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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Welcome to Part 3 of my series looking at how to write aliens so that they seem, well, alien. So far we’ve had a look at how alien bodies might be designed in a way that doesn’t look like a guy in a mask, and we’ve taken a look at some of the easy, lazy, and downright problematic ways to create an entire …
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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 …
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I spend a lot of time thinking about aliens. What they might be like. Why we tell stories about them in the way they do. These blogs are adapted from a talk I gave at the much-missed Nine Worlds Geekfest in 2013. One of the main inspirations for that talk was Spock. Particularly, how the Old Spock from the original …
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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 …
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