WELCOME…

This site is about FANTASY and SCIENCE FICTION, and how I write about them. It is also how I think about them… and here are a few thoughts…

FANTASY

MAGIC… what’s that all about? What is it? How is it used? Where does it go when it is used. Where does it go when it’s not needed, ah? Does its’ actuation only require a stick-like wand of eldritch appearance and the shouting of a silly word? Does SHAZZAM actually mean anything? And is it more powerful than ABRACADABRA?

DRAGONS… could they exist? Did they exist, and do they still survive in some ecological and evolutionary backwater? And if so, how do they overcome the laws of inverse proportion? You know the ones; the ones that say a man would need a wingspan of fifteen metres or more and chest muscles the size of a small shed to get off the ground; the ones that say a winged creature weighing two tonnes or more would, when launching off a suitably high and sheer cliff-face, leave a hole in the ground reminiscent of a small asteroid impact. Then there’s fire-breathing. Or rather, fire-exhaling! A methane-laden bag, under pressure, with no safety valve and triggered by some form of random piezo ignition in the mouth is not exactly a testament to worlds’ best safety design… especially at meal-times.

WEREWOLVES… mmmm. Much more believable, aren’t they? Or are they? Magic and flying lizards seem a stroll in the park compared to anthropomorphic cellular reconfiguration.; and that on a monthly basis too. Move over PMT, here comes PWT! Could medication control their cravings… and what would they actually do for jobs? Do their teeth fall out with age and force them into retirement? I mean, that would make them eligible for the pension, wouldn’t it? What sort of a form would they need for that application? A veterinary certificate?

ALTERNATIVE REALITIES… we know they exist, because some of us have them in our heads. But can they be real? What is actually behind your mirror? There’s definitely something there because what you see in the mirror is different to what is going in to it. Is there a boundary layer we haven’t discovered yet… a thin, squishy bit between here and…. somewhere else?

You may find reasonable explanations to all the above in THE OTHER SIDE OF MAGIK. Or you might just enjoy the story and not worry too much about occult credibility.

SCI-FI

FTL TRAVEL… the Holy Grail of science fiction. How does it actually… er… work? I have a theory… or rather… I have an extrapolation of a theory. The original idea came from Captain Bruce Cathie who wrote his complex theory of UFO reality in his books HARMONIC 33 and HARMONIC 695. I obtained Bruces’ approval for my concept of an evolutionary uni-field process based upon his work. And if you can follow it, it's in the book in black and white.

HEROES… lantern of jaw, steely of eye, hard of mien. Realistic of the human animal? I suppose the man or woman of the future will be no different to the man or woman of today. So look around you… that’s the future.

ALIENS… tricky one, this. Over four hundred billion stars in this galaxy; what are the odds of us being alone? There are hundreds of thousands of different life-forms on the one planet we do know about… so what’s hard about getting your head around other planets? In my story there are one or two assumptions I have made… the aliens need to interact with us in a manner we can understand; and their hopes, fears, civilization, concepts and technologies must be easy for the reader to absorb and believe to be a reasonable scenario within the confines and context of the story. Therefore, aliens are tailor-made to suit the plot, authors’ preference, etc. In this case, it means no blobby, protoplasmic intelligences that behave like super-cultured yoghurt and communicate with hiccups on the hydrogen line. I have had to make my aliens credible to a human audience. They are, after all, my aliens.

Put the above together with some non-gratuitous, but none-the-less painful, violence and some definitely gratuitous, though tastefully done, sex and you have the basis of the saga PAX MAGELLANICA: REICHWORLD.

THERE are more books on the way. I’m half-way through JONATHON GOODE: HONOURARY WITCH. But that’s another fantasy, and another story…