It has been a good year for Life is Strange fans. As well as the release of Life is Strange: Reunion, the game that finally reunited Chloe and Max in a time twisting, fiery mystery, and filming beginning on the Prime TV series, this year also saw the release of Out of Focus, the novel that followed Chloe Price’s adventures as …
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Important and possibly legally relevant information: I am an author and critic (which feels a bit grandiose for “Selling my opinions for money,” but there you go). I spend a lot of my time thinking about works of fiction in various mediums, and fictional situations of my own devising – including violent ones. Fiction often presents situations that occur in …
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There is a rule that all science fiction writers know, even if they don’t know it explicitly, they feel it in their bones. It’s instinctive. The rule comes in two parts. Part one is “Steal from everyone…” Science fiction is a kleptomaniac orgy, we are all out here stealing from Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein and Ursula …
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Right now, I’m writing a story, and I have got to a scene that is, frankly, the exact hypothetical scenario that AI fans think LLMs are useful for. It’s a bit of incidental dialogue that I need to establish worldbuilding and character, but which does not really do any lifting for the larger plot. Frankly, one of the reasons I’m …
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Yesterday saw the launch of my latest book, Life is Strange: Welcome to Caledon University, the updated, edited, amended, redacted, and vandalised prospectus for the university that is the setting of Life is Strange: Double Exposure and Life is Strange: Reunion. Much like the Life is Strange games themselves, the book is about scratching beneath the surface, of communities, of …
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Before we go any further, I just want to say how much I respect Dan Trachtenberg. Prey is arguably the perfect Predator movie. It strips the franchise right down to its core themes. It echoes the original Predator without really imitating it. It is everything a fan of the Predator movies could want. You have to respect someone who makes …
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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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