Keith Stevenson's Blog, page 5

Hellburner – CJ Cherryh

Hellburner by C.J. Cherryh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hellburner is a direct sequel to Heavy Time and, according to Cherryh, these are the only two books that need to be read in order, which says something about how she’s constructed the whole Company Wars saga with multiple entry points into the narrative.

Cherryh takes the same approach as Heavy Time, which I think bears out the general theme of the little guy trying hard to piece together what the hell is going on while at the mercy of people and...

Publication Log – October

There’s a lot going on in the background as I move a number of manuscripts toward publication, so this series of posts will capture some of the inputs and things I learn along the way for Horizon, The Lenticular and 2 Bodies (which is definitely a working title). Horizon is up first.

Horizon

For those not interested in the intricacies of self-publishing, look away.

With Horizon off to the printers – or rather the print-on-demanders (the days of unsold boxes of books in your garage i...

Publication Log – September

There’s a lot going on in the background as I move a number of manuscripts toward publication, so this series of posts will capture some of the inputs and things I learn along the way for Horizon, The Lenticular and 2 Bodies (which is definitely a working title). Horizon is up first.

Horizon

The ebook of Horizon was published in 2014. This was one of the first crop of books selected by HarperCollins Australia for its Impulse imprint – a range of titles to be published as ebooks only. T...

The Rings of Power

Two episodes in and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has me well and truly hooked.

The production looks beautiful. Shot in New Zealand, of course, and with an eye-watering per episode budget that means the CGI, sets and costumes are spectacular, no-one could fault the visuals. It also has the feel of Game of Thrones – when it was good – flying us over the continents to the various elven, dwarf and human kingdoms to catch up on the different story threads.

But possibly the most pow...

The Singing Ringing Tree – Disturbing kids TV

I’ve blogged before about the disturbing children’s television that you don’t see much of any more, probably because the makers would get sued. Shows like The Owl Service and Timeslip.

But there are other examples, and one that was pretty surreal at the time was The Singing Ringing Tree. This was an East German movie of a fairy tale that was serialised for television in the UK. It was disturbing for a number of reasons, but mainly because of the evil, magical dwarf who did lots of horrible th...

Society from mythology

Any decent worldbuilding, particularly where it posits an imaginary alien species, needs to delve into the social structure and belief system that exists.

When I considered creating ‘the alien’, I knew I couldn’t go ‘too alien’. There are – no doubt – aliens out there in the vastness of space that we will never understand or be able to relate to because our frame of reference has nothing in common with theirs. That’s okay from a ‘real world’ point of view but it doesn’t work in a fictional se...

Themes

One of the things I’ve realised in working through the development of this story cycle is just how malleable plot is. The origins of the Lenticular books led me to write a bunch of short stories – a serial in fact –  published on the Nuketown website in the late Nineties.

I look at those stories now with a somewhat embarassed sense, because the writing lacks nuance. Even so, the key plot points from those early attempts have survived into the novel sequence, but the furniture has shifted and ...

Origins

Way back in the 20th Century, 1996 to be exact, I was on a tram, riding home from the Aurealis Awards ceremony that was held that year in Justin Ackroyd’s Slow Glass bookshop in Swanston Street (yes, it was THAT long ago) when I had a flash of an image. An alien held down on a bench by Earthmen, struggling against them while some part of its body was cut away.

I never question my subconscious too closely when it comes to ideas and writing. I happily receive whatever it wants to spit at me. Th...

Disturbing children’s television

Talking to a friend some time ago, I was reminded of some really disturbing kid’s TV shows I watched as a child which have stayed with me all these years. The show we were talking about was based on a novel called Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr. My friend remembered the 1988 movie Paperhouse but I remembered the earlier ATV show Escape Into Night (from – dare I say – 1972). This from wikipedia:

Escape Into Night deals with a young girl, Marianne, whose drawings become the basis for dreams...

Quick reviews - November 2020

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Whimsical first chapter that draws you in (almost more like a short story), slightly more formulaic second chapter that tries to build mystery, and a tangential third chapter that pummels you with telling, telling, telling. I lost the will to keep going.

Incursion by Mitchell Hogan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Great start to a new series