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Welcome to the Test Shack...

Archer pitched his car into the outside lane of the motorway, London-bound. Accelerating to ease away the tension. Geek's inventions always pushed The Axiom Few into dangerous territory. It came with the job. And ultimately it was a case of "no guts no glory". They never wanted the glory, but they also didn't want any of their devices to fall into the wrong hands. It had never happened before and he'd always hoped they could keep things just the way he wanted. Secret. And revealed to others in only the method and measure that was to his preference... The Axiom Few short story collection is now available to buy in paperback or eBook download. It features eight interconnected tales, three of which have been previously published in Jupiter SF magazine. With an introduction by Rod MacDonald of SFCrowsnest.com. Click here for more info and click here to buy.

The Axiom Few - A Peek at the Front Cover

We're a week away from release day, but I really want to give you a sneak peek at the front cover. Hope you like it...

The Axiom Few - 24/09/2010

I've just posted up on my website that The Axiom Few book will be surfacing on September 24th. I'm putting the finishing touches on the final story and playing around with that wonderful concept known as "the law of the economy of characters". I'm off on holiday to sunnier climes for a couple of weeks and hopefully the change of scenery will help me mull over those last bits of story before getting it ready for publication on my return. See you in September!

"Inception" (contains spoilers)

This entry contains plot spoilers about the film "Inception". But it's not really a review. You can find those elsewhere... What a strange week it's been. My 14 month old son Oliver had an ear infection at the weekend and an allergic reaction to something that gave him a puffy eye that made him look like he'd lost a boxing match. Quite embarrassing when you take him out in public because it really did look like the little guy had done ten rounds with Cassius Clay. "We're not beating our child, honestly", I wanted to say to the people sitting at the next table in Pret a Manger, Kingston. So we had Ollie in and out of A&E and the doctors to get him well. He was a proper pharmaceutical cocktail of steroids, piriton, Amoxycillin and Calpol. Poor little thing. He's alright now thankfully, but it was funny to watch him throwing Lego everywhere in the waiting room. That's what performance-enhancing drugs do to you when you're a toddler.

A quick Axiom Few update

For those of you who are interested, here's an update on The Axiom Few book. I mentioned in an earlier post that all the stories in the collection will be be standalone, but interconnected. However, I have decided (or rather, the plot and characters decided for me) that stories 6 and 7, namely "The Precipice Faction" and "The Autumn Structure" would work better if they ran together. While they are two separate stories with separate events taking place within them, it started to make a lot of sense to have the first story run straight into the second one, with an overall arc that leads to a big revelation at the finish of the second story. Think of it as a little two-parter in the series. This is effectively the finale of the collection because story 8 is a prequel, focussing on the events that brought The Axiom Few together. The Precipice Faction and The Autumn Structure have been written almost in tandem, which is a first for me. But I feel the result is so

Spireclaw gets 5 Stars at Obooko.com

It's great to see that Spireclaw is getting a consistent 5 star rating over at Obooko.com . Thank you to those who are voting for it. If you've read it please drop me a line via my contact page and let me know what you thought. It's always great to have feedback and I like to put quotes from readers on my site to hopefully encourage others to dip in. Also, in response to Fiona Gregory's review on the Web Fiction Guide, I have decided to put in a marker (basically a line) at the bottom of each chapter page, to indicate the end of the chapter. I'd hate to think that readers might be missing a vital piece of the story! And of course, I know I've mentioned it before, but as the summer holidays approach, and with all those iPhone4's hitting the market, there's every reason to grab a copy of the free audiobook for 5 hours of beachtime storytelling. After all, who doesn't like a story with a good twist?

What's next for The Axiom Few?

Three of my short stories about The Axiom Few, a team of freelance techno-graduates who operate on the edge of science in a future London, have been published in Jupiter SF magazine, and not a bad word was said about any of them. Two further stories are available to read for free on my website and I am in the middle of writing the sixth, seventh and eighth instalments concurrently. While they are not direct sequels of each other, they do link together like a jigsaw puzzle and only through reading all eight stories will the whole scope of the story become clear. And even then it feels like just the beginning, as some pretty scary doors get opened. So I have decided to take The Axiom Few to the next level. I am going to publish via Lulu.com a book of all eight stories. Everything should be ready to come out this Autumn, at which point I will remove the two free stories from my site and encourage you to buy the whole collection. Here's the story listing, and the order they will ap

Is "Foundation" filmable?

When I read that Roland Emmerich is to adapt Isaac Asimov's seminal science-ficton book "Foundation" my first reaction was one of glee. After all, with Fincher's Rama hitting the wall there was a lot to be depressed about when it came to seeing adaptations of the genre's classics on the big screen. But just how filmable and accessible is Foundation? And is Emmerich the man for the job? I'm currently reading the first Foundation trilogy again after getting through only books one and two when I read them some fifteen years ago. The books were written in the late 1940's. Could Asimov's tales of humanity spanning millions of planets thousands of years in the future still be credible? Students of the genre no doubt agree that sci-fi that speaks of the future ends up giving away more about current thinking at the time it is written, rather than being particularly prophetic about what is to come. For example, look at how dated the futuristic sci-fi movies o

Spireclaw audiobook - the iPod version

I'm not sure how many people who read this blog are on Twitter, but I confess I am a complete addict. I'm not going to try to explain it to the uninitiated. I've tried that in the past and I was met with shrugs and blank faces. All I can say is, to understand Twitter's power and simplistic brilliance, you just have to dive in and give it a go. There's something on it for everyone. Plug over. The whole point of me mentioning this is because Twitter enabled me to find the user @prowlmedia who approached me about reformatting my Spireclaw audiobook (which was in the form of a bunch of unwieldy MP3s) and turning them into a very iPod friendly M4B file which is apparently the standard for audiobooks. This format also introduces chapter breaks, which makes navigating the 5-hour audiobook much easier. Within 24 hours he'd given me the formatted file, all for the princely cost of nothing, (except a #followfriday, which acts like an advert for another Twitter user).

Best Horror of the Year - almost

Ellen Datlow, editor of Night Shade Books anthology of the year's best horror stories, has included a list of  Honorable Mentions  and I'm pleased to say that my story "Last Train to Tassenmere" appears there. I'm listed amongst some of the greatest names in the genre, which is a real honour.

A vision of the future?

After much waiting I finally received a letter this morning from a well known institute that deals with opticians and optical science, and no, I'm not allowed to name them yet. The contents was both scary and exciting. But I better give you a bit of back story. For most of my life I had always thought it was normal to be able to see, on occasion, people's bones beneath their skin. We all think the reality we see is the absolute one and assume that others share this. We all, for example, think we're seeing the same colour "blue" but is each of our individual interpretations of that colour different? In August last year, I was having my eyes tested when the optician told me I had a number of additional blood vessels in my right eye. This was a bonus apparently. If I were to ever black out, the blood would be restored quickly and my eyesight would return much faster than your average person. When I asked the optician how he had broken his arm (I could see the mended

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 4 of 4

It's about 8am on Saturday 19th September 1998 and I'm having a cooked breakfast in a little cafe in Mount Pleasant Air Force base on the Falkland Islands. After I've finished eating I walk across the road with my colleagues and check in to board the plane home to the UK. We're hitching a ride home with the RAF. there are no scheduled flights to and from the Islands to the UK so the only way to travel is by chater flight (see part 1) or by buying a spare seat on an army rotation plane. After a couple of hours of waiting we walk out across the tarmac (no transfer buses here). It's quite a trek to the 737. We board, settle in and soon the plane is taxiing out to the runway. My first thought as we soared into the patchy clouds was how intensely the plane seemed to be banking as it climbed. I wondered if the pilot was showing off to his buddies in the back just how he could push the flight envelope of a 737 in the same way as he could with a jet fighter. It was nerv

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 3 of 4

I'm sitting in a Bristow personnel transport helicopter built to carry about 30 people. We're hovering about 2 feet above the runway at Mount Pleasant Airforce Base and I'm wearing a ridiculous (but lifesaving) 1-piece suit with rubber seals around the neck, wrists and ankles. Some of the other guys who I'm sharing this flight with have been in the training simulator and passed an exam to be here (a dummy helicopter cabin is dunked upside down into a swimming pool and if you don't escape to the surface, you don't pass the exam, among other things). My training consists of a 20 minute video, most of which is about how to put the suit on. The video told me that is you're not wearing the suit when the helicopter ditches into the frozen South Atlantic, then you'll live for about 1 minute and 40 seconds. With the suit, you get to tread water for an additional 6 minutes before freezing to death. It's hard to know which is better, given that nobody could ge

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 2 of 4

It's 4:30am, mid-September 1998 and I'm up and about, making a quick cup of coffee in my hotel room and getting dressed for a day at the portacabin, sorry office. When I'm dressed I plug in the headphones on my CD Walkman and step out into the frozen night. It's perfectly still and perfectly clear. I listen to Paul Carrack's album "Beautiful World" and I walk to the other side of the sleeping town of Port Stanley. The stars are unrecognisable above me but they are present in their millions in a truly breathtaking vista. There's no pollution here. My workday began at 5am, which was 9am in the UK. I was dealing with our internet service provider in Wigmore Street in London, and the Cable and Wireless folks in Aberdeen. Come 1:30pm, when it was 5:30pm in the UK, my day came to an end, and I was free to please myself for the afternoon. The Head of Operations offered me one of the SUV's to go driving if I liked, but I couldn't drive. However there

My Falkland Islands Experience - Part 1 of 4

All this stuff in the news about the commencement of offshore drilling in the Falkland Islands brings back vivid memories of the previous drilling round which took place in 1998, which I was there for. I wanted to write a bit about it because the time I spent on the island gave me a lot of inspiration for my science-fiction writing, and three of my stories ( Remnants , Galileo's Tides and The Techipre Filament ) are based on memories of that trip. This blog entry will be in four parts. At the time I was working for one of the oil companies drilling there (obviously) and I remember there was some speculation as to whether I would get to go with the exploration team who were headed down to the Islands. But, given the remote location it was decided that my IT skills would be essential to set up and maintain the email/phone link to the London office, and ensure the team's laptops and PC's were working at all times. The project was costing $100,000 a day, so downtime would be

Web Fiction Guide reviews Spireclaw

Fiona Gregory over at the Web Fiction Guide has given my eNovel "Spireclaw" a respectable 4 out of 5. She starts her review by saying... "Within the first paragraph of this novel I knew I was in the hands of a skillful, practised writer. The atmosphere is eerie and evocative as the main character, Kieran, wakes from a disturbing dream and looks out the window into the dark, wind tossed yard." But she seemed to struggle with the ending. This was either because she somehow managed to skip a big chunk of the penultimate chapter, then had to go back and read it after realising her error, or because she found the twist ending a little too shocking (and let's face it, she won't have been the first to have that reaction). But she finishes up the review on a positive note by saying... "If you’d like to read a nicely crafted modern dark (subtly) supernatural mystery set in London, here’s your book." All in all a very positive review.

The Future of The Axiom Few

SF Crowsnest's Rod MacDonald has confirmed himself as a fan of The Axiom Few. In his review of their latest appearance in Jupiter SF 27, he describes The Voidant Lance as "an electric story" and calls out to Channel 4 to make a TV series! High praise indeed and very inspiring for me. SFRevu's Sam Tomaino speaks just as highly of the story and was also kind enough to link to my website for the follow-up. So I'm five stories into The Axiom Few's world and I'm wondering whether to flesh out the canon with more short stories or press on with a novel. A novel, as I said before, would be a big undertaking and I have a few ideas for it, but I don't want to undermine the format of the short stories which seems to work so well. I rather like the idea of constructing the whole canvas (back story and all) in a collection of short stories that fit together as puzzle pieces, rather like they are beginning to now. Other ideas have crossed my mind, such as creat

Jupiter SF 27 Released

Jupiter SF 27 (Praxidike) landed on my doormat this morning. Great to see The Voidant Lance looming inside. As Ian mentions in the editorial, the follow-up story The Techipre Filament is located on my website , so head on over after finishing the one in Jupiter to see what the Axiom Few get up to next, Although those with a keen eye might realise that things are ever so slightly different about the team in The Techipre Filament. Hope you enjoy, and if you've followed the team since The Ceres Configuration back in 2004, or even The Darken Loop last year, I'd love to hear what you think of the stories. And of course, you can get Jupiter here .