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Wolves at the Door in Print

11/25/2019

The excellent Cohesion Press is finally releasing its catalogue of e-book anthologies in print. Next up is Wolves at the Door.

This was my first sale to Cohesion and my story Taking down the Top Cat about a military raid on a drug lord’s compound that takes an unexpected turn into the macabre is one of many great stories from authors like Kirsten Cross and James A Moore.

Cohesion Press, and particularly their SNAFU series of military horror anthologies, are focused on bringing you action-packed short stories that blend military detail with other-worldly horror.

They’ve even caught the eye of Hollywood with some SNAFU stories being adapted for Netflix by the award winning animation series Love Death & Robots.

Stories in this book typically have a theme of lycanthropy (If you’ve seen the excellent movie Dog Soldiers, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s in store), but the authors manage to apply that theme to a wide range of stories from Scotland in The Middle Ages to the modern day jungles of Columbia. There’s a bit of something for everyone – provided that they’re fans of fast-paced action (and are not too squeamish). You can pick up a copy of Wolves at the Door here…

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SNAFU: Last Stand

11/25/2019

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My fourth outing with Australia’s own Cohesion Press is coming out later this year.

SNAFU: Last Stand features action-packed stories of desperate standoffs, heroic sacrifices and thriling rear guard actions from authors like Alan Baxter and Patrick Freivald and features a forward from Tim Miller of Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate fame.

Cohesion Press typically publishes stories of military action with a slice of science fiction or the paranormal. I can’t give away too much about my story, Canute. Suffice to say that I thought I’d maxed out the action and horror and then the editors’ comments came back saying they wanted even more! So I guess this one’s going to be a pretty wild ride.

You can pre-order SNAFU: Last Stand Here…

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It's done... well, kinda.

1/3/2018

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So I think I can say the novel is finished! Not that anything is ever really finished, but at least it is as good as I can get it by myself. So what now?

Well that depends. If there's any interest from the traditional publishing industry (i.e. if I get an agent or any interest direct from publishers) then no doubt they will want some input. If I self-publish then I will probably engage my own editor and there will be (yet) another draft based on their recommendations and artwork to commission and all the rest of it. But for now I can say that The View from Infinity Beach is done!

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SNAFU at the Aurealis Awards

2/20/2017

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When I was working in Singapore, there was a phrase in Singlish that always stuck with me. You’d say someone was “blur” or “blur like sotong”. Sotong means squid in Malay and to say they were “blur” like a squid meant they had that same dull, glassy-eyed expression that you saw on those hapless molluscs in a fish market. If you were blur, then you were obtuse, oblivious to everything around you; you weren’t in on the joke or up to speed with current events.

Anyway, I’ve been so blur recently that I didn’t even realise that Non-Zero Sum had been nominated for an Aurealis Award, and only found out when I got tagged in a Facebook post saying it had made the shortlist!

t’s an open secret that writers are their own worst critics. By and large we have no idea how stories are going to be received. Occasionally you get a good feeling about a story. Something about it just gives you an expectation that other people are going to like it just as much as you, but that feeling is rare. Here’s where I should say that I had just such a feeling about Non-Zero Sum, but the truth is I didn’t. I liked the central idea: that nuclear explosions rip open a gate between worlds and allow things to come through. I liked the characters--a military HAZMAT team sent to a nuclear accident to gather data and then running into supernatural, monster weirdness--the action scenes were fun (imagine if HP Lovecraft had grown up playing Doom and Quake), but the story never jelled for me. I always felt I could have done more with it.

Shows what I know... Told you I was blur.

Non-Zero Sum probably won’t win. It’s up against some stiff competition, and this style of fast-paced action stories may not be to the judge’s taste. But what the hell… it’s shortlisted and I’m running with that and slapping a big “Finalist” sticker on this post anyway.

Thanks to Geoff Brown, AJ Spedding and everyone at Cohesion Press. You guys are the best!

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SNAFU and the Sofa

1/10/2017

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2016 was a bit quiet on the writing front, too much going on IRL, but it ended on a high note with the publication of SNAFU:Black Ops featuring my short story The Waking Dragon. This is my third outing with the SNAFU series (stories of mine also made it into Hunters and Wolves at the Door) and they're always a lot of fun. Hopefully this shows through in the story itself. Obviously my fellow contributors and I did something right as Black Ops is curently sitting pretty with a 4.5 star average on Amazon. Apart from your humble correspondent there are also stories from Jonathan Maberry, Nicholas Sansbury Smith, James Lovegrove and... as the saying goes... many more. If you're a fan of action stories with a supernatural or sci-fi twist then it's definately worth checking out.

In another three-peat, an older story of mine, rounded out the year for the Hugo award-winning Starship Sofa podcast. Taking the High Road won the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest in 2012 and follows a doomed expedition to Mars as they find a new way of living on a comet hurting out of the solar system. Its guaranteed to piss off anyone who knows anything about orbital mechanics, but apart from that its a fine read, in fact it's one of my favourites. It's one of those stories that you look back on and think, "Did I really write that?" I think they did a great job turning it into an audiobook and its free! Why not have a listen and check it out for yourself?

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More SNAFU

4/19/2016

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The cover art for the next SNAFU anthology is out and Dean Samed has done the business again.

One of the "many more" is going to be none other than your humble correspondent. I'm still working on the story. This is the first time I've been asked to contribute to an anthology before the story has actually been written. Nothing like contractual obligation to get the creative juices flowing!

I'm trying something a bit different with this one. In the past I may have been guilty of being a bit too formulaic. This one is going to have its share of red meat too--SNAFU readers want their fix of military action with a spec-fic twist that Cohesion Press always delivers--but at the same time it's going to be a bit mind-bendy.

Will I pull it off, or is this where i jump the shark? Only time will tell.

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I'll just leave this here...

4/19/2016

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A really nice review from The United Federation of Charles which I hope he won't mind me sharing.

"Non-Zero Sum Game" by R.P.L Johnson

"An interesting psychological look at soldiers who have stared too long into the abyss and what sort of questions that raises. In a bizarre way, I think of this story as taking place in the Doom universe. You have Marines regularly called upon to stop the forces of Hell but there is no sign of heaven in their works. I found the ending to be curiously uplifting and I've got to give the author real credit for this one. 10/10"

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SNAFU: Hunters

1/19/2016

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SNAFU: Hunters is now available for pre-order. This a great little anthology from Cohesion Press, edited by the wonderful A.J. Spedding and it includes a story of mine, Non-Zero Sum.

Think of movies like "Predator" or "Dog Soldiers". These are stories of hunters and the hunted with a focus on action and a specific twist in every tale.

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Paris 13/11/2015

11/14/2015

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I've said this before on Facebook after the Charlie Hebdo massacre but it bears repeating after what we've seen in Paris over the past hours.:

Terrorism is the weapon of the weak.

Terrorists use carefully scripted acts of violence to try and achieve a political aim that they could not achieve by main force alone. That's the point. They can't achieve their goals unless we let let them; they're not strong enough.

So by all means attend the candle-lit vigils and share the Je suis Paris memes, but at the end of the day all that stuff is meaningless. The correct reaction to any terrorist incident is to stiffen the upper lip and hold the fucking line.

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Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

8/26/2015

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Any novel that spans over five thousand years if going to have to leave a lot out. Whether or not you enjoy Seveneves will depend on whether you agree with the author’s choices of what gets to stay in the book and what gets jettisoned. For me I thought that the book might have worked better as a trilogy rather than a single over-long book with a gaping five-thousand year hole in the middle, but your mileage may vary. Spoilers ahead…

Seveneves is a book in two distinct halves. The first half is a hard sci-fi disaster tale following the crew of the International Space Station (among many, many others) when they become the focus of efforts to save the human race after the mysterious explosion of the Moon. This part of the book was quite entertaining and offered up plenty of technical details for those who like that sort of thing. However, I found it strangely unemotional. The author deliberately shows us only those saved from the apocalypse with the vast bulk of the human race condemned to die off camera. Seven billion people seem quite content to work around the clock to save a few thousand and the masses are strangely accepting of their fate. This seemed unrealistic.

The science of the “Hard Rain” has been dissected elsewhere. Suffice to say that it is a fudge. The explosion of the Moon as described at the start of the book would not lead to the destruction of the Earth. The fragments would simply re-combine, drawn back together by their mutual gravity. But you kind of have to go along with it otherwise the whole premise of the book doesn’t work.

The second half of the book is distinctly odd. After the entire human race has been whittled down to eight individuals (all female but only seven of them fertile—the Seven Eves of the title) we then leap forward five thousand years to a time when a world-circling civilisation has been built in orbit and the Earth is habitable once more. For me, this seemed to skip over the interesting bit—how to build a civilisation. Humanity has been given a second chance, an opportunity to do things right with the benefit of hindsight and a good technical library. What choices would they make differently? I felt that a trilogy structure, much like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, would have worked better here.

As it is, the civilisation that the author creates is quite strange. They are technologically advanced, but seem to be mired in the past. Each of the Seven Eves genetically modified their offspring leading to seven distinct races. And there seems to have been very little inter-racial breeding over the millennia (although it is hinted at and so must be biologically possible). Bizarrely in this day and age, the author says that individuals’ personalities, their preferences in friends and lovers, their choice of intellectual pursuits are largely controlled by their race. Teklans are all doughty warriors. Julians are natural politicians and Aidans are still fighting against five-thousand year old slights to their ancestor. I found this to be odd, like an old book from the fifties where races are little more than stereotypes.

In five thousand years, through such drastic changes in the human experience, I doubted that Moirans would still name their children after historical details of their long dead ancestor. It would be like a modern European naming their kid Hammurabi because much of modern civilisation grew from the Indus Valley many thousand years ago.

There’s not much story in the second half either. There is a cold war between the “Red” and “Blue” sides of humanity which again seems to exist only because five thousand years ago, their respective Eves didn’t get along. (Aren’t these archaic details swamped by more recent economic/technical/social factors?) More “races” are found on Earth, emerging from five thousand year old bunkers and deep-sea habitats and there is a brief conflict at a flashpoint between Red and Blue territory but this all seemed a bit petty and parochial set against the massive canvas that this book had given itself.

Ultimately, this is a very ambitious book that falls short of its goals. There are quibbles to be had with the technical details in the first half. (Why launch arks into space with all the expense and technical difficulties when it is revealed later that much less-prepared humans can ride out the hard rain in underground bunkers?) And the odd stylistic choices in the second half seem to be hinting at some allegorical meaning which is never clearly realised. It’s an interesting read, but not the author’s best work.

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