1960s research and an alternate German federation

1960s fax machine

The most difficult things about writing a story in the late 1960s/early 1970s weren’t the clothes, hairdos, lack of traffic, old fashioned weaponry or spying techniques, but the technology and social attitudes. Mobile phones, laptops and social media just weren’t available. If you wanted people to know something, you put […]

Alternate history stories - personal or grand scale?

Roman-themed stories and alternat(iv)e history stories could drive you to visualise a grand scale; empires lost and won, heroes and heroines fighting in their thousands, declaiming and sacrificing on battlefields and forum, unimagined tragedies and triumphs that turned the world’s, possibly the galaxy’s, history on its face. Epic events with epic challenges and epic poems […]

Alternate history and steampunk - settling the ambiguity

Steampunk themed photo: Kyle Cassidy

When people ask me about my books, I say “Thrillers – alternative history thrillers. They’re set in a world where the historical timeline changed in the past and a different looking world evolved.”

But the reactions can be interesting. Here’s one typical conversation I had at a book […]