Authors Electric

Imagine a duel of titans:    Harpo Marx vs.    A creature who looks both like that and like this:                                                 The concept still rings my bells after all these years. Halley's Comet, in 1986, sends a trainload of passengers scream-rolling back in time to 1906 San Francisco--the year of the Great Quake.  And I had some cool tricks to go with it: 1) Also on the train is a new kind of vampire. Austin Blacke looks like the Sundance Kid...but can also transform to a hyena or python--and even change his face. Blacke goes into immediate 'blood shock', desperately needing the blood of his day. 2) Unaware they're being stalked, the passengers face other perils. They're quickly 'made' as  strangers   because of their money, clothes and speech. A few adapt clever disguises--including the h...

Last month as part of the annual Chester Literature Festival I took part in a debate about Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. Now, anyone who knows my writing will know that I’m not a huge Twilight fan. I’m quite happy for people to read what they want, and for writers to do new things with established genres - so it’s not the sparkly vampires that bother me so much (although I do personally think they’re rubbish!) It’s the fact that, since Twilight’s astronomic rise in popularity, the misunderstood heartthrob vampire now seems to be the only type being written - and subsequently, a lot of horror markets have placed a blanket ban on submissions of vampire stories, which is a shame for writers like me who like vampires (and werewolves, and zombies, and other newly ‘unfashionable’ creatures!) This was actually the entire reason that me and L.C. Hu produced our anthology ‘ Re-Vamp! ’ in 2011, to counteract all the mopey teenage monsters - but I’m digressing. The thing is, in this debate, I wa...

           The news of 19-year-old Sandra Isherwood’s half-million pound deal for her YA debut Bjorkana will fill many a struggling author with envy. On the surface it looks a neat premise: young baseball hero Aidan falls in love with a tree spirit, in the wood where an unsolved murder took place some years before – but you can also see the buzz around this book as part of a wider trend. Look around, and you may notice that it’s not the only recently hyped book that features ‘tree people’ of some sort.  Sleeve detail from Bjorkana . Across the pond you have Evergreen Park by K. J. Granger , featuring characters who are essentially dryads, exiled from their cleared forests and now living incognito in suburban Chicago . And back in the UK, Dan Williams’s debut Oak Heart is the story of a man whose soul was bound to a tree by dodgy 14 th Century witchcraft, and who as a result cannot die (or at least not easily). All three are ...

Are you sure it's only a figment of the imagination? A gorgeous botanical drawing of a Triffid by Bryan Poole for the Science Fiction Classics (1998) Dr Seuss allegedly invented the word ‘nerd’. Lewis Carroll gave us Jabberwocks, slithy toves and vorpal blades.  And no dinner service is complete without a runcible spoon, courtesy of Edward Lear. Everyone has heard of robots - a word popularized by Karel Capek in 1920, although he credited his brother Josef with actually inventing it. Following the discovery of a newly discovered particle called a positron, Isaac Asimov provided his robots with ‘positronic’ brains to help give the stories a more scientific feel, even though he admitted himself that it was a bit of spoofery. It was catchy, sounded right, and stuck, and has been used ever since by other writers - not to mention being incorporated into the names of any number of companies: even non-nerds will have come across the word. Personally, my fa...

I once read a book by Gwyn Thomas called The World Cannot Hear You. I can’t f o r the life of me remember much about it (except that I loved it), but the title has always lurked in my mind. I t seemed to me to epitomise the writer’s (or writers’) tragedy. You write, or read, these wonderful books, somebody reads them, or maybe not, and then they are gone. I used to drone on about Gerald Kersh, whom I thought was fantastic. Nobody else had ever heard of him, which I bitterly resented, more on his behalf than my own. Before and during World WarII he was enormous. And now…? But sometimes, out of the blue, things get jogged. My phone rang not so long ago , and I was asked to take part in a Radio 4 programme about the writers considered to be in the van of the “new realism” in children’s books. My Mate Shofiq was mentioned, and Albes on and the Germans. Good God, I thought - I wrote them! And suddenly remembered being rung up by the headmaster of a school in Peckham to cancel my invitatio...