The Future History of Norwich – a Fan Fiction, Part 2

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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The Future History of Norwich – a Fan Fiction, Part 1

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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Why Did I Put A Sofa on My Spaceship?

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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Sufficiently Advanced Technology

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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Fermi’s P(rog)ress

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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Maybe Buffy-esque Writing is Good Actually?

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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Why I Can’t Write Competence Porn

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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Putting the Noir in Elfes Noirs

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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My Life with the Living Dead

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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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 …

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