Late last year I joined Ragnarok Publications for their Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters giant
monster anthology KickStarter campaign, and after successfully making
their target - and more besides - the book's first stage of release in
digital format has arrived!
As a "stretch goal" author for the project, I wrote "The Turn of the Card", an original story for the collection based on creatures from the Colossal Kaiju Combat card game produced by Sunstone Games, which is complimented with this action-packed piece of artwork by Matt Frank!
"The Turn of the Card"
tells the tale of the crew of India 99, a Metropolitan Police
helicopter that ventures into harm's way when London is invaded by
gigantic beasts; you can check it out here in the retail digital edition for Kindle, Nook or eReader...
Back in 2011 I wrote an audio drama for what was at the time Big Finish's newest revival of a classic British SF series, The Liberator Chronicles, and I'm pleased to announce it will be available next month! Working with B7 Media to carry on the legacy of "classic" Blake's 7 and
featuring all-new stories starring the cast of the original TV show,
the series has been a big success for the BF team, clocking up six
three-story box sets to date, tie-in novels and most recently full-cast
audio stories.
My first experience writing for Blake's 7
was working on the reimagined B7M audio series and Early Years
prequels, so it was interesting for me to get to close the circle by
coming up with a story that slots into the original incarnation of the
show; and so, next month Blake's 7: The Liberator Chronicles Volume 7 will be on sale, featuring my story "The Hard Road", starring Gareth Thomas as Blake and Andrew Whipp as Trel Dekkan.
"The Hard Road"
is a story about Blake's fateful choice to make an alliance with
another group of anti-Federation rebels, and a confrontation with a
question that cuts to the heart of his resistance - Is there a line you will not cross?
Blake's 7: The Liberator Chronicles Volume 7 also features "Spy", a story by Simon Guerrier and "Disorder" by Eddie Robson.
To pre-order a copy of the box set, visit the Big Finish site Here.
Last year I worked on the Deus Ex: The Fall, the first game in the Deus Ex franchise
for mobile and tablet devices - released to great critical acclaim on
iOS, the title has now been ported across to the Android operating
system and is available for download via Google Play.
The game is a side-story set in the same world as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and it picks up from the end of my tie-in novel Icarus Effect:
Winner
of seven "Best Mobile/iOS Game" awards at E3 2013, the game tells the
story of Ben Saxon, a former British SAS Mercenary who underwent
physical augmentation and is now seeking the truth behind the drug
conspiracy. Betrayed by his private military employers, the Tyrants, not
only is his own life at risk, but time is running out for all augmented
humans. Deus Ex: The Fall was developed by Square Enix’s Mobile division in Europe, in collaboration with the original Deus Ex: Human Revolution team at Eidos-Montréal and N-Fusion, and is the first foray of the Deus Ex franchise into the mobile space.
It's that gift-after-Christmas that comes to scribes around the nation: the Public Lending Right.
If you are a writer/editor/illustrator/etc, a resident of the UK or
Ireland and you ever need a reason for donating your books to the
library - on top of all the obvious ones like promoting reading and
supporting this valuable and increasingly undermined public service -
here it is.
What is the PLR?
The
PLR is a system where authors who've written books that are in public
libraries get a little revenue each time somebody borrows their works.
It's a way to repay writers who won't be earning a royalty from a sale
in a bookstore. The hardworking folks at the PLR office pay a nominal
fee based on how borrowed you were - and in the interests of fairness,
you can't earn more than around £6000, so the big names don't get to hog
all the money.
In the current political climate, both the PLR and
the libraries it springs from are under threat, so if you are a writer
or a reader, please do your bit to help support both as best you can.
Here's my Top Ten Library Loans of my novels for 2013 (with 2012's position in brackets)
1 (1) Peacemaker
2 (-) Fear To Tread
3 (4) Hammer & Anvil
4 (3) Nemesis
5 (2) The Flight of the Eisenstein
6 (5) Red Fury
7 (7) Cast No Shadow
8 (6) Icarus Effect
9 (8) The Blood Angels Omnibus
10 (9) Synthesis
Once again, my Doctor Who Western Peacemaker maintains its top slot in the chart, although my most recent Horus Heresy novel Fear To Tread was a close second place.
As always, my thanks to everyone who supported their local libraries and borrowed my books...
This is my first 'Coming Soon' update on future projects and events for 2014...
"The Turn of The Card" - eBook edition of the Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters anthology, featuring my short story inspired by the Colossal Kaiju Combat gameworld. January.
Animex 2014 - I'll be talking about games writing as part of the Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer Games at the University of Teeside. February 10th & 11th.
Warhammer 40,000: Maree Noir - French language edition of my Warhammer 40,000 novel Black Tide. February 21st.
Blake's 7 The Liberator Chronicles Volume 7: The Hard Road - Part of Big Finish's upcoming Blake's 7 audio box-set series. February.
Warhammer 40,000: Schwarze Flut - German language edition of my Warhammer 40,000 novel Black Tide. March 6th.
"The Turn of The Card" - Hardcover and paperback edition of the Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters anthology, featuring my short story inspired by the Colossal Kaiju Combat gameworld. March.
Deus Ex 4 - A new chapter in the Deus Ex videogame series, for next-generation consoles and PCs. TBC.
Podcasters
Sina, Michael and Paul had me on their Ten Forward show earlier this
month, under the banner of the TrekMate fansite, and once again it was
great to have the chance to talk about writing for the Final Frontier...
I came along to discuss about my new Star Trek: The Fall novel The Posioned Chalice, and you can listen to a streaming version of the discussion (or download it directly) right Here.
Last year-end blog of the annual series is my movie round-up. I
backslid with my watching in 2013, seeing almost half the films I caught
in 2012, so I’ll have to try and make that up again in the next twelve
months; but on the plus side I did get out to the cinema more, and
there’s nothing quite like the collective experience of a movie...except
when people talk or turn up twenty minutes in or can’t find their damn
seats or... Here’s the list:
Trek Nation, Unknown, Underworld: Awakening, The Grey, Everything or Nothing, Wreck-It Ralph, Looper, Taken 2, Zero Dark Thirty, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [2011], A Fantastic Fear Of Everything, Cleanskin, Oblivion, Welcome To The Punch, District 9, Red Faction: Origins, Storage 24, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Source Code, Pacific Rim, Men In Black 3, The Mechanic, Jack Reacher, Elysium, The Watch, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, Argo, Ted, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Thor: The Dark World, The Day The Earth Stood Still [2008], Gravity, Seduced And Abandoned, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Virus.
Oddly,
I seemed to have watched several Liam Neeson films this year; I’m not
sure what that means. Anyhow, I got some nerd-love with new Iron Man and Star Trek movies in 2013, not to mention Pacific Rim which I thoroughly enjoyed, the pacey Welcome to the Punch and the excellently tense Gravity. My sleeper hits of the year have to be Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which is a great bit of lo-fi sci-fi comedy, and Storage 24, which is a great bit of lo-fi sci-fi action. Check ‘em out.
The next of my year-end round ups is all about games: in the year that a
console generation ended and a new one arrived, I’ve stayed firmly
rooted in the past. In fact, you could almost say I’ve regressed,
because I played a whole bunch of PC games in 2013, despite the fact
that my desktop is so elderly now the long-life battery on the
motherboard actually had to be replaced in the summer. But I also jumped
in with hands and feet on the motion-control thing too, getting a
Kinect for my Xbox 360 – which had the effect of turning my non-gamer
girlfriend into an instant expert player. Still, I slipped back into my
old FPSing habits as the year went on... Here’s the list:
Jetpack Joyride (PS3 version), Mars Rover Landing, Star Wars Kinect, Kinect Sports, Kinect Sports Season Two, Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Kinect Adventures!, The Walking Dead, Star Trek: The Video Game, Peggle, Crash Course 2, Karaoke, Iron Man 3: The Official Game, Star Wars Angry Birds, Spartacus: Legends, Sniper Ghost Warrior 2, Pacific Rim: The Video Game, Defence Grid: The Awakening, 007 Legends, FTL, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Roblox, NHL 14, Titanfall, Redshirt, Chainsaw Warrior, Papers Please, Monaco, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, Gunpoint, DmC Devil May Cry, Remember Me, Injustice: Gods Among Us, Batman: Arkham Origins, Star Wars: Tiny Death Star, Pet Rescue Saga, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Metro: Last Light, Saints Row IV, MirrorMoon EP, Grand Theft Auto V, Grand Theft Auto Online, Formula 1 2013.
Best of the year? Titanfall impressed the heck (or should that be mech?) out of me, and Blood Dragon was a good romp; on the smaller end of things, I loved Redshirt, Gunpoint and Papers Please, which are all cheap on Steam and well worth your time.
And here’s the first in my annual year-end series of blogs on what
amused me (or not) in 2013. First, books. They’re great. I read a lot
more non-fiction and digital stuff this year. If that’s a trend, I don’t
know what it means. Here’s the list:
Exogene (T.C. McCarthy), Ghosts of Onyx (Eric Nylund), Brotherhood of the Storm (Chris Wraight), Black Library Weekender 2012 Anthology Volume Two (Various), The Crimson Shadow (Una McCormack), Revelation and Dust (David R. George III), Angel Exterminatus (Graham McNeill), Betrayer (Aaron Dembski-Bowden), Mark of Calth (Various), Vaporware (Richard Dansky), Battleship (Peter David), A Ceremony of Losses (David Mack), Dragon Jet (David Axton), No Easy Day (Mark Owen with Kevin Maurer), Broken Homes (Ben Aaronovitch), Combat Ops ("David Michaels"), The Junior Officer's Reading Club (Patrick Hennessey), Peaceable Kingdoms (Dayton Ward), The Imperial Truth (Various), The Big Book of Flight (Rowland White), The Grey Man (Andy McNab), I, Jedi (Michael A. Stackpole), No Visible Horizon (Joshua Cooper Ramo), Corax: Soulforge (Gav Thorpe), H.A.W.X. ("Michaels"), Pacific Rim (Alex Irvine), Black Sky (William H. Lovejoy), The Con Job (Matt Forbeck), Yukikaze (Chohei Kambayashi), Vulkan Lives! (Nick Kyme), Locked On (Tom Clancy with Mark Greaney), Storm Front (White), Undersea Prison (Duncan Falconer), Blacklist Aftermath (Peter Telep), Federation: The First 150 Years (David A. Goodman).
Top
picks of 2013 for me are non-fiction titles (even though one is
actually fictional non-fiction) – Joshua Cooper Ramo’s hymn to stunt
flying No Visible Horizon was a fast and compelling read; Rowland White’s celebratory Big Book of Flight is
a lovely thing that is both contemporary and nostalgic, a must-have for
aviation geeks; and David Goodman’s history of the United Federation of
Planets is lush and a delight for an entirely different class of nerd.
By contrast, the worst book I read this year was a digital title so
turgid I deleted it after finishing it for fear it was actually sapping
the life from me.
It’s taken me a few days to get around to writing the first of my
annual New Year posts, mostly because 2013 has been a tough one to
assimilate.
I went into last year thinking about times past and stuff done; see, 2013 was the year in which the original edition of Cyberpunk (one
of my favourite role-playing games) was set, and off the back of that
gameworld I spent around a decade of gaming in the same campaign with
chums of mine who I still count as good friends today. Of course, 2013
hit and I wasn’t augmented with neural implants and cool cyberware, so
that was a downer. But as this year drew on, it became a mix of lows and
highs that have left me still trying to map it all.
Our family
lost someone this year, and it happened in a matter of months. Add that
to health scares for both my folks (which passed, thankfully) and
illness closer to home, and 2013 left me feeling the very real weight of
mortality...as well as reminding me to never, ever take anything in life for granted. So in that way, I’m glad to see the back of this unlucky number and turn the page.
But with the bad comes the good, and there was some of that too. 2013 was the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, and I was pleased to be asked to contribute something to AudioGo’s Destiny of The Doctor miniseries as part of that celebration – I wrote Shockwave,
a 7th Doctor story narrated by Sophie Aldred, and it was fun to drop
back into the Time Lord’s world after being away for a while. Out on the
Final Frontier, I wrote my first dedicated digital work, a Star Trek: The Next Generation ebook novella called The Stuff of Dreams and then contributed the penultimate book to The Fall miniseries with The Poisoned Chalice; to my delight, Poisoned Chalice made it on to the New York Times bestseller’s list, making my third NYT charter. I did a little less this year for the Grim Dark future of Warhammer 40,000 and The Horus Heresy with five new short stories for The Imperial Truth, Angels of Death and Lords of the Space Marines collections – and talking of short stories, I also had another first with a tale I wrote for the Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters
Kickstarter project. But perhaps the biggest writing milestone of 2013
for me was finishing up a personal project that I’ve been working on, on
and off, since 2010. More on that – I hope – in the months to come.
In videogames, I got to work on a mobile title for the first time, scriptwriting for Deus Ex: The Fall, a game sequel to my tie-in novel Deus Ex: Icarus Effect. In addition, as part of the release for the Director’s Cut of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I wrote Fallen Angel,
another ebook to connect with the gameworld. Of course, most of what I
was doing game-wise in 2013 remained under an ironclad Non-Disclosure
Agreement until very recently when the existence of the as-yet-untitled Deus Ex 4 was
officially announced; but by the same token, a big techno-fantasy
action-RPG I spent many months working on was cancelled, reinstated,
cancelled again, retooled and reinstated again and then finally definitively cancelled, this time for keeps.
Outside
of work, I did less big events this year (just the Horus Heresy
Weekender, Black Library Weekender II and Nine Worlds convention) but in
return I had great vacations in the Canary Islands and the military
museums of the Southeast; I got cross paths with cool folks like Rowland
White, Joss Whedon and David Goyer, I learned archery...
But right now, if you ask me to guess at what 2014 holds, I can’t tell you. All I’m sure of is, it’s going be different.
