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Book Reviews

Review: Merchants of Doubt

Now, lets set another scene. You’re a tobacco company executive. Your company makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, you’ve got a private estate in Connecticut, you play a leisurely eighteen holes with the governor every weekend and your congressmen takes your calls any time, day or night. There’s only one cloud on your clear horizon, and it’s that blasted scientist and his research that you wish you’d never commissioned in the first place.

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FlashMob

FlashMob: Counting Down The Nights

The wanderer plants his staff on the stone that marks the edge of his village, fields of barley behind and open grasslands ahead. He glances back, but none have come to see him off. Just Aimar, Erramun and their spears, following behind at a safe distance. They are only there to make sure he leaves.

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FlashMob

FlashMob: Between the Hearth and the Cage

Flames gutter amongst the broken hulks, the bones of once-great warships groaning as they sink beneath the rolling swell. It’s early morning, Helios’s rays have yet to burn away the fog, and already the fury of battle seems distant, like a dream. Gulls caw and swoop overhead, picking at the bloody remains of friend and foe alike while I clutch at my shattered oar, teeth chattering and await Poseidon’s vengeance in the eerie silence.

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Book Reviews

Review: House of the Rain King

At its heart, the House of the Rain King is a story about debts: debts paid, debts owed, and the power the debt-holders wield over people, families both born and found, and the faith of the entire valley. Every moment that the Rain King lingers the floodwaters rise, and they’ll keep rising until He receives his due.

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FlashMob

FlashMob: Be Good To Mama

Dizzy’s clients are gathered in her private dining room and they’re getting rowdy: slamming back shots of single malt like its water, snorting the latest in bio-engineered psychotropics, cracking jokes and laughing too loud, their voices carrying the hysterical edge particular to men who secretly hate their colleagues, while coveting their jobs, their wives and their mistresses.

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Personal Updates

My Most Rejected Story Is Out In The World

I wrote Chameleon back in 2023 for The Hope Prize (a competition jointly run by Readings and Simon and Schuster, sadly with an absolutely exorbitant $25 entry fee, and a questionable approach to the copyright of the stories authors submit). It wasn’t selected for the shortlist, and over the past 3 years I’ve submitted it […]

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Personal Updates

Writers of the Future Volume 42

So, I recently spent a week in Los Angeles hobnobbing with the likes of Kevin J. Anderson, signing books with S. M. Stirling and making a bunch of brand new friends. Why? Because I was lucky enough to win first place in Q2 2025 of the Writers of the Future Contest, and the prize includes […]

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Book Reviews Personal Updates

I’m now reviewing books for Aurealis Magazine

Pretty much what it says on the tin. Aurealis Magazine is Australia’s oldest and grandest speculative fiction magazine, with ten issues annually, each one choc full of new fiction, articles, essays and book reviews. And, since the start of the 2026, I’ve been one of the reviewers. I wanted to challenge myself to read more […]

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Personal Updates

First Draft of Threat Vector is done! Finished!

The other day I typed THE END on the first draft of Threat Vector, my current Work In Progress. Phew! 117,000 words of pure (actually not that pure), unadulterated (actually needs quite a bit of adulterating, if I’m honest) adrenaline! First, the pitch: Xav and Yas, an Australian penetration testing duo, are tricked into breaking […]

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Personal Updates

Homecoming a Finalist for 2025 Aurealis Awards

I learned in February that my novella Homecoming, a story about the search for home in the remnants of a ruined galaxy, was shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for the Best Science Fiction Novella of 2025. Since 1995, the Aurealis Awards have been the premier Australian genre fiction awards, recognising the best in Australian science […]