Category: Interviews etc

Time for Cakes and Ale: Podcast Interview

Here’s a podcast interview with me, by ‘Time for Cakes and Ale’ run by Becks and Eeson.  They describe their podcast as ‘an outlet for our ramblings on whatever geeky topics take our fancy’.  I like a bit of rambling myself, and here they have indulged me at length. Thanks both.

How I write

My friend Tony Ballantyne has been asking writers to describe their writing process, posting the results on his website every month.   Here is what I wrote for him.

If you haven’t encountered Tony’s work, I recommend it.  He is one of the cleverest people I know, in fact quite possibly the cleverest.  (I won’t embarass him by saying that, by the way: he doesn’t really do that kind of humility.)  Annoyingly, apart from being a talented and productive writer, having a degree in maths, and being a deputy head of a secondary school, he also plays several musical instruments and is a member of a brass band.  His novels are unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.  However there is something about his particular vision, dark,  witty, humane, and occasionally tinged with a rather scary version of Christian theology (the latter particularly apparent in Recursion), that occasionally reminds me of Philip K. Dick.

His latest novel is Dream Paris -full of strange Ballantynian angles on the French revolution and politics in general- but you’d probably do better to read Dream London first.

I, clawfoot

Here is a guest post I did for Sarah Chorn, who edits a column on SF signal called Special Needs in Strange Worlds.   I am very grateful to Sarah for giving me an opportunity to discuss the people with disabilities who appear in Dark Eden and Mother of Eden (the batfaces, clawfeet and slowheads), as I don’t think anyone has specifically asked me about them before and they are absolutely central to the world of Eden.

In this post, I also reveal that I am in a way the original for the so-called clawfeet.  Which, now I think about it, may partly explain my decision to make the clawfooted Jeff Redlantern very wise and absolutely irresistible to women.