Films v Games

Thieves later, films now.
Or: not film. This is just something that I've started noticing, and it's hard to ignore. There's a lot of fuss at the moment about computer games eating into the profits of the film industry — just the same fuss, as MovieBob has pointed out in his Studio System set of articles, as there […]

New post under construction

Yes, yes, after hearing Adam Christopher wax lyrical about the importance of regular updates, I swore I'd get at least one entry a week in, and lo! I have missed it. However, there's a good reason. I was all set to do a spot about the return of thieves in fantasy, using Scott Lynch, Douglas Hulick and David Tallerman as examples […]

Heirs of the Blade — further reading.

Keen-eyed readers may have noticed that Heirs of the Blade brings in a number of characters previously seen in the short stories on this site. This is obviously because of my immense skill in foreshadowing and plotting ahead and not at all because several of those characters just wouldn't leave me alone until they got a serious […]

The most asked question

Mark Charan Newton, author of the excellent Legends of the Red Sun series has a clip and a muse on the great question almost every author gets at one time or another (1): Where do ideas come from.
That got me thinking. Technically, my published long fiction to date represents only a single set of initial ideas — that's the […]

Minsc, Might and Morrowind

The Eye of the Beholder fond mockathon I did a while back started the memories flowing regarding computer RPGs (of the single rather than the MMO (1) variety) that I've had fun with. Now Fantasycon's gone and the Reading and London signings are still coming up, here are a few that I recall having some real fun with back […]

Terrible Lizards

Last week, the BBC debuted a somewhat delayed sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs, Planet Dinosaur (1), and lo! Thumbs up! (3).
Dinosaurs were always a big thing for me — starting at the age that kids normally start liking dinosaurs and never really going away. There was probably a crisis point somewhere along the way which might have seen the […]

Conan 2, Hyperborean boogaloo

… anyway …
Hmm, Ok, so I wasn't unqualifiedly in love with the movie, but Bob "Movie Bob" Chipman, whose opinions I normally chime with, says here: "Nobody really seems to give a damn about Conan the Barbarian" which would be a terrible thing to be true. It would be the death of a lot of potential fantasy films in potentia […]

Prepare for Hyper(borean)speed

In which I continue watching films as a pretext for making awful puns in the title. And yes, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers for the new Conan film.
I have been heard to say that before Peter Jackson made Fellowship (1) there wasn't a fantasy film out there that you could cite as a good film without then going on to say "but…". […]

Movieing Mountains

Yuk. Puns. Ah well.
Anyway, cutting the day job down to four days a week has meant that this thing called the cinema (1) has re-entered my life. Experiment has taught that I can actually go into Leeds, get a big ol' slab of writing down in the coffee shop of my choice, and also take in a movie. As anyone […]

A funny thing happened…

In which I am the victim of racist abuse.
I over-dramatise, certainly. It wasn’t aimed at me specifically. The jackbooted ghost of Moseley didn’t kick in my door at midnight. However, hearing the phrase “They should all f*ck off where they came from” used to close some oratory on the scurrilous nature of those Eastern European immigrants […]


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Heirs of the Blade by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Sea Watch by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Salute the Dark by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Blood of the Mantis by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Empire in Black and Gold by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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