“Oh no, they’re all wearing beards!” …or travels in a parallel world

Beards are  evil. Especially goatees. That’s probably a fact you could take away from the original Star Trek series. That and Kirk breathed in a lot. Because of Star Trek’s influence, facial hair has become a trope for SF, signalling the divide between worlds. Apophis and Teal’C appear with the evil twin goatee in Stargate-SG1. [...]

Sandwiches of unknown nature…

The title of the post is from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. I read it and the SF nature of it jumped out at me. What? It did, my brain works like that… And it got me thinking about how I often tackle world building from a food standpoint. I’m reading a Mesopotamian cookbook at the [...]

The hunt for the SF toilet. So where *do* you go…?

My house is a disaster zone. The nuclear bunker that was my bathroom–and yay for the builders in the 30s for deciding to waterproof the room with concrete–is a shell of itself. I have a bath in the bath position. Not plumbed in, but it’s obvious the room with only one right angle  in it [...]

Getting ‘punked: Synthetic Dreams

Synthetic Dreams–a cyberpunk romance–released this week from Carina Press.  It’s my first push into the ‘punks (I have a not-quite-a-steam-punk and bio-punk lurking in the background too) and I’m hooked. Dreams started with an image of my hero, Paul Cross, sitting on the heroine’s battered couch, waiting for the heroine, Vyn. The room was reminiscent [...]

I should be…

Twitter is, it has to be said, has within it an endless supply of…stuff. If it’s happened, happening or going to happen it’ll explode on Twitter first. I love it for that reason. And I also love it for the fact that there have been ideas that have slammed me upside the head from it [...]

Your average, mind controlling parasite

A parasite that takes over your brain, controls your actions, changes the way you interact with the world… The goa’uld  from Stargate right?  Nope. Look no further than your cat. I will state, here and now, that I’m not a liker of cats. I can now be very happy about that. Cats have a parasite [...]

Anyone else having a hunter-seeker moment…?

I watched this clip, finding it amazing…and just that little bit terrifying. They’re almost sentient. It took me back to the start of Dune and Paul Atreides being hunted in his room.  Love the hunter-seeker description, of a ‘…ravening sliver of metal…’. The quads above would be a hunting pack, ready to strip you to [...]