One of the interesting things about Science Fiction is the way it straddles that gapping canyon of division in contemporary culture between art and science. Fiction is an art. Science is, of course, science. So what do you get if you make art about science? (I strongly object to the idea that Science Fiction has… [Read more…]
December 13, 2010
As a writer you are free. You are the freest person there ever was. Your freedom is what you buy with your solitude. Ursula K Le Guin I write as many evenings a week as I can at a nearby library. It belongs to the city university, but I have taken it over piece by… [Read more…]
December 10, 2010
I very rarely comment on politics. I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances. There is… [Read more…]
December 3, 2010
It’s a snowin’ in the British Isles, and it’s put me in mind of the coming end of year. So. I have decided to start a new tradition around these parts, and make my predictions for the key trends in SF in the year to come! And now with no further ado we present… Damo’s… [Read more…]
November 20, 2010
Lauren Westwood is graduate of Loughborough University’s MA in Creative Writing and was a project intern for the Writing Industries Conference. She is a young writer with a passion for SF and Fantasy, but had never heard of steampunk until accepting my challenge to review the Steampunk Reloaded anthology. Here she gives a fascinating insight… [Read more…]
November 18, 2010
It’s all too easy to dismiss science fiction and fantasy stories as escapist nonsense. But there’s ultimately something despairing about the charge of running away most readers of these genres encounter at some point. It tends to come from an authority figure of some kind – a teacher, a boss, a parent. It is often… [Read more…]
November 12, 2010
All quiet on the blog front. I have been writing. But I have to venture out in to the public eye in the near future, starting with: Novacon – I will be at Novacon in Nottingham tomorrow, for at least the afternoon. I’ve never attended the convention before, so excited to see what kind of… [Read more…]
November 2, 2010
In a moment of idle bravado, I agreed to a smack-down NaNoWriMo word war with fellow authors of weird fiction Gra Linnaea, Paul Jessup and John Klima. So far the score is… …and as you can see I am losing. (At the time of writing.) So cheer for me or something.
October 31, 2010
UPDATE: I’m asking a few good SF writers the following question (answer below, and please add your own!) – If you could teach a class of young people one idea from SF, what would it be? Science Fiction is almost an oxymoron. We live in a society where science and the humanities seem to be… [Read more…]
October 15, 2010
If science fiction is a genre of ideas, is there any wonder Hollywood doesn’t get it? Look. There are are only two truly great science fiction movies. The first is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, written in collaboration with Arthur C Clarke. The second is Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott and adapted from Philip K Dick’s… [Read more…]
October 8, 2010
I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. I have a Work In Progress and want the progress bit to happen faster. NaNo seems like a good focus for achieving that. My strategy this year is to throw myself body and soul in to the effort. To that end, I shall be at University of Leicester… [Read more…]
October 3, 2010
Yesterday I watched the great Bali Rai read a story aloud to twenty-thousand people at the Walker’s stadium at half-time of the Leice ster vs. Scunthorpe match. I’m not sure what the people of Scunthorpe made of it, but the football fans of Leicester loved it, and took away thousands of copies of the story… [Read more…]
December 19, 2010
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