Hello from the continent.I'm now no longer living in the United Kingdom, and the culture shock is... subtle.There's ups and downs (better healthcare, less considerate drivers), but overall things are much the same as they were over in the UK. Let's f...

Hello from beneath the ocean,No, that headline isn't fiction, but it's true in two different ways.First, I am literally beneath the ocean as I write this. I'm in my car, and the laptop is perched against the steering wheel. My car is (thankfully, and...

Hello from Normandy,We're taken the risk of a holiday in France, which is terra-non-grata from the point of view of the British authorities. According to the government's current guidelines, I shall have to self-isolate for at least five days upon my...

Hello from London,I look forward to a time when Coronavirus isn't the subject of the day. It used to be that speculating about a global pandemic qualified as speculative fiction. Now, dreaming about a world free from global pandemic counts as specula...

Hello from London,You'd think, having received both doses of vaccine, having actually had Covid-19, and having observed every single rule foisted upon us by our allegedly enlightened leaders, that I'd be more or less able to travel at this point.It t...

In my last post, I shared a short story I was particularly happy with, called “Shadows.” I also explained in a previous post that this story had originally been very different. The first time I considered the concept of people losing their shadows, m...

I wrote Shadows over a year before I made it freely available. Much of that time was spent adjusting small details that no-one will ever notice. I liked this story very much, and I think that’s part of the reason why it was so hard to let go. The aud...

Sisyphus is a Korean science fiction drama exclusively available on Netflix. It follows a successful tech entrepreneur called Han Tae-Sul and Gang Seo-Hae, a woman who travels back from the future to save him from assassination, and by extension, sav...

I live in the UK, and as a resident of this Northern Isle, I have the stupendous privilege, for reasons that are a source of great international discontent, of having access to the Coronavirus vaccine now, rather than later. I took advantage of this...

Back at the beginning of lockdown – that’s over a year ago now – I went to the countryside for a few months with my family, accompanied by a writing prompt I’d come up with. This prompt had been kicking around in my head for a while now. I had an ide...

Netflix been a blessing during the pandemic. It’s brought us a huge variety of entertainment. When it ran out of Western shows to feed our ever-present need for distraction, there was an entire realm of foreign-language fiction to discover. Among the...

The Mask of Mirrors is a rich and thickly-embroidered story of intrigue, conspiracy and magic woven throughout a Venetian city where religion and magic are as much a part of the city as the cobblestones themselves. Into this society divided by class,...

Tricky, Tricky. There’s a lot to like about Shadow in the Cloud, including a great performance by Chloe Grace Moretz. There are also some ballsy special effects that took a historical war setting and injected some almost-Marvel-like magic, however un...

I’ve been writing short stories for a long time, and scratching out story ideas for even longer. Long before I started writing the things you’ve read. Given that experience, you might think that I knew a lot about writing. In some ways I did, but in...

To Sleep is a Sea of Stars is the science fiction debut of Christopher Paolini, formerly better known for his fantasy works, entitled “The Inheritance Cycle”: Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr and Inheritance. Paolini’s original four works were started when h...