Novels
My two series of novels are connected by characters and the built-world I have created, but they are set several hundred years apart.
The House Next Door Trilogy
Set in 2055, 2092 and 2472, the House Next Door trilogy provides snapshots of future worlds ravaged by climate change. This adventure story has a serious message about the future we’re creating for ourselves and the people and planet we will leave behind. Click on the images to find out more about each book.
Warning: this is a genuine trilogy in that it is one complete story told across three books. You will only find out what happens if you get to the end of the third book!
Find out more about the research I did to provide the technological, political and scientific content for Mathew’s story. Find out why I write about the things I write about here. Read my author’s QnA here.
The Recoverist Quartet
The Recoverist Quartet is set in the last quarter of the 25th Century in a world transformed by climate change. Britain is a desert archipelago. The privileged live in cities, sheltered from unpredictable storms and lethal heat. They are trapped in their misery, living beneath a false sun, only able to deal with the realities of their world by taking drugs to dull their emotions. The cities are in terminal decline. There are not enough people to sustain them. A man-made virus called the Mercy has made fertility a rare gift.
Outside the cities, people are not considered worth saving. They are the Non-Grata. In northern Britain, they survive only by selling their children to the cities for food, water and energy. Against this canvas, we meet Isobel Twelvetrees, rejected by her city and put outside to die. Then there is The Kind, a group of Non-Grata who have built a different kind of life, even in the south, where the sun burns every living thing to dust. They use technologies long outlawed by the government and so advanced it appears like magic to strangers. They are using their knowledge to imagine a more hopeful future for mankind and are driven by an intelligence that seems more than human. The Kind and Elidir are available from Amazon and other major ebook and paperback bookshops,
Short stories
Versions of the Future is a collection of short stories inspired by a collaboration between science fiction authors and scientists from the Human Brain Project and the Bristol Robotics Lab. The authors were me, Stephen Oram and Allen Ashley and the scientists included Professor Allen Winfield, Marta Palau Franco and Dr Antonia Tzemanaki. We spent a day with the scientists, discussing their work and touring the lab. The authors then went away and wrote stories based on what we saw. Marta’s involvement particularly inspired me in ERL Emergency Robots – a civilian, outdoor robotics competition focusing on realistic, multi-domain emergency response scenarios. Rescue robots. My story imagines a near future scenario where robots may be used to good effect to rescue people after a terrorist attack. After the authors had written their stories, we got together again at the Bristol Literary Festival to read out what we’d written and discuss in front of a live audience.
I was a regular at Virtual Futures Future Fiction Salon for a while, held monthly in Soho in London. The stories I have written here are near-future fiction. The events are usually themed. A couple of my stories were filmed being read by actors at the Lights of Soho gallery. The tale ‘Young Blood’ wase published in Near Future Fictions journal.
A volume of short sharp stories that present alternative or unconsidered visions of the future; stories that draw attention to the potential impact of cutting-edge science and technology for society and humanity.
In addition to established SF authors such as Ken MacLeod, Tim Maughan, Geoff Ryman, Simon Ings, Jule Owen and David Gullen, the anthology features stories by producers, civil servants, artists, and more – providing a broader appreciation of what the future might hold. Quick bursts of conjecture and insight, guaranteed to both entertain and stimulate.
When tomorrow has become a question mark — filled with as much malice as promise — can science fiction be a means of exploring the answer?
Virtual Futures presents eighteen bursts of speculative fiction that explore the landscape of the near future: short stories that depict a world populated by killer voice-controlled speakers, AIs with mental health disorders, narcotic nanobots, and much, much more.
‘Doggerland’ in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 60: Volume 60
‘Castle Under the Water’ in Another Place, a collection of sci-fi stories, with all profits going to the Alf Dubs Children’s Fund. A boy orphaned by war discovers a consoling dream in a picture book, which leads him to adventure and to discover that his world is not quite that it seems.