It’s no secret that for BioWare there’s a lot riding on this game. After MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA many saw ANTHEM as the new IP that would reinvigorate BioWare. The company and hundreds of game developers spent six years on ANTHEM, and bugs and critical reviews have plagued it following its initial release as a demo. I played the demo and had fun, however, so I purchased the game. There were enough bright spots in the demo to encourage me to trust BioWare.
This week, speculative fiction blog Aurelia Leo published an article I wrote on legendary SF director John Carpenter. Over the decades I’ve searched out any property I could find that Carpenter has directed. Find my thoughts on many of his SF films at the link, including THEY LIVE, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, THE THING, and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.
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When I was a teenager I read a lot of 1950s Science Fiction. It was the tail end of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction.” Asimov, Pohl, Heinlein, del Rey and more. I fell in love with the genre because of those books. They sparked my imagination and took me to fascinating locations in futuristic settings. The stakes were always huge. It’s those books that really taught me how important YA Science Fiction is. Readers get hooked on the genre early; it’s what happened to me.
Over at Speculative Chic they’ve posted an article I wrote about the Science Fiction books and movies that I love most featuring the oceans. They helped inspire me to write THE WAR BENEATH. Some of them are novels from the tail end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
A quick announcement regarding the new thriller. I posted on my social media on 8 December that THE WAR BENEATH had been shortlisted for the 2018 CLUE Award for Suspense/Thriller/Crime Novel. Recently I also found out that the book has reached the shortlist for the 2018 GLOBAL THRILLER Award and is now also a CLUE semi-finalist. Both are competitions called the Chanticleer International Book Awards (the CIBAs) organized by Chanticleer Book Reviews.
I wrote about turning forty-seven here. My thoughts remain the same. I was born at the best possible time. I loved the decades I’ve experienced — the films, the music, the television, pop culture, and the explosion of technology. I’ve witnessed the birth of the personal computer, the internet, the ease of information acquisition and now this time of instant gratification. It’s a period that we could only have imagined just a short time ago.
On Thursday 4 October I presented the inaugural TSJ Future Writer Award during the commencement ceremony for the Class of 2018 at London South Collegiate Institute in the Thames Valley District School Board.
TSJ and Gail Barker, 8 August 2018
On 8 August I participated in the radio show YOUR LIFE, YOUR WAY at local radio station 106.9 THE X. The topics of conversation ranged from managing a busy life while also writing thrillers to my new underwater adventure THE WAR BENEATH. Gail Barker and I also discussed
The Best Science Fiction Movies of the 1970’sI should clarify that a film’s presence on this blog post is entirely subjective based on my experiences growing up. These were my creative formative years, during which I was discovering genre books, television shows, and movies. I was born in 1970, so really the 80’s were my true introduction to Science Fiction Horror, Thriller and Adventure — books by Asimov and Crichton and films by Cameron, Spielberg, Carpenter, and Verhoeven — but the 1970’s played a huge role in my love for the genre. Detroit Channel 7 broadcast most of the films I saw. Many had poor effects, but the stories were so powerful and the actors so committed that the movies rose above the rest of the stories that were available at the time. The themes were relevant, the plots compelling and interesting, all the base human emotions like revenge and lust and greed and hate were on full display, they spoke of issues that people dealt with every day, and they featured powerful scores and incredible directing. They were gripping.
COMING 20 NOVEMBER 2018
I have now officially finished edits on THE WAR BENEATH, and the book is in the hands of ChiZine where it is being prepped for printing. It has been an extraordinary process, and the love and care that is going into this book is difficult to describe. When I first saw the cover, I knew that this was going to be special. Made by Emblem in Toronto created it, and even produced an animated version for their Instagram account: