Here's a story about an aquarium starship that has seen better days, and the trouble that befalls it when its crew make some extremely reckless curation decisions. It's unabashed space opera, with exobiological oddness galore, as well as some more familiar beasts... I’m watching fish swim round the fake easter island head - clockwise, like they always do - when the call comes in. They’re basically fish, anyway. Eyes placed penti-fashion round a tube with a mouth at one end, a

Here is a very, very silly story I originally wrote on twitter, for Halloween 2013. It's a story of monstrosity and redemption, set in the cold and darkness of the high alps. It has a very frightening twist, that might shock more fragile readers. Read on if you dare... Once there was a town up in the attic of the world, where the air is thin, and snow crackles under a sky like deep water. A man was leaving this town with just a bottle and an old blanket, his tears turning i

This story was the result of a stupid hypothetical question I asked on twitter, about how many chimps turning hand cranks it would take to generate sufficient energy to accelerate an egg to the edge of lightspeed. It's very silly, but I guess you could call it hard SF. Enjoy. Brother Sidney rushes into the kitchen with wide-open eyes. “There’s been an explosion, down at the mill!” he blurts. “It’s the scramblers!” We’re just tucking into our soy - a cup & a half each each. Gr

Today I’d like to reach out to you regarding an exciting new opportunity. I’d like to talk to you about Business. While a lot of you might know me as a fledgling SF author, or just someone who tweets utter bollocks about animals on twitter, you may not be aware that I am also a game developer. Of a sort, anyway. This year, the people at Failbetter Games (Sunless Sea, Fallen London) started a funding initiative for narrative games. I somehow made a successful application, and

In my first guest post, David Thomas Moore, commissioning editor at Abaddon Books (and therefore my editor, the poor bastard), talks about running shared worlds, and the magic - not to mention bafflement - that can happen when multiple authors write in the same setting. Along the way we'll meet Macbeth as a lich king, and Frankensteins galore. When Nate said he was going to be hosting guest blogs, I threw myself bodily at the task, since I figured it would make a change to ha