A.E. Currie Blog

  Surely there is no one who loves scifi who doesn't also love Andy Weir's debut novel, "The Martian". That must make writing any further books a tough proposition, although probably not the worst problem to have as an author. Like its predecessor, "Project Hail Mary" is a geek-MCed and, very much, geek-targeted adventure story. This time, the action takes place light years from Earth with, again, technology based mostly on what we have now or are likely to develop in the next few decades. It's that realism that makes Weir almost (ahem) unique and a breath of STEM fresh air. The main character is slightly different, although you'd also have a pint with this one, even if he hadn't just come back from a ripping Boy's Own extraplanetary excursion. Although an astronaut, the new MC is established as not "the right stuff" with some faults shoehorned-in to make him more humanly fallible and add extra tension to the plot. Not that extra pe...

I had a headmaster at school who used to say, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."  You don't get many book reviews written with that attitude. When I say that a good thing about Scott Adam's "God's Debris" was it was short, that sounds like a joke. However, as the author states himself, the book is more of a thought experiment than a novel, and the length was probably well judged for its purpose. It also doesn't sound positive if I say the question that hung in my mind on finishing it was, "Why did Adams write this?" It's not unusual for a writer to have a motive behind a piece of work beyond entertaining folk and getting paid for it, and it's clear the rationale behind "God's Debris" wasn't that. The entertainment part, anyway. The story's premise is that the main character meets an old man who has apparently been supernaturally gifted with knowledge of everything, and ...

Unusually, this isn’t a comment on climate change and the impending doom of humanity - I suspect at least a couple of us will scrape through. No, it’s about how when I type “a future” into one of Google's docs, it suggests I change it to “the future”. Has autocorrect finally become sentient and it's trying to tell me something?  Spelling I can live with. Attempting to alter my fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality feels like overreach. As a science fiction writer whose books are set in a world that's supposed to be realistic, this is clearly something that interests me. My last book was set in three different time periods and it occurred to me I might want to do some mucking around the past and future, but could I? Would it break my rule that you can't bend the laws of physics? Fate When we talk about the future, there’s an implication it’s an actual thing. In fact, whether there’s a defined fate in store for us or not is a fundamental physical and philosophic...

I’m doing my first book club chat this month on Utopia Five and I’m about to release a new edit. All of that has made me think back on the original idea: what if you had a computer game that simulated reality well enough to make changes in the past and see the result? How would you make something like that? For starters, you’d need a heck of a lot of data: 100% world camera coverage. Second, I decided the data would have to be public. I wanted the game invented by a person, not Google. So, I introduced an Open Panopticon in 2025 and the story takes place thirty years later.  The title of Utopia Five is a hat tip to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five - the protagonists of both can time travel in their own lifetime. Lee Sands was born the day the Panopticon was turned on and the game is a virtual time machine, which sees back to that moment and no further. I was worried I’d laid that reference on a bit thick, but nobody seemed to notice, demonstrating that authors don’t have a clue ...

My SciFi novel Utopia Five is set in 2053. It’s about a post-event society that some people consider utopian and some dystopian. Whether you live in a dystopia or not feels like it should be obvious! But is it? What is the definition? An “Event” “The Day of the Triffids” was written in 1963 by John Wyndham and the pivotal event in his book had nothing to do with carnivorous plants. In the novel, a meteor shower renders almost everyone blind and triggers the collapse of civilisation. The eponymous hostile hostas just take advantage of a situation that has abruptly shifted in their favour. The storyline is an example of a common 2-step process in dystopian fiction: - An “event” triggers the sudden breakdown of society and exposes individuals to a lot of nasty and brutish stuff. The result is usually a short life for most of the characters and a willingness to accept almost anything to fix the situation. - A new foe appears. They are intent on genocide or enslavement, contribute to the m...

. My new hard science fiction novel came out this month!  Denizen 43  is the third in the Panopticon trilogy  and it's my first book set in space, which meant I had to do a lot of research. Specifically, I needed to know what realistic engineering would look like on the Moon and what life there might be like. It's Going To Be A Long Night Solar panels will be a key lunar power source and getting enough daylight will be an issue for future colonists.  The result of millions of years of gravitational interaction between the Earth and the Moon is something called "tidal locking" or synchronous rotation. On Earth, tidal locking means everyone always sees the same face of the Moon. On the Moon, the effect is more significant: it means a single one of their days lasts nearly 30 Earth days . As a lunar colonist, once the sun sets over the horizon, you aren't going to see it rise again for a fortnight. I like a lie-in, but even I might find 2 weeks excessive. ...