“An adult is in charge,” I thought while reading ‘The Separation’ by Christopher Priest. On the news of his recent death, I moved a few of his novels towards the top of my unread pile, and ‘The Separation’ was the first that I hit. On starting, I wondered why I had not read it earlier […]
My latest publication, My Wonder Book of Snails and Slugs, is available for your free reading pleasure (?) in the new edition of Penumbric. I think of it as a sometimes melancholy, sometimes sinister tale of love, loss and survival, and also of snails, a sea of slugs, a sea monster, bat faced cardigan monkeys […]
The opening of “The Old Man” with Jeff Bridges as an older gentleman experiencing a home invasion who turns the tables with unexpected hidden talents got me in. The darkness of the imagined scene where he efficiently kills off innocent police officers and his evening’s date just to avoid detection, kept me there. I ended […]
9 years ago, we were living in The Netherlands when Russia shot the Malaysian civilian aircraft MH17 out of the sky. We found out when the phone started ringing from Australia. My wife’s uncle, who was staying with us, was due to take that flight the next day. Family were concerned that they may have […]
Reading a biography of Elon Musk a few years back, I kept thinking about my school mate, Greg. He passed away 8 years ago. I wish Greg had been an Elon Musk. He studied engineering and computing so that he could design and build a military space fleet, but didn’t quite get there in this […]
JG Ballard died in 2009 on April 19 (I am a tad late to say ‘OTD’). I read his “The Voices of Time” in a paperback collection edited by Damien Knight, 100 Years of Science Fiction. (I was very happy to buy those two volumes, by the way, in the mid-70s, with part of the […]
For your Winter Olympics reading pleasure in the short breaks between episodes of The Curling (not a Laird Barron novel), why not read my story with a title that threatens to break the Twitter character limit, “The murder of Father Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin considered as the single men’s Olympics Luge final“? A story that manages […]
For your aural pleasure, my story Crop Rotation is available as a podcast from 29 December at The Nights End Podcast. My thanks to James Barnett and Dissonance Media.
May I recommend for your reading … pleasure? … my most recent publication, and my final for 2021 (and who knows, perhaps my final ever?), The Time-Traveller’s Lament ? So many things to say about this, for a change. Thanks to the folks at Sci-Phi Journal. This is the second story of mine they have […]
Thanks very much for the mention Ellen Datlow, and thank you Jon Padgett, and Matt Cardin and Michael Cisco at Grimscribe Press for publishing “Grooming my grandfather”.
Nobody is looking 