Tag archives for speculative
Opening Chapter “Ambush!” – Excerpt from Perfects
'Ambush' is probably the (very short) opening chapter of my novel, which will be edited professionally over the winter. I'm also thinking about re-titling the novel to avoid confusion with the original novella that it was expanded from. Ideas accepted in the comments. Ambush Pandora’s driving scared the hell out of all of us, but the simulator couldn’t lie. She was way safer and faster than any of us, even me. We didn’t buy that though, given how scary she was driving on manual, so I got Han to compare her real driving performance with the simulations. She was slightly slower and safer when we were actually in the car with her, but still faster and safer than any of us could do in the sim. So we reluctantly agreed that she should be the driver. Two Police Cars in Liverpool…
Chieftans by Bob Forrest-Webb [Book Review]
Chieftains by Bob Forrest-Webb My rating: 3 of 5 stars Chieftans is a speculative fiction piece on the Cold War going hot in 1985. It was written in the early 1980s and hasn't dated well. Like Game of Thrones everyone dies, but in less interesting and more predictable ways. Chieftans - review There are good points to Chieftans. For the most part the characters are believable and likeable. Bob Forrest-Webb clearly has done his research, and understands British Army soldiers and officers. That aspect of the book was excellent. One of things that didn't quite work for me though was that the book was clearly researched/written about four or five years before it was set (it was first published in 1982). This means that some of the kit wasn't deployed, or had its name/designation changed on deployment. There was also…
Editing Perfects
Over the last few weeks I've been editing Perfects for a second draft. I finished it over two years ago and it has sat in the metaphorical drawer waiting until I had time between uni courses to focus on it and apply what I learned from A215 to it. As a re-cap, Perfects is an evolution of Exodus, which was my multi-threaded NaNoWriMo 2012 story of a mid twenty first century exodus of people from Earth into space as space travel became an order of magnitude cheaper. I decided when I re-looked at it that there was an interesting world there, but that the strands needed loads of work to knit together. One of the strands became the novella Crisis Point, which I released in 2013. Perfects followed a group of genetically engineered teenagers and twentysomethings living mainly in Cambridge.…
Self Driving Cars
I've written over the last couple of weeks about advances in police technology, but one of the other technology changes that has a major societal impact is self driving cars. People have been talking about this for years, and recently both Google and Elon Musk are seriously working on self driving cars. Other companies are too, but not to the same extent. Progress Report on Self Driving Cars Last week Google released a report on where they'd got to with self driving cars. They plan to report monthly from now on. Their self driving cars have clocked up million miles in autonomous mode, and have been involved in 12 accidents. None of those accidents have been the fault of the self driving cars, in fact for 8 of the 12 the vehicle was stationary. If you ignore the five accidents…
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Book Review – Cronix by James Hider
Cronix by James Hider My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is near future post human science fiction. The premise is that humanity works out how to upload consciousness to virtual worlds and this results in amazing breakthroughs of scientific knowledge and an effective end to death. Almost everyone chooses to join the exodus from fleshy existence to living eternally in the comfort of virtual worlds. The story is set several hundred years after the break through. Told from multiple points of view, including flashbacks to the pre uploading memories of one of the protagonists. It takes a while to build to sound engagement because you need to get engaged with each of the viewpoints, but when you get there you really are engaged. There is a clear sense of a believable future world, it sort of makes sense given…