I am a great fan of science fiction that’s plausible enough to be ‘scientific’, but which doesn’t take the ‘science’ so far as to be boring. In the miniseries that launched the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica a decade or so ago, Galactica took a direct hit from a nuke and survived with near-undiminished fighting capacity. Is … More Sci-fi writing tricks: balancing drama with plausibility
The talented folks at Jalapeno Publishing – who are behind Scaffolding – have issued a cool preview video. Check this out! You can buy the collectable hard copy online from Blurb – and don’t forget to read my article in the first issue – it’s all about typewriters and writing. More soon. Copyright © Matthew … More A cool video about ‘Scaffolding’ magazine
Launched this week: Scaffolding, a quality arts magazine by a US-based publisher. I’m excited. I hope you are too. I’ve got an article in the very first issue, exploring my writing life as seen through my typewriters. My piece begins: In April 1951, Jack Kerouac fed one end of a very long piece of paper … More My article in the very first issue of Scaffolding
OK so I saw Rogue 1. To me it was one of the best Star Wars movies ever made, up there with The Empire Strikes Back. In the specific, it was a sci-fi war movie – pure and simple. And it showed what usually happens in war – where people usually end up dead. It … More Star Wars without the Force – reviewing Rogue 1
Here’s a blast from 2013 about the baddest sci-fi mech ever imagined… ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I posted last week about why huge bipedal fighting ‘mechs’ from sci-fi like Pacific Rim are unlikely, unless the laws of physics change. But that doesn’t mean sci-fi mechs have to be boring. Not at all. More in a moment. First off … More OMG – the baddest sci-fi mega-mech…e-v-a-h! -redux
Last week I retrieved the last of my publishing licenses from Penguin Random House. Yeah, I know. Most authors crawl over broken glass to get a contract with PRH or one of the other big houses. Me? I’ve been asking for my contracts back. I had over thirty of them, all for out-of-print books which, … More Hot titles from my writing past – and they’re baaaaack!
It always intrigues me that ‘writing’, to most people, appears to be ‘writing fiction’. Time and again I’ll see stuff on social media pivoting on that idea – ‘writers – what’s your character arc?’, or ‘what’s your latest plot twist’ or whatever. Whereas non-fiction writing is always seen as a secondary product of expertise in … More Why even non-fiction has to tell a story
