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Fiction and Excerpts [1]
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Fiction and Excerpts [1]

Extinction Game (Excerpt)

Mon Sep 1, 2014 1:00pm
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, || Jerry Beche should be dead. Instead, he's rescued from a desolate Earth where he was the last man alive. He's then trained for the toughest conditions imaginable and placed with a crack team of specialists on an isolated island. Every one of them is a survivor, as each withstood the violent ending of their own alternate Earth. And their new specialism? To retrieve weapons and data in missions to other apocalyptic versions of our world.

My Favourite Apocalypses, or, How to End the World for Fun and Profit

Tue Sep 9, 2014 10:00am 18 comments Favorite This

One of my very earliest childhood memories is of getting my sticky, sticky hands on one of my brother’s Superman comics. In one panel, it showed how an infant Supes had been loaded into a rocket and fired off from his home planet Krypton in the moments before it was destroyed. The next panel showed the planet coming apart in big fat chunks all flying apart from each other like…well, pretty much like the cover of a Boston album.

I loved that picture of an exploding planet. I loved it so much I spent a fair bit of time on the floor of my parent’s living-room, drawing exploding planets over and over in crayon. Red for the molten core, blue and green for the surface of the chunks speeding away from each other, brown for the jagged pieces of underlying planet-stuff. My obsession lasted probably just about long enough for my parents to start wondering if they had a budding sociopath on their hands…

[Prepare for a list of some of my favourite apocalypses…]

Extinction Game (Excerpt)

Mon Sep 1, 2014 1:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

Jerry Beche should be dead. Instead, he’s rescued from a desolate Earth where he was the last man alive. He’s then trained for the toughest conditions imaginable and placed with a crack team of specialists on an isolated island. Every one of them is a survivor, as each withstood the violent ending of their own alternate Earth. And their new specialism? To retrieve weapons and data in missions to other apocalyptic versions of our world.

But what is ‘the Authority,’ the shadowy organization that rescued Beche and his fellow survivors? How does it access timelines to find other Earths? And why does it need these instruments of death?

As Jerry struggles to obey his new masters, he begins to distrust his new companions. A strange bunch, their motivations are less than clear, and accidents start plaguing their missions. Jerry suspects the Authority is feeding them lies, and team members are spying on him. As a dangerous situation spirals into catastrophe, is there anybody he can trust?

Below, check out a preview from Gary Gibson’s riveting, action-packed post-apocalyptic survival story, Extinction Game—available September 11th from Tor UK!

[Read an excerpt]

Future Thinking: Will Current Technology Eclipse Science Fiction?

Tue Jun 11, 2013 5:00pm 12 comments Favorite This

Perhaps sparked by recent news of 3D photocopiers and the like, I’ve been thinking about SF and new technologies. One of the things you often hear people say these days is that science fiction is in danger of being overtaken by the sheer pace of advancements in science and technology. People were saying similar things, too, when I wrote my Shoal trilogy. It’s an understandable refrain, particularly when the news is now filled with reports about downloadable blueprints for building guns with those same 3D printers. The feeling that you’re living in a world co-scripted by John Varley and John Brunner tends to grow when you take a quick scan through any number of online news sites and discover front-page features on exoplanets, life extension, and NASA research into Alcubierre drives. It might seem that in the face of such remarkable advances, science fiction might no longer be as relevant as it once was, reality having in many respects caught up with it. You might think that, but you would be wrong.

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