Author post
Elements of truth in the building of worlds: Guest post from Andy Livingstone
My earliest memory of school is being told off by my teacher for daydreaming at the age of five. My earliest memory of fantasy fiction is picking up a copy of The Hobbit at the age of six, trying to be smart and thinking that the title would make my… Read More
Peter Newman on why he made one of his main characters a baby…
Happy publication to Peter Newman! The Vagrant is published today in paperback, ahead of his new book, The Malice, out in May. Here he talks about why he cast one of his main characters in The Vagrant as a tiny baby, and where that idea came from…… Read More
GUEST BLOG: Peter Newman on filling the (silence)
It’s publication week for Peter Newman’s excellent The Vagrant (out 23rd April) and he’s shared his experience of writing a silent character with us. When I first started writing The Vagrant, I knew that I wanted my protagonist to be silent and I also knew that I didn’t want to… Read More
Rewriting the Script: Laura Liddell Nolen (@LauraLLNolen) gives 3 Reasons YA Sci-Fi Creates Spectacular Female Characters – #BFIVoyager
Ray Bradbury wrote that Science Fiction is the art of the possible. What are the limits of mankind’s abilities, and what would happen if we reached them? Or, better yet, removed some of those limits? Or, to draw from Mr. Bradbury’s imagination, what if we made them worse? Sci-fi reimagines,… Read More
The soundtrack to James Smythe’s The Explorer (@jpsmythe) – #BFIVoyager
James Smythe’s The Explorer has been compared to literary sci-fi greats like Kazuo Ishiguro and JM Coetzee, as well as incredible films like Gravity and Duncan Jones’ Moon. Here he shares the soundtrack behind this tense, claustrophobic and completely gripping book. Listen along with him here… Read More
Ingrid Seymour (@Ingrid_Seymour) on why the YA genre needs to keep pushing gender boundaries – #BFIVoyager
Compared to the not-so-distant past, commercial Sci-Fi now incorporates a significant number of female protagonists between its pages – a very notable fact in the young adult category. As a female YA author, I couldn’t be more pleased. Dystopia, with characters like Katniss and Tris, has enjoyed the most benefits. Read More
Peter Newman (@runpetewrite) on Contact! – #BFIVoyager
For me, science fiction is all about contact, where human beings interact with new technology or new species and how each then changes the other. Growing up, science fiction shaped me in many ways, small and large. Star Wars altered the way I thought about Lego long before… Read More
My view of ‘Tomorrow’s World’, Jason W. LaPier (@JasonWLaPier) – #BFIVoyager
One of the themes of the #BFIVoyager festival is ‘Tomorrow’s World’, so I’d like to tell you about the novel I have coming out next summer. Unexpected Rain takes place several centuries into the future. Near-light-speed travel has enabled humans to colonize a few nearby star systems, which turns out… Read More
Writing Sci Fi as a debut author, Gerrard Cowan (@GerrardCowan) – #BFIVoyager
The Machinery is my debut novel, and I am very, very glad that I chose the sci-fi/fantasy arena for my first attempt. I came up with the idea for the book in the summer of 2008, but it took me about a year and a half to get cracking on… Read More