Building the Polity was a gradual process for me that started back in the 80s when, searching for somewhere, anywhere to get something published, I discovered the small presses. These were mostly A5 chapbooks (though some were larger) published from someone’s home and with a readership of no more than a couple of hundred. My interest was SFF so I ordered anything related and read it. I discovered that most of the stories were science fiction whereas before I’d been working on a fantasy trilogy, which now still resides in my files.
So science fiction… Even the fantasy I was working on leaned more in that direction anyway – I was more inclined towards the logical consistency you find in SF while the supposed fantasy elements were technological – super-science. I started off with a story about a man whose cryogenically frozen brain tissue was used to run the body of a cyborg player in a game similar to American football. He was then used as a disposable asset to kill off some revolutionaries. The story was called “Another England” and was published in a magazine called Back Brain Recluse in 1989. However there was very little of the Polity there. Continue reading
Authors are influenced by all sorts of things – their favourite writers, their childhoods, the amount of caffeine consumed at any one time. Sometimes though the influences that shape a book can come from stranger places, or show themselves in unusual ways. 
Getting off my butt to run is hard: I don’t like running. I’ve just eaten. I am going to get cramps. I have something else to do. It is far too late to run. I can always do it tomorrow. I’m tired. 
In an 1895 notebook, Samuel Clemens (who you might better know by his pen name: Mark Twain) wrote,
You know, one of the coolest things about SFF is how it invites us to mothball our skepticism and explore just about any metaphysical concept. Avatar Aang lives in a world where reincarnation is inarguably real. So does Rand Al-Thor. Just so, Narnia is a world with a concrete moral order, and the Marvel universe is absolutely lousy with gods. Fate, karma, magic, ghosts – you name it; we’ve got a franchise for it.
Write what you want to read, write what you know, but just damn write.
I have the devil’s own luck when it comes to titles, at least as far as that there Jonathan Oliver at Solaris is concerned.
One of the things that motivated me to write The Four Legendary Kingdoms was a desire to explore humanity’s fascination with myths, in particular, the myth of the Twelve Labours of Hercules.
So you’d like to write a military science fiction series. Good. You came to the right place. I’ve written some, and would be happy to share my secrets, the first of which is to understand the true nature of business that you hope to be part of. No, it isn’t the book business. What you’re planning to do is join the entertainment industry.
One of the joys of writing novels over writing for the screen is that your budget is infinite and your imagination is unfettered. You don’t have to worry about the cost of the number of suns your planet orbits around, nor about the practical effort required to have half a dozen alien races, none of whom conform to a basic upright and bipedal morphology, appear repeatedly and interact with your human characters.
Civilian Reader 