Now’s the perfect time to celebrate Bob Fowke

Bob Fowke is one of the most intriguing cover artists, working across a host of different genres. A new exhibition in the UK should give him some long-overdue notice.

50 classic endings

As the book of my being slips inexorably over the armrest of life toward the carpet of death, the solipsist in me can’t help but think about the extinction of all the rest of you, too. Here are some of my favorite ways we could all bow out.

Cold Thrills

Book four in the Pink Floyd Psychedelic Odyssey series, this sumptuous, large-format book explores the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd from 1974 to the present day in unprecedented detail. Up to 1984, it covers every official release, all the studio outtakes, film and TV footage, and every circulating live show, along with the essential band and solo releases since.

Riding The Tide

Book three in the Pink Floyd Psychedelic Odyssey series, this sumptuous, large-format book explores the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd from 1971 to 1973 in unprecedented detail. It covers every official release, all the studio outtakes, film and TV footage, and every circulating live show.

The pointy paradoxes of Triangle explained

In my post on Back To The Future, I chastised the movie for having it both ways: for violating the conventions on single time stream or multiple time stream science fiction. Here’s another movie that breaks its own rules, and it’s much more interesting.

Stone On Stone

Book two in the Pink Floyd Psychedelic Odyssey series, this sumptuous, large-format book explores the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd from 1969 to 1970 in unprecedented detail. It covers every official release, all the studio outtakes, film and TV footage, and every circulating live show.

Why don’t we just get rid of nature?

Look, I’m all for the environment. But let’s have this conversation for the sake of it. Do we actually need the natural world? Can’t we just be rid of it? What’s the point of all that green?

Professor Maas explains science fiction

Confused by the chasm of belief? Can’t wrap your head around the wormhole of fringe science? Still wondering what smart core is all about? Here come the answers.

Temples Of Light

Book one in the Pink Floyd Psychedelic Odyssey series, this sumptuous, large-format book explores the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd from 1965 to 1968 in unprecedented detail. It covers every official release, all the studio outtakes, film and TV footage, and every circulating live show.

How we all became Nigel Kneale

The 1968 television drama The Year Of The Sex Olympics has gained a reputation as one of the most prescient of its time, intimating everything from reality TV to Youtube. But its legacy is far darker than this.

A walk through Sunhillow

What could be wilder than this: the idea that there are planets composed entirely of sound, and that therefore the only way to experience them is through the medium of music?

20 rules for the perfect science fiction horror plot

These won’t be the same as yours, but the ultimate science fiction horror book or movie for me would follow all these rules. In the real world, I haven’t seen one yet that does. Still hoping.

No god no god no: 2025 in review

How was your 2025? Too soon? Well, take your mind off the rest of what happened and let’s remember what a bumper year it was for science fiction. Oh good grief.

A Maas Companion

Robert Maas invites you behind the scenes. Here you’ll read about his experiences, influences, and creative drivers. Drawing on this blog and much more, the volume forms a unique book-by-book guide to all aspects of his fiction.

What the hell, Arthur?

2001: A Space Odyssey, most notably a movie about a murderous AI, promotes the exact opposite of Arthur C. Clarke’s own views on the future of humanity. We’re still living with its fallout.

Take my word for it: the hard stuff

Everyone has a stick to beat science fiction with. Here’s mine. When it comes to “hard” science fiction, it’s ultra-respectable, and ultra-dull.

Outbreak in space: Alien as a succession of decision points

The first Alien trilogy traces the outbreak of a virulent disease. Throughout the movies, bad decisions threaten its uncontrolled release. This post tracks each of those decision points in detail.

Are we ready for the big one?

When Worlds Collide was published more than 90 years ago. But if its scenario happened today, could we do what they did?

Writing Liminus

My 2024 novel Liminus is what the science fiction community calls equipoise: it operates in a space midway between high fantasy and folk horror. But it began as something quite different.

Welcome to Pantropia

Pantropy is the idea that humanity must adapt to foreign environments if it is to colonize space. But for the rising generation, I reckon it starts much closer to home.

Where no manhood has gone before

Japanese company UNN will send a sample of your living DNA into space for posterity to recover. This intrepid blogger offers his flesh to the stars.

The kids are all wrong: revisiting Nothing But The Night

A secret conspiracy on a remote Scottish island, the sacrifice of a living human being in a fire, and Christopher Lee. Do we have the makings of a second, long-lost The Wicker Man?

Gravity fails: Life and the last quarantine

In the 2017 movie Life, protocols for containing an alien threat in low Earth orbit are inadequate, and so are the scientists. Here’s how we all died.

The Fallen And The Falling

The third of three volumes that collect Robert Maas’s shorter fiction, here are six scarified missives of ultimate loss sent from the depths of human despair, including the novellas Shortfall and Over Immelmann Falls.

Doubles

The second of three volumes that collect Robert Maas’s shorter fiction, here are seven stories of dark revelation, including the novellas A Thousand Years Of Nanking and Eyes Tight But Feeling Outward With The Sensitivity Of Flayed Nerves.

Singles

The first of three volumes that collect Robert Maas’s shorter fiction, here are eight stories told entirely in first person, including the novellas Tessellation Row and Cheer Up Sleepy Gene.

The tenuous web of time travel stories

Time travel plots get tangled real fast, don’t they? Or do they? Let’s see just how easy it is to write a time hopping thriller by constructing one right here right now.

Introducing: The Great Corruption

It seems like every chancer is flooding Amazon with AI generated children’s books. So I reckoned I ought to create one of my own.

Fifteen genuinely good Hipgnosis covers

LP designers Hipgnosis epitomized rock’s long-derided quest to elevate itself into an art form. But here are fifteen covers that eschew the pretensions and still look great.

70 deep dive epics that inspire and move me

What’s an epic rock song? For me, it’s one that spins out an intensity of emotion, compelling you to dance, cry, or sing along. Here are some favorites from the golden age.

Keep your hands off the past, Marty

When it was first released in 1985, Back To The Future was seen as an endorsement of Reaganomics. Today its mix of “make America great” and “again” seem far more complex.

Did Frankenstein build a robot?

We all know the movies. The monster is stitched together from human corpses. But the original novel tells a different story.

The great ‘I Am The Walrus’ AI image slideshow

Everybody’s got one. And because I’m too lazy to turn this into a Youtube video, you get to scroll down all by yourself. In the meantime, give that computer some drugs. I reckon it needs them.

A tale of four (or five) broken women

The best modern interpretation of fairy tale comes from South Korea, and may be my favorite movie of all time. Here’s a detailed analysis.

Writing Eyes Tight But Feeling Outward With The Sensitivity Of Flayed Nerves

My 2023 novella Eyes Tight But Feeling Outward With The Sensitivity Of Flayed Nerves is more than just a ridiculous title. Here’s how it came to be written.

Record Collector Presents…The Moody Blues

Scott Meze contributes to the full story of this much-loved and pioneering rock band, a work of love by a host of notable fans and commentators including exclusive interviews and in-depth reviews on each studio album.

Powerful and persecuted: 10 weird women

“Weird” is a word with energy and strength, a word to respect. It’s your duty to be weird. And if you need role models, here are ten of world cinema’s best.

Is Midsommar actually any good?

That’s a loaded question since I wouldn’t phrase it that way if I thought it was. In truth there’s a great deal to admire about the movie, but as folk horror it fails all my tests.

Farewell to the one

We can dream, can’t we? That the AI revolution might actually skim off the top earners rather than dump still further on the bottom. Here’s how it could pan out.

Give me dystopia: 2024 in review

It’s that time again. Here’s my review of all that was great and all that was not in science fiction cinema and TV in 2024.

A leaf on the wind

The climactic sub-orbital chase in the 2005 movie Serenity is six and a half minutes of science fiction perfection. Here’s a shot-by-shot analysis.

Two trips to Eros

It’s one of the first near-Earth objects to be discovered. And unsurprisingly, science fiction has long associated Eros with sex. Here are just two examples.

The Mooring

They’d earned the vacation. But when the survivors of a brutal abduction find themselves in a weird variation of the same place, the resurfacing of all their long-buried fears is as potent and debilitating as the imprisonment itself.

Can I please get a copy of The Witcher without a Netflix circle?

You know what the worst thing about a Netflix adaptation is? That the source book is then contaminated with the association forever. Unless you were lucky enough to buy it beforehand.

Uncle Walt writes: Dear Seth

Uncle Walt just loves to write letters to his relatives. Here’s the last of the ones I’ve managed to intercept.

The Sex Doll Sessions

In this revealing book, machine trauma specialist Rafael Meers documents the four months he spent secretly rehabilitating a number of battered, partially dismembered sex dolls and coaching them to reconcile with their betrayal.

Robot scouts and virtual agents: what AI might mean for the publishing industry

Have you ever pitched a book to the industry? It’s a soul-sapping chore that, likely as not, ends with a curt form letter in response. Could AI be about to deliver something much better?

50 superb album covers Discogs won’t let you see

Discogs.com is an essential resource for anyone interested in music. But its decision to censor album covers risks everything it has built, and the tumbling down of all musical freedom.

Liminus

Beyond the borders of everything Keel knows lies a region of primal madness, the pagan forest of the deepest layers of his imagination. With sword clutched tight, he penetrates the liminus as if it can be conquered on his own terms.

Robert Silverberg and the horrors of liberalism

In the 1950s, the danger expressed in mind control stories was that ordinary Americans were being turned into communists. By Silverberg’s 1967 story ‘Passengers’ there was a quite different fear.