Mark Cantrell's Blog, page 41

BLOG: One Boozy Night In The Earth City

The shadow whispered its name

How did the world city in the macabre urban horror, Silas Morlock get its name? The novel's author, Mark Cantrell, reveals all. Yes, there was alcohol...

 

ONE night back in the early Noughties, in a crowded city centre bar in Bradford, I stumbled upon the name for the world-city depicted in what was to become my novel, Silas Morlock.

 

Booze may, or may not, have had something to do with it, but we were pretty inebriated by that point, and so I took to sh...

BLOG: Dirty Little Secrets Of Unwashed Brits

 Go tidy your room this minute

We’re in a right mess, if this survey is anything to go by. No, this isn’t yet another piece about the perils of ‘Brexit’ – it’s a glimpse into the grotty habits of everyday Brits. And what a bunch of mucky pups we are, writes Mark Cantrell

 

WE Brits are a grotty lot, by all accounts. Well, at least we are according to one of those throwaway surveys created to clickbait their way into the pages of a copy-hungry press...

POEM: When Old Words Weigh Heavy

Dust Me Down

By Mark Cantrell

Sometimes

I feel like the living

Embodiment

Of Marx’s lesser known axiom:

About how the traditions

Of all the dead

Generations

Weigh down upon the brains

Of the living.

That’s me,

As I look around

At the desiccated paper

Corpses

Of my past works.

They call to me,

They invoke me to pull

Their remains from that

Mausoleum

Of shelving, to resurrect them

In a second shot at life.

No! No!

I sometimes cry,

Striving to find the words ahead,

To create something new,...

NEWS: Cameron #GoingBackwards On Climate Change

 [image error]Backwards march will urge Government to about face on climate change retreat

 

CLIMATE change campaigners and environmentalists will be marching – backwards – from Trafalgar Square down to Whitehall tomorrow in protest at the Government's retreat from the green agenda it once loudly trumpeted, writes Mark Cantrell.

 

In 2010, as the Conservative-led coalition with the LibDems came to power, David Cameron vowed to lead the “greenest government ever” but si...

BLOG: The Year of Citizen Zero

 The time has come to set a date

 Mark Cantrell explains why he's decided to take his novel out of a perennial near future and root it in hard time...

 

WHEN I first wrote Citizen Zero it felt appropriate to keep the novel's place in time vague, but now it feels right that the events depicted in the story take place in 2070.

 

Indulge me while I explain.

 

Back in 1994, when I first began to write the novel, I was only 25 and (obviously) immortal so I wanted to keep the ti...

BOOKS: It's Never Too Hot To Read

You don't need golden chocolate balls for this kind of embassy

The Publishers Association wants to recruit 10,000 Reading Ambassadors to promote the joy of literature, so Mark Cantrell shares a few thoughts on this double-edged and potentially subversive pasttime...

 

AS a novelist with a few works under my belt, I should embrace the concept of reading ambassadors, and I am indeed agreeable – but there's a part of me that laments they are even necessary.

 

In this day and age, t...

FICTION: When Man Comes Along, A Pup's Fate Is Sealed

White Fur

This is one of the earliest pieces of short fiction I ever wrote, so no apologies that it's not up to the standard of my later efforts. It's also the first story I ever had published, appearing in a supplement of my local newspaper back in 1992. The story was edited down to about 1,000 words but here I'm sharing the original in all its glory (or verbosity). Hope you like cheese -- and blood -- because a poor little seal is about to have a brutal encounter with its kind's worst nightm...

LIFE: Don't Be A High Street Sugar Junkie

There's nothing sweet about overdosing the sugar content

 

 According to a recent study by Action on Sugar, high street coffee shops are loading up their luxury drinks with “dangerously high” levels of the white stuff, prompting concerns over the impact these chains are having on obesity and type 2 diabetes. As Mark Cantrell writes, too much sugar doesn't just rot your teeth – it can rot your quality of life

 

THE amount of sugar in our food and drink can be tru...

Science: Evolutionary Scientists Blame Blokes for Menopause

Well, you might say the clue is in the name

By Mark Cantrell

 

Blokes are to blame for the menopause, apparently.

 

Well, it's the first thought that sprung to mind when glancing at the announcement, but on closer inspection it turned out to be the stay-at-home 'mummy's boys' who were responsible for putting the brakes on female fertility.

 

Okay, so that's enough with the laddish populism, it's actually a serious matter. We're talking about evolutionary biology here; harking back...

SitRep: The State Of Things

 Citizen Zero Subject To Delay

Classified under the provisions of the Official Secrets Act: This document is not for public disclosure for a period of a minimum of 75 years

 

FAO: Chairman, inter-agency sub-committee on domestic security

Mr Carlisle,

It has come to our attention that the dissident group self-identified as Inspired Quill (IQ) has come to a very welcome setback in the release schedule of its proposed novel, titled CITIZEN ZERO.

As you are aware from previous communicatio...