8 Zombie Apocalypses That Aren’t Pandemics

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 …

View Post

Five Times I Got Worried About Fermi’s Paradox While Writing My Book

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 …

View Post

“Intelligences Greater Than Man’s and Yet as Mortal as His Own”
Part 2: A Matter of Culture

Welcome to part two of our look at how to write aliens so that they actually seem vaguely alien, adapted from my talk at Nine Worlds Geekfest far too many years ago. In the last part of this article we looked at the appearance of aliens, how we can arrange their bodies in ways that don’t necessarily conform to the “tube-with-two-limbs-at-each-end-and-a-head-at-one-end” model of alien …

View Post

An Accumulation of Blogs

This is a shiny new blog that will soon be populated with all of the quality free content I can find time to make, there are plans my friends. Lots of plans. But until then, I thought I’d use this as a chance to link to some old and forgotten pieces of mine that I still remember fondly. So: Women …

View Post