Keith Stevenson's Blog, page 2

Scavengers – Robert Hood

Scavengers by Robert Hood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A vivid Aussie crime thriller with supernatural elements

Robert Hood is best known as a writer of horror and fantasy and he’s been described as ‘Aussie Horror’s wicked godfather’. But he began his publishing career in crime fiction and also commissioned and co-edited the anthology Crosstown Traffic, which featured a dozen crime stories blended with genres such as Westerns, Romance, Fantasy and Horror. All this is to say, Hood is a steady hand wit...

Building a world

Worldbuilding is an essential part of any science fiction or fantasy novel. Any world a story is set in has to feel real and believable to draw the reader in and make them feel they’re in the world of the book’s characters. With my current work in progress – The End-Times of Markusz Zielinski – I’m now embarking on the creation of my third ‘world’ to add to the deep space exploration/ climate catastrophe world of Horizon [see Planet Building] and the multiple worlds and alien species of The Len...

Alien Clay – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tchaikovsky’s creativity and ideas are on full display

On the future Earth of Alien Clay, society is in the grip of a bunch of ideological zealots that would give the Spanish Inquisition a run for their money. The ‘Mandate’ insists on a scientific orthodoxy that stifles true scientific thinking and enforces its worldview with a jackbooted fervour that tolerates no alternatives. Those who dare to dabble in ‘free thinking’ are captured, inte...

Conquist Dirk Strasser

Conquist: A Novel by Dirk Strasser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring lost world adventure

For more than a century our collective imaginations have been set alight by tales of lost worlds and the brave or foolish explorers that stumble into them. Stories like Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot, Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and H Rider Hagard’s King Solomon’s Mines have spun wonderous tales of places that exist beyond our wildest dreams. And it’s from such works that Strasser’s Conquis...

Aussie Author Month interview

Instagram user @literaturelylost is running Aussie Author Month this April with daily shoutouts to some amazing authors. Read my short interview for this event And follow @literaturelylost for more Aussie authors.

Did you always have a desire to be an author, or did it occur spontaneously?

I started writing short stories for my class newsletter in primary school and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Could you please explain your process of writing? Do you follow any particular rituals or...

What is The Effect?

The titular end-times in my current work in progress encompass the end of the universe. You can’t get more end-timesier than that. Trapped on the last planet, my hero – mathematician Markusz Zielinski – and a dead engineer are trying to work out how to stop it.

The universe isn’t ending all at once but parts of it are in a most disturbing fashion due to ‘the Effect’. Before Markusz and friends can work out how to control or reverse the Effect, I had to work out what it does and a timeline fo...

The Final Shroud Nathan Burrage

The Final Shroud by Nathan Burrage
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After creating a lived-in world in The Salt Lines Book 1 – The Hidden Keystone that is at once historically accurate and vividly realistic, Burrage doubles down on the more fantastical elements of his story in the series finale The Final Shroud.

In 14th Century France, Templar initiate Bertrand continues his flight across the land with the mysterious and mystical Salome, pursued by agents of the King of France and malevolent forces inte...

Aliens: Bishop TR Napper

Aliens: Bishop by T.R. Napper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Feels like a middle episode in a longer story.

Writing a tie-in novel has benefits and drawbacks. The benefits are that the writer gains exposure to a broader readership by producing a book in an already established and popular intellectual property. If they happen to be a fan of that IP, they also get the buzz of playing with that universe’s characters, worlds and situations. A drawback is that the IP can sometimes be a creative straitjacket....

What The Lenticular Cost

I could probably have done this a lot cheaper, but I was determined to make the Lenticular books equal in quality to anything a major publishing house could produce and there was also a degree of experimentation in using the various promotional tools on offer to indie authors, some of which proved to be worth it while others fell short of their promise.

Also as a three book series my financial outlay in promoting the first book – Traitor’s Run – took into account the fact that successful sale...

Firewalkers – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Firewalkers by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For a novella, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Firewalkers” contains a whole novel’s worth of ideas as well as a densely imagined world which is wholly original and at the same time completely inevitable. We’re in the endtimes of the climate crisis and the people of the small African town of Ankara Achouka cling to existence in the hottest equatorial climes of a ravaged Earth. The reason the town exists is to service the uber-rich pilgrims who jour...