Every conspiracy theory, and every conspiracy show, has a Slump. Sometimes it’s the moment where you realize that the person explaining the theory to you is actually advocating, seriously, that reptilian aliens make up the world’s governments and that these aliens are regularly enhancing human soldiers for combat on alien worlds reached via stargates. It’s …
http://i1247.photobucket.com/albums/gg639/AlasdairStuart/TheExplorercover_zpsfab5d532.jpg The journey is its own reward. To strive to seek to find and not to yield. Per ardua ad astra. The journey lies at the heart of science fiction, one of the few pieces of connective tissue that transcends medium. Star Trek’s original name was Wagon Train To The Stars, novelists like Iain M …
Utopia hit the halfway mark last week, and it did so in a manner as definitive as it was risky. The opening sequence saw now solo assassin Arby return to Grant’s school and murder everyone there, adult and child alike. This is standard Network fare, as we’ve seen already; Arby and his now deceased partner …
Langdon St Ives’ adventuring days are largely behind him. He still does the odd job for the Society, and is trying to sell his wife on the idea of both an airship and an elephant to pull back the roof of the airship hangar, but his life is quieter, more measured than it’s been in …
Traditionally, and I speak as someone who rode The X Files train all the way to the end, conspiracy shows tend to be ever shrinking rabbits pulled from ever more grandiose hats. You either constantly spin things out, to positively Scooby Dooian proportions, meander an info dump into tie in media (The X Files principle …
I’m a sucker for cozy catastrophes. It’s a slightly derogatory term that refers to the sort of end of the world stories that John Wyndham pioneered. Quiet, sleepy English village is woken by the sudden, horrifying (And implied) forced impregnation of every woman in the village with psychic death children, whilst two villages up another …
Utopia, Channel 4’s new conspiracy thriller, opens in a comic shop. A pair of assassins,; one well-dressed, the other a shambling Lenny of a man, walk in, interrogate the staff and then murder them. The second to last person to die is the store clerk who is, of course,an overweight man with bad hair in …
Instantaneously, a field of energy falls across most of America. Standing miles high, the field appears instantly, is completely permeable and absolutely deadly. Anyone trapped under it or who passes through it is rendered down to organic mush. Three hundred million Americans die in a heartbeat. It’s 2003. The world has just ended. This …
The End Is The Beginning: Without Warning by John Birmingham
The first lesson I learnt as a freelancer was to be consistent, the second was to be enthusiastic and the third was to be surprising. Consistency gets you return business, which is literally your bread and butter, enthusiasm gets you noticed when other, more reticent writers aren’t and surprise gets you remembered. The most disheartening …
Detectives Jim Rosato and John Tallow arrive at a building on Pearl Street in New York. Rosato’s overweight, his wife has been making him jog. Tallow’s a reader, a man stuck in his own head because its fractionally easier than living in a city of casual brutality and great sandwich shops. There are reports …