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.
