military sf bestseller – Page 2

January 18, 2016

The invasion of the White Knight homeworld

One of the greatest pleasures of life is the warm swell of pride at watching your helpless babies grow first into children — with their own personalities, interests, and aptitudes — and then mature into adults who achieve feats we as the older generation could only dream of. We realize that the youngsters really did learn from those mistakes they made in their youth, that they were actually listening to our sage advice (even though they never admitted it at the time), and quietly ignored our advice when they had moved beyond us. Doesn’t always work out so well, of course, but it has for me with the characters of the Human Legion. In the first TO&E I wrote out […]

December 18, 2015

Empire at War – a military SF box set

More announcements! You’ve probably seen plenty of box sets in the Amazon Kindle Store in recent years. The idea is that several individual titles are collected into a single Kindle book, and usually presented at a bargain price. The books are connected by a theme, and the first Kindle military SF/ space opera themed box set that I’m aware of was Stars & Empire, which came out last year and did very well. These box sets are a very good idea, I thought to myself. So I decided to make one of my own. I wanted a strong theme, which took me a while to dream up. Then it occurred to me that I had discovered other British military […]

December 15, 2015

Marko Kloos interviewed

Not by me, unfortunately, but there’s a podcast interview by the #Wrongfun podcast team that they carried out at the recent Honorcon militarySF convention at Raleigh, NC. [The interview is episode 7, which you can find here.] It’s a small world, because a guest of honor at next year’s Honorcon is Christopher G. Nuttall, and in a few days I’ll be announcing a collaboration that Chris and I are working on together. If you don’t know about Marko Kloos and his ‘Frontlines’ series, then I recommend you check him out. I read the first book when it was still self-published by Marko, but now he’s published by 47 North (a very successful division of Amazon) which means he gets smarter […]

December 11, 2015

Have a science fiction Christmas with Human Legion audiobooks

Tantor Media have been busy producing audio editions of the first three novels in the Human Legion series. Narrator Tom Zingarelli does a fantastic job of bringing Arun McEwan and the others to life. It is a strange experience for me to hear a voice actor speak the words I wrote in 2014. You can hear a sample of Marine Cadet here and of Indigo Squad here. You can pre-order CDs or an mp3 download at the Tantor website (follow the links above to the audio samples). You can buy CDs from most Amazon stores too, though at the moment the purchase links seem to be for CDs only and aren’t available in Australia. The audio edition of Marine Cadet […]

November 6, 2015

The Sad Puppies of Gin Street or Does a Hugo Award Boost Book Sales?

Until 2015 it had been decades since I’d paid much attention to the Hugos, which I’d say are still the most prestigious awards in science fiction. Like the Oscars, the Hugos have always courted controversy and always will. What’s been different over the past three years is that the most recent Hugo spat to emerge now has social media as both a battlefield to fight over and a way to whip up hatred for the ‘opposing side’ into levels of frothing madness that have at times brought shame upon the science fiction community. Furthermore the mutual recriminations on social media sparked a pamphlet war, as we shall see in a moment. I put ‘opposing side’ in quotes because we’re all […]

November 6, 2015

War Against the White Knights: teaser#1

It’s been a tough week in the Human Legion writing shed (pictured). Ian and I had written 18,000 words for War Against the White Knights, the fifth Human Legion book, but we needed to meet to discuss the next stage. Unfortunately, I’ve been too ill this week to write books. Every writer is different, but for me I find it relatively easy to get my head in a place where I can come up with story ideas, but to get in the mental place where I can craft scenes effectively and efficiently is much harder. In a good working day dedicated to writing, I might write 5,000 words of story. Half of that will come in an intense 90-minute burst […]

October 9, 2015

Human Empire is out now

I’m very pleased to announce my first collaborative writing project, Human Empire, the fourth in the six-book Human Legion series, is now available to buy from the Amazon Kindle Store here. It’s got space battles, aliens, treachery… all the usual good stuff. We’re moving up in scale too. Ian and I wrote scenes with dozens of ships and tens of thousands of people. Admittedly, we didn’t exactly describe each person’s experience in detail, but we think there’s a greater feeling of scale in this book, something that’s going to get even bigger with the next one. As normal, the book will initially be on sale for a bargain launch price of 99c/99p or local equivalent for at least a few days. I’ve […]

October 2, 2015

Human Empire paperback cover

We’re still awaiting some Recon Team reports, but are hopeful to get the next book out next week. Thanks for all the suggestions you’re making so far. Very helpful! In the interim, here’s the paperback cover. The covers of Marine Cadet and Renegade Legion don’t relate to a specific scene in the books. The ship on the cover of Indigo Squad is Beowulf and the deck plans match the image. We continued that idea further with Human Empire. The front cover image is actually a scene from the book.

September 28, 2015

What’s really hot in science fiction: part 2

Welcome back to an occasional series of posts on what’s hot in science fiction, concentrating on Amazon’s science fiction bestseller charts. For a discussion of what I’m up to, and why I want to move away from bullying and arrogance and onto celebrating success, see part one. Let’s start with the top-20 bestselling science fiction books on amazon.com I scraped the data last week (I had a busy weekend building sand daleks on the beach which is why I’m posting a few days later), so if you follow the link, you will get a slightly different picture. I’m escalating a request to Amazon for permission to replicate their chart data, but for now you’ll have to click the link. The […]

September 28, 2015

What’s really hot in science fiction: part 1

Science fiction is flourishing! Adult SF book sales are up sharply. The past few years have witnessed an explosion of vibrant new literary talent. I believe that more science fiction authors are earning enough to support themselves and their families as a full-time writer than at any time in history. No wonder the scene is so healthy. Although I hear some traditionally published mid-list authors telling of their pain at falling sales right now, overall there’s never been a better time to be a science fiction author, or reader. But, wait! I’m only talking about books, and that’s such a small part of the SF scene these days. If we look beyond books we can see the huge popularity of […]