Over the last couple of years I’ve become a big fan of the Japanese animation style called anime. Of course, this is not a new medium, it’s been around in some shape or form since at least the early 1960s. A lot of us westerners didn’t know it, but we’d been enjoying anime since way …
I recently read the last of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories, Forward the Foundation. It was published posthumously in 1993 after his death in 1992. It features the last years of his hero, Hari Seldon, and the completion of his galaxy-spanning and history-spanning project, Foundation. It seems fitting that Asimov’s last book was the last Foundation …
I’m making some slow progress on the new novel. The first thing I did was to start organising the chapters I already have, and to work out where the gaps are and rearrange everything. To help me do this I’ve started using Powerpoint, with each slide representing a chapter, with notes about the chapter, which …
It seems like almost every book you pick up these days, especially if it’s in the science fiction/fantasy genres, is a part of some long-running series. There are obvious commercial reasons for this, but I’m guessing a lot of authors also just think in terms of long story arcs. I mean, I’m doing it myself …
1980 It was a cold night in New York City. Gary Mullens made his way down Broadway, past Christmas shoppers and homeless people. He was headed for West 72nd Street. It seemed to him that New York in this time period didn’t look much different to what it was in the future – except of …
“…the stuff of which we’re made is like flotsam on the cosmic ocean.” – The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene, p. 301 Yang Lee arrived at his modest, three bedroom house in the northern outskirts of San Bernadino, near the foothills of the San Bernadino Mountains. As he got out of his car …
ONE The building was a squat and ugly single-story red brick within the light-industrial district, south-east of the University District. The battered sign out front, printed in a retro computer font, said Qwanten Data. The front office windows had heavy security wire over them, and the dusty venetian blinds within were closed, giving the building …
In the course of writing my first science fiction novel, Eye of the Timegate, the word count blew out to around 240,000 words by the time the first draft was completed. The finished work clocked in at just over 136,00 words. A lot of stuff was left on the cutting floor. After I finished the …
