Shadows of the Apt

Some random rants with a pretence at a linking theme.   There is a sign at Leeds train station that says “Stay off the tracks”. It is painted, black letters in a white box, on the front of each platform, so as to be easily visible from the far side.   The mind boggles. What is the target audience for […]

Novels are stories, and the earliest stories come to us as myths. The joy of myths, of course, is that they are readily reinventable. I don’t mean in the sense that there are only (x) stories in the world, and they’re being constantly repeated. This rather depressing proposition is usually achieved by simplifying stories to the […]

I’ve stressed the fact that waiting comes into this business with distressing regularity. The truth is that the beginning is all wait: you write, and you wait. If you return to the writing board, the waiting continues. Many years go by waiting for that first moment of contact, like a forgotten spy checking the same safe-houses […]

“There is a ten-foot by ten-foot room here. There is an orc. He is guarding a chest.”   For better or for worse, role-playing games.   There are very few things (2) that a man could admit to doing that would throw more of a pall of geekishness about him. I say “a man” because the quintessential image of a role-playing […]

The Spiderlands’ relationship to its Lowlander neighbours has always been a complicated one. For a start, few Lowlanders really understand either the extent of the Spiderlands or how it works. To the Lowlanders, the Spiderlands is exemplified in the cities of Seldies, Everis and, further south, Siennis, that sit at the south-east corner of the Lowlands. In […]

So we have the Lowlands, not a political unity but a geographical area containing four feuding Ant city-states and a couple of Beetle cities, not to mention the detritus left over from the Days of Lore, Moth-kinden and Mantis-kinden clinging on in forests and on mountaintops.   The Lowlands is sandwiched between two traditional neighbours, and a third has […]

Noël Coward said (1) “I love criticism so long as it’s unqualified praise.” My own relationship to criticism has been long in developing. As an unread author, to start with, you tend to be short of any actual constructive feedback. It is a curse, and it is also a shield. Whilst the only criticism you might get […]

Well, it's that time of year again. ;I wish all of you the very best for the last few days of 2007, and looking forward very much to 2008. ;  In the old country (1), they have a saying: May This Be The Worst Of Our Days. Here's to many good ones to come. ;  Adrian Tchaikovsky (2). 25^th December […]

A curious niche genrelet usually located within fantasy/science fiction’s bounds is that of alternative history. This is the quintessential “what if” genre – only with the lens turned not on the future, as with hard SF, but on the past.   The genre is a relatively recent one, and perhaps this is to do with changing outlooks […]

The dominion of the Moth-kinden before the revolution was mostly referred to by its masters as “ours”, but by the other old Inapt powers as the Shadowlands or the Darklands after the Moths’ nocturnal habits. After their fall, and the rise of the Beetle and Ant-kinden free city-states, the term “the Lowlands” began to be […]