Shadows of the Apt

Did I do that joke last year? There are a limited number of axe-related puns in the world, honestly. Anyway, it's that time of year (a bit later than the same time last year, if that makes any sense at all) when someone has to get axed. The Gemmell Awards have opened up for voting on the […]

Eastersprosiumcon was a great fun weekend, albeit somewhat expensive when you tot everything up (1). Caught up with all the great and the good (or the scum and the villainy) that constitute the con-going author and publishing bods. My panel items all went well — we had a YA panel with the unusual benefit of having an […]

Firstly, and before everything gets transmuted to Dysprosium (2), I had an awesome time at Luxcon. I got to pal around the Peadar O Guilin and Aliette de Bodard — both authors whose work I tremendously admire. I got to play in a zombie survival game — as myself — run by local GM Ben, and I and the other guests got […]

I blogged a while back about getting massively into podcasts, which remains a definite thing whenever I am going from place to place and not able to bury my nose in a bo0k. I am currently awaiting new episodes Tea and Jeopardy, Geek Syndicate, Rachel and Myles X‑plain the X‑men, Shut Up And Sit Down, Galactic Suburbia, the  Starburst Bookworm […]

Very tempted to call this one "Too Many Cooks" but that would be entirely unjust. This follows my earlier post going over the first half of Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series which, for ease of reference, can be found here. We've seen so far a fantasy series with buried Old-tech elements, and […]

Literature has lost one of its greats today. Not just genre literature, but literature as a whole — a household name and a man of a profoundly complex canon presented wrapped in two often underrated fields: speculative fiction and comedy. It is probably a small thing, on the grand scale, but my most personal tribute would be to say that […]

There was a to-and-fro on Twitter recently about RPG systems and book settings that got me thinking about the idea again. I've often thought about turning Shadows of the Apt into an RPG — it would give it a pleasing circularity, if nothing else, given the world's origins. There are a lot of very good worlds out there […]

Cheap at half the price. Yes, I've been a bit slow on the ol' blogging, from a certain point of view (1). From another point of view, I've been blogging like crazy, just in a Lovecraftian way that's been going on superimposed over the reality you know, and yet entirely invisible to feeble mortal eyes. Specifically, guest posts […]

Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness are a weird and wild ride. A couple are well regarded, most are obscure, and I think the series took a general sales nose-dive in its second half. They were written between 1986 and 1992, so immediately after both the Belgariad and the first Shannara trilogy had just wrapped up, and […]

Well, perhaps not the sneakiest of sneak previews as this is the section I toured with through 2014 — if you heard me read at a convention, this was likely the piece. However, it's a nice, concise bit and it gives the flavour of the book very well. Emily Marshwic, our hero, has gone from being a gentlewoman in the […]