
Dead Astronauts & Postcapitalist Desire
Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer is hard sci-fi. There’s no space opera grandeur here, it’s far more profound. It offers a tender and bleak vision of how humanity changes and fails.

Epic Iran
(Gold model of a chariot, 500-330BC) In the book I’m writing at the moment, the main character finds themselves torn from their ordinary life in my hometown of Barry. I wanted them to find an ally and mentor to help them navigate their conflict and keep them alive.I wanted this character, who I ended up…

‘British’.
I’d not long started my career in videogames when a game designer told me that good game design is giving people what they want, but also giving people something they didn’t realise they wanted, but now they’ve got it, they’re delighted. Similarly, if you cannot offer something new and compelling as an opposition party in…

Stop Being Reasonable & The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
With regard to arguing with others about who we should be and how we should act, I wrote recently about how hard I’ve found it to change my mind. So, after the edits and proofs of my forthcoming novel Brother Red, I managed to get stuck into a book I’d bought a while ago precisely…

Whiteshift
Whiteshift, by Eric Kaufman, is an easy book to recommend you read, in part because it is a thoughtful, detailed presentation of some challenging ideas and in part because its subject matter couldn’t (coronavirus aside) be more important. There are aspects to the thesis I don’t accept or understand, but I now accept, more clearly…

Janesville. A premonition?
I’m reflecting on the aftermath of a UK election result that I, personally, found disappointing. As with the Trump result a few years ago, there’s a fair amount of soul-searching and blame-pinning on the left. In games we call it a ‘post-mortem’ and it’s a reflection on what went wrong and what needs to change,…

Roadside Picnic & Beneath The World, A Sea
These two books, one old, one new, continue my lucky streak of ‘boundaried alien geography on earth’ novels that started with the amazing Southern Reach trilogy and continued with Tade Thompson’s award-winning Rosewater.

Every step you take…Part 2 – Surveillance Capitalism
“Maybe you don’t want to ask a question. Maybe you just want to have it answered for you before you ask it. That would be better.” Larry Page, 2014 “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers…we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is…

I can’t change my mind.
I’m left-wing. I think I know what that means, but I’m never sure. I come from a family who have always been left-wing. Their arguments and their actions were hugely influential on my politics. I did once think that it was entirely because of that upbringing that I became left-wing; Labour to be precise, despite…

Landmarks & Postcapitalism
With the third book’s first draft completed and no more deadlines at this point in time, I’ve begun recharging after years of frantic scribbling. The first book I chose to read after coming up for air is a book I wish I’d read before starting writing at all. I’ve read one previous book by Robert…

The Sheltering Sky, The Damned United, The Raven Tower and Lanark
I’ve been busy finishing my third novel. While I was wrestling with it over the last few months I managed to read a few books I’m now ready to recommend. Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, first published in 1949, is the story of Kit and Port Moresby, Americans full of fashionably existential angst deciding to…

The Blind Assassin
“In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.” The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, is one of the best books I’ve read. It’s a delight to be able to say it so soon, comparatively speaking,…

All Among The Barley & The Gutter Prayer
1930’s rural England seen through the eyes of a troubled young girl coming of age and a high-octane rollercoaster fantasy set in a bleak, violent and ancient city were my January reads. Melissa Harrison’s All Among The Barley is meticulously researched. Early in the book it felt heavy-handed, almost over the top. Edie Mather, the…

So Long, See You Tomorrow & Rosewater
I needed to step away from sff reading at least briefly, mix it up. I got a blast of something beautiful. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow is a marvellous novella. I was reminded of Ian McEwan’s prose, still my favourite, for its transparency and depth of perception. Maxwell’s book presents the act of…

I used to stand in bookshops pt 3
In the last episode… I had just seen my book for the first time in a bookshop. March 2016. Over two and a half years on a hell of a lot has changed in my life, good and bad. Now it’s Saturday morning, two days after the above picture was taken. There’s a lot more…

The Wake & Rotherweird
The Green Man figure from the folklore of numerous cultures and religions manifests in these two glorious novels as a righteous and very english force; a saviour of tradition, a keeper of continuity. The Wake, by Paul Kingsnorth, is the tale of Buckmaster of Holland, an ‘oxganger’ in the 11th century just as the Normans…

Picasso and Tolkien and obsession
“Everything we love is about to die, and that is why everything we love must be summed up, with all the high emotion of farewell, in something so beautiful we shall never forget it.” In their own utterly distinct ways, Picasso and Tolkien were creative contemporaries. They shared nothing, perhaps, beyond their being obsessed with…

The Winter Road. The other road.
My second novel is called The Winter Road and it’s out in November. It’s been a journey. I’ll shortly create a page on this site with more cool stuff relating to it, but here’s the cover reveal and blurb over on the marvellous ‘The Fantasy Hive’. The cover, a part of which is this post’s…

The Fifth Season & Nigerians In Space
As saddened by the whole Hugo ‘puppy’ bullshit as any right-thinking person would be, it did introduce me to The Fifth Season, so thank you for that guys. Incidentally, Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians In Space bubbled up to the top of my ‘to read’ pile too. I loved both these books.

Newsletter #4 – Scythians, Gods and Rogues
This is a big chunk of my latest newsletter. I’ll drop them in here from time to time so you can see the kind of things that my subscribers have agreed to be sent to their inbox, those lucky/weird people (delete as appropriate)… Mind-blowing. That’s my considered opinion of the two major exhibitions you can…

The Southern Reach trilogy
I love Jeff Vandermeer’s work because I love HP Lovecraft’s work. But I enjoy Vandermeer more. Horror describes the ways in which people strive to escape the painful and grisly annihilation of the self. It can be personal or impersonal, understandable or insensate. It can also describe our confrontation with the unfathomable. This last is…

Newsletter #1
Here’s the contents of the first newsletter I sent out to my first couple of subscribers :) If you’d like some of this in your inbox occasionally, you can sign up via the link above! The future is quieter. I’ve set up this newsletter primarily so that I can keep in touch with anyone who…

Every step you take…
…aka ‘Why I’ve decided to boycott Facebook and Google.’ It began innocently enough. I fancied popping along to Bristolcon for the first time and I was invited to do a panel called ‘You are the product’. I’d put it down as an option (the organisers offer a range of panel ideas and pick those options…

Ninefox Gambit & Aurora
I’m reading a bit of sci-fi at the moment as I’m woefully under-read in the genre. How lovely to have these two line up back to back. Ninefox Gambit is a brilliant debut by Yoon Ha Lee. Kel Cheris is a captain given a seemingly impossible mission to destroy an impregnable space fortress that is…

Dark Tales
Dark Tales, by Shirley Jackson, is a hugely effective collection of short gothic horror stories written in the fifties and sixties. She died in ’65. I confess, like many I’ve spoken to about this book, not to have heard of her until a recent review of this collection, many of which were originally published in The…

The Familiar Volume 1 & A Stranger In Olondria
“But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.” Sofia Samatar I’ve long been fascinated by virtuosi and recently I’ve read two almost without equal. Mark Danielewski and Sofia Samatar are virtuosi,…

Senlin Ascends & The Sudden Appearance of Hope
I do almost all my reading on the bus. Thus, my go-to indicator of a great read is how surprised I am that I’ve reached my destination. With Senlin Ascends, by Josiah Bancroft, I’ve been oblivious to my journey altogether. Our protagonist, Thomas Senlin, is a newly-wed on his honeymoon to a fictional Tower of…

The Name of the Wind
“I was brilliant. Not just your run-of-the-mill brilliance either. I was extraordinarily brilliant.” Patrick Rothfuss has written an astounding debut that I cannot unequivocally recommend. Well, that’s not strictly true. I can, but it’s clear why, despite its assured place in the modern canon, it’s divisive. It’s easy to see why the book is captivating….

Beyond Redemption and Hunters & Collectors
In the last few weeks I’ve read two great books; both are clever and both feature a strong central trio of characters. In Beyond Redemption by Michael Fletcher, we have three emotionally stunted, savage and amusing warriors who wander a dark and wretched world leaving a trail of death and chaos behind them until they…

The Buried Giant & The Quarantined City
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant bolsters the list of fantasy genre writing that pushes its boundaries and should invigorate the genre’s authors and fans.

Last week: Art, devils, witches and death
They’ve always seemed easy to parody, the Abstract Expressionists. ‘They just flicked paint about’, ‘can’t they draw?’ etc. So I was as surprised as anyone to fall in love at the RA exhibition last weekend. The galleries were crammed with works, to the displeasure of some critics, but it gave me an opportunity to see…



Against The Day
Where do I begin? While this is not my favourite book, it is the best novel I’ve read. Pynchon, for me, is the most accomplished writer in English alive. Here is my impossible benchmark.

Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell
If the awards and critical acclaim have not steered you towards the fractious company of the two foremost English magicians of the nineteenth century, then it is unlikely my meagre addition to the chorus will tip the balance. Nevertheless, I exhort you to go get this enchanting novel. And I was enchanted.

Billie and Amy
Amy Winehouse had voice to burn, a sound burnished by a drunk god showing off, like He took a bet to make another Billie Holiday and won the bet with a sad contempt.

Frank Sobotka
David Simon’s The Wire is high on all lists of unmissable television. I’ve heard many people describe season 2 as the weakest season. I completed it over the weekend and hope this is true, if only because it was riveting.

The Violent Century
This is a story about superheroes in the second world war and beyond, a counterfactual fantasy. At first you will rightly think of Watchmen and X-Men but Lavie Tidhar has created something here that is more bleak and more noir, as though the X-Men had been re-told by John le Carré.

Hiding the ventriloquist*
“My name’s Gant and I’m sorry for my poor writing.” So begins chapter one of Snakewood. As I planned out the book I fretted a great deal over how to immerse readers in the lands, cities and lives of the world of Sarun, in which the story is set. I recalled how vividly I daydreamed…
It’s Snakewood launch day :)
Edited 26.08.22 This page contained a link to the soundcloud audio for chapter 1 of Snakewood. You can get that and more here.

I used to stand in bookshops pt 2
I was gearing up for March 17th, when I’d finally see my book sit quietly on a shelf alongside hundreds of others, as though it was the most ordinary thing; just a book, on a shelf. I was preparing myself to be, well, a bit underwhelmed? The anticipation couldn’t possibly deliver a satisfying payoff, so…

They followed their mercenary calling…*
The poem ‘Epitaph On An Army Of Mercenaries’ by AE Housman** is one of my favourites, and graces Snakewood as its foreword. It was an influence on the novel not so much because it happened to be about mercenaries, but because I had challenged myself to tell a story about them such that a reader…

The Bone Clocks
The title of David Mitchell’s marvellous book almost fully encapsulates it, as all its characters, deathless or otherwise, serve its dominant theme: the misery of ageing.

How Sláine and a handful of mushrooms defined the magic of Snakewood*
My debut fantasy novel Snakewood, due out in March, is the realization of a world I first dreamed up as a teenage boy. I’d like to introduce you to the way magic works in that world – no lightshows and fireworks, just thick bad-tasting gloop known as ‘fightbrew’ that makes you superhuman!

I used to stand in bookshops…
…as a teenager, then a man in my twenties and thirties and I used to look at the science fiction and fantasy novels and believe I, also, was a writer, when I wasn’t.

The Children Act
I’ve written here about my miserable realisation I wouldn’t read more than a couple of thousand books in my lifetime, if I really went for it. I thus struggle to read more than one or two books by any author because there are so many more authors to read. How could I read another Philip…

H is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald has opened her soul, and unlike most of us, is able to articulate its pain and its healing with a beautiful and haunting power.

The Goldfinch & The Liars’ Gospel
Theo Decker, the protagonist of Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel The Goldfinch contemplates the way Carel Fabritius’s painting of the same name has dominated his life, a complicated connection beginning with the shocking opening as his mother is killed in a terrorist bomb blast in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in their hometown of New York. …

The Girl With All The Gifts
Minor spoilers regarding early part of novel ahead… I’ve not personally overdosed on zombie movies/games/books/TV shows/tee shirts etc. but because the rest of the world has, I’ve got a second-hand kind of weariness of it, so much so I have tried to avoid it. I’ve done the odd George Romero, loved Shaun of the Dead…

The Deluge
I’d been putting off trying to articulate my thoughts on Adam Tooze’s masterful analysis of global history from 1916-1931, The Deluge, because, being so ignorant about that era, I wasn’t sure what I could say other than ‘read it, it’ll educate ya’, for fear of drawing incorrect or misleading conclusions from this densely detailed and…

Stannis Baratheon is not the Mayor of Casterbridge
This post contains Game of Thrones spoilers, for, well, almost all of it, along with the movie adaptation of The Mist and the opening of the Mayor of Casterbridge, oh and possibly King Lear. Yep, I think that’s it.

The Banner Saga
I was captivated by the gorgeous artwork when it first popped up in my Steam shop window. A quick scan of some reviews was enough for me to buy it. Then, as I’ve been rather busy, I shelved it until now. After ten minutes I was utterly immersed. The Banner Saga, by the Texas based…

The Quantum Thief
This book has no right to be a debut. It’s exhilarating, a tour de force. The Quantum Thief is a heist thriller the threads of which are woven into a sinuous and densely realised future. It’s a challenging read, I’ll admit hard to follow in places, as Hannu Rajaniemi displaces the awesome intelligence and agency…

Rivers of London & The Blade Itself
I recently read, back to back, Ben Aaranovitch’s Rivers of London and Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, the latter a long overdue read for me as a fantasy author. It was because of their similarities that I’m writing about (and recommending them) together.

Burning a million pounds
It had been a long time since I listened to The KLF’s ‘Chill Out’ album. I was trying to drown out one of the many satirical teenage comedies on Nick Jr. my daughter loves in order to get a redraft of my novel finished. It’s a beautiful album, but hearing it after so many years made…

Peter Jackson’s ‘Ring Cycle’ – a love letter
I’ve read a lot of complaints over Peter Jackson taking a short book and making a trilogy out of it merely to screw us all for extra cash. Bullshit. Well, mostly. I don’t doubt it makes Time Warner a heap more money and I don’t doubt that to get all the big stars on board…


Proximity and the manipulation of moral feeling
News coverage of Isis and Gaza recently has reminded me of Henry Fonda. Specifically, the Henry Fonda thought experiment in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s landmark (and quite brilliant) paper ‘A Defense of Abortion’. ((Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1971) )) For Thomson it’s a quite ghastly aside, the rejection of which (proximity…

The City & The City
Hopefully all China Miéville’s novels are as original and engaging as this one. The City & The City is on one level a standard ‘detective investigating death of girl uncovers big conspiracy’ story, but Miéville has decided to weave the tale into a quite unique milieu.

Knowledge – a few helpful questions for the internet age
How do you know what to believe? The internet has fragmented the ancient institutions that have shaped and disseminated knowledge and it has democratized facts in a way never before seen in human history. When deciding what to believe, and by corollary what moral and practical courses of action derive from those beliefs, anyone with…

House of Leaves
If the horror genre is a journey, then House* of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, is its destination. I say this not only because it is an attempt to get at the fundament of what is horrifying, but also because the nature of the attempt is an audacious, remarkably intelligent and emotionally satisfying weaving of…

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Hearing that I hadn’t read any of Gabriel García Márquez’s work, when his death was announced, a friend kindly bought me this, as he had Wolf Hall. Clearly, he knows what’s good for me. This twentieth century classic in the magical realist tradition was my first foray into the realm, unless Calvino’s If On A…

Sentimentality
Ricky Gervais’s new series of Derek has once again divided viewers and critics. The show is a sentimental ‘mockumentary’ following, principally, four characters in a nursing home for the elderly. I loved the first series, the final episode being as moving as the christmas special of The Office. Many of the criticisms stem from a…

Replay
Replay, by Ken Grimwood, tackles the classic ‘What if…’ scenario: “What if I could live my life over again?” It treads a path between the wonderful Star Trek episode ‘The Inner Light’ and Groundhog Day. Jeff, the book’s protagonist, is going to ‘replay’ his life more than once, unlike Picard; but unlike Phil Connors, he’s…

Wolf Hall
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, is a masterpiece. It is one of the best books I will ever read. I know this because I’ve lost count of the times I’ve paused over a page, muttered ‘Fuck off’ at the sheer and dazzling quality and control of the form and the narrative, and then carried on reading,…

The Reader’s Gift
As someone learning the craft of writing, and leaving it rather late to do so, I need to read widely, and read writing of good quality so that I may learn from it. It was inevitable I would become a neurotic reader. Anyone with a passion for books has or will come to the realisation…

Norwegian Wood
So, I’ve popped my Haruki Murakami cherry, having heard from a number of different sources about this writer and his cult following and magical prose. Norwegian Wood is a story, set in Japan, of a teenage boy, Toru Watanabe, in love with a girl, Naoko, who we learn is schizophrenic and with whom he shares…

Good coffee is easy
In the UK in the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an explosion in the amount of us buying coffee while we’re out and about. With this boom, its headline acts being the big chains like Starbucks, Costas, Nero etc. the word ‘barista’ has reached the common lexicon, rarely confused now with the legal…

In the land of the blind, could the literary agent be king?
Writers have a problem. It’s harder than it ever was to get published. It’s also easier than it ever was to get published.

Shouldn’t things be better?
“How is it that we have created so much mental and emotional suffering despite levels of wealth unprecedented in human history?” (The Spirit Level) It’s not the sort of thing you can sort out in a blog entry, but there’s any number of things that don’t seem to add up when I think about British…

Abraham Lincoln, Jamie Carragher and me
I’m stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a post-apocalyptic ruin, watching a man called Hannibal slowly lead a handful of worn-out looking former slaves and a diseased, mutated Brahmin bull to the headless statue of the former president. On the back of the bull are some supplies and the stone head of Abraham…

Ten of my favourite movie moments
Well, it’s my blog, I can do a ‘my favourite things’ if I want to. What prompted it was this year’s christmas Radio Times. For as long as I can remember I’ve enjoyed sitting down with it and reading through, picking out all the old films I’d like to watch, you know, ‘Meet Me in…

Hard Copy
If our homes express who we are, what of the home where all of your literature and music is invisible to the casual eye; no trace of the stories and music that move you and define you represented alongside whatever art or furniture or decor you’ve put together to create a place that is special…

Why I love running
There’s an iron nail in my left knee the first half mile away from my front door, down the slope past the school, dozing in the silence of its lie-in on a bright Saturday morning. The nail, where my iliotibial band sticks itself to my knee, warms and melts away as I turn onto the…

Making my own words work
I talked in my last blog-post about the pleasure I get from hard-working prose. Good writing comes from the choices you make with the words you commit to the page. In this blog-post I’m going to look at two scenes from my book Snakewood and explain what I was trying to achieve with them. I…

The deliciousness of hard-working prose
What would you say constitutes great writing? For a practising writer like me, good writing isn’t just about what is enjoyable to read, but also about the choices a writer makes when they select words to convey their message. I thought I’d try to articulate what great writing looks like to me, using an author…

Altered Carbon (veers into bonus thoughts on mental continuity and my nan!!)
Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan, is a cyberpunk-noir detective thriller of the ‘locked room’ variety. If you want steam rising out of your grates in grimy streets straight off the ‘Blade Runner’ mood boards and a bosomy femme fatale in a plot full of twists and turns then stop reading and go buy it, because as a debut novel,…

City of Saints and Madmen
City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer, has been labelled ‘avant-garde fantasy’. It is. The city is the star; Ambergris is a violent and gothic-romantic ecosystem, the inhabitants of which live in a fearful symbiosis with the deeply mysterious ‘Greycaps’. These underground dwellers were initially displaced by the founders of Ambergris from the much older city that it grew…

Richly blending achievements may cause loss of sleep!
Over the years I’ve been addicted to a number of games. These include all the MMOs I’ve played, Championship Manager, Civilization, Elite, Just Cause 2 and Test Drive Unlimited. And this was proper addiction, you know: “Oh shit it’s 4am, oh man, not again.” Five hundred calories a day on weekends (crisps, tea and chips) Tips and strategy…


Show don’t tell
I spend some time on an internet writing forum. There have been a few forum threads that have exploded over the titular writing maxim. One post in particular is based on some advice Chuck Palahniuk had written somewhere: ‘you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires’…

Wool
Spoiler free. Rest easy… Hugh Howey is in the enviable position of the author who self-published with a good enough book, got a buzz going and then took off into the stratosphere – publishing deal! film in the offing! I’m delighted for him. It reminded me afresh that all the self-marketing in the world isn’t…

The Old Ways
The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane is a book about walking country paths. I know, that’s what I thought, and I only bought it because writers of the stature of John Banville named it as one of the books of the year on its release last year. But then I started reading it, and I was…

Worldbuilding part 2: It’s a kind of magic
This blog post gives an overview of my very physical take on ‘magic’ in the world of Snakewood. Now, inevitably, with a fantasy novel, you’re likely to have some sort of ‘magic’, something to make it fantastic in the purest sense. For Snakewood, perhaps because of my conceptual struggle, as a materialist, for magic, I…

Love and brains and language games
I’m going philosophical in this post, so those of a disposition sensitive to pointless armchair theorising look away now. I’ve long been interested in Philosophy, but particularly interested in the brain, the most complex thing in the known universe, as far as I’m aware. In this post I want to explain why I think the mind is…

Worldbuilding part 1 – how prevailing winds shape history’s winners and losers
How to create a convincing fantasy world. That’s the question I’m sure all writers in the genre wrestle with at the outset. You can get lost in it. All such writers I’ve read on the forums I frequent vary in how deeply they imagine the setting for their story, prior to banging out the chapters….

The Stress Of Her Regard & Sum
Byron, Keats and Shelley – check. Vampires – check. Life or death adventures through London, Venice, Rome and the Alps – check. As with the other Tim Powers novels I’ve read (The Drawing of the Dark, On Stranger Tides and Last Call), The Stress Of Her Regard pits a hopelessly outclassed protagonist, here Michael Crawford, against…

Design your own difficulty – how LOTRO lost its soul
I’ve wondered for a while what the use of analytics in driving game design would mean for games. There are clearly massive benefits. But along the way I think there are casualties, particularly when it comes to the uniqueness of a vision a designer has for the experience they’ve created. The only time I’ve articulated…

Do readers care about grammar?
“Surely if incredibly high sales of authors who don’t close edit their books teaches us one thing, it’s that in some parts of some genres editing is less important to readers than other factors…..the point about self-publishing is that every type of reader can find books that are for them so long as we stop…

The Intellectuals and the Masses, The Dying Earth trilogy and Little, Big
I’ll share my thoughts and recommendations here of great books I’ve read. Here are three I’ve read recently, I’ve not read a bad book in a while it seems ;) “The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.” John Carey So, I’ve…

Why Guild Wars was the best MMO
I never played World of Warcraft (WOW). It could be a fatal caveat to the bag of opinions that follows, but, as Rushdie said of Don DeLillo’s magnum opus Underworld, WOW “fills the sky” where MMOs are concerned. It must be acknowledged, a tip of the hat to the naked emperor from here onwards, as well…

The final full stop.
The final sentence of Snakewood approached, already in my head, and I’m looking at the words unfold like I’m on a train thundering off the rails and over the cliff.