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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 been told off by fans for making my books too cheap. We’re doing the launch price discount partially to reward readers of […]
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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 when the writing is flowing easily. It feels so good, it’s difficult to describe. That 90-minute burst will not only […]
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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 science fiction book lovers here on this website, and I like to think that we’re too grown-up at humanlegion.com to […]
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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 is available to pre-order now for release on December 22nd. The next two audiobooks will be launched at monthly intervals. […]
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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 SF writers over the past year or two, and the only way to find them was by keeping an eye […]
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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 for Blue Squad in Marine Cadet, the cadets were 17 years old. Today I’m writing the order of battle for […]
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February 3, 2016

The Empire at War is available for pre-order

The launch of a major new military sf anthology.
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March 2, 2016

Book 5 releasing soon

Thanks for your patience, everyone. Here’s a quick update on the progress of Book 5: War Against the White Knights. I finished the first draft of the novel earlier this week, and it weighs in at just over a hundred thousand words. Now, first drafts can be a bit rough, but Ian and I have been editing each other’s chapters all the way through. I’m still waiting for Ian’s feedback on the last two chapters, but other than that the draft pretty tight. Normally, by this point I would have asked for volunteers to sign up to a Force Recon Team. The volunteers from previous books have given us sage advice, but running the Recon Teams takes time, and so I’ve decided not to call for volunteers this time around, so I can get the book to you quicker. I fully intend […]
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