fear and it’s three as-yet-unannounced sequels have been a labour of love over the last five years, a period of time where I think we can …
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We’re coming towards the end of this little series now. We’ve looked at how we might make aliens that look actually alien, rather than like actors with forehead make-up. We’ve looked at how to construct an alien culture (and what not to do), and how we can look at out own unexamined assumptions to see what rules we can break. Today we’re …
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