Star Trek Strange New Worlds Toward The Night by James Swallow
Waterstone's Rose Lane in Canterbury
My #StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds novel TOWARD THE NIGHT is out in paperback this week - I'll be joining fellow author @unamccormack.bsky.social at Waterstones Rose Lane in Canterbuy this Thursday to sign books & talk Trek! Tickets are still available at the link! 🖖
www.waterstones.com/events/james...
The 1st published superhero RPG in history, too!
IME, most agents don't engage with tie-ins unless the margins are good.
The Star Trek Battle Manual by Lou Zocchi from 1972, later withdrawn for legal reasons, would become the basis for the long-running Star Fleet Battles tabletop wargame.
Space Patrol, a sci-fi tabletop roleplaying game published by Lou Zocchi's GameScience in 1977, heavily influenced by Star Trek.
RIP Lou Zocchi, master of weird dice & creator of the d100 Zocchihedron; also a key figure in #StarTrek games history, writer of the 1st (unlicensed) ST tabletop wargame that evolved into Star Fleet Battles + publisher of Space Patrol, arguably the roleplaying game that set the tone for ST RPGs. 🖖
(At Gatwick Aviation Fair): "Bring me the head of IG-88!"
THUNDERBIRDS: HIDDEN DANGERS - INTERNATIONAL RESCUES - A Short Story Anthology
New blog: Thunderbirds Are Go! Announcing THUNDERBIRDS: HIDDEN DANGERS - INTERNATIONAL RESCUES, a collection of all-new original short stories from @gerryanderson.bsky.social, edited by myself & Andrew "A.C." Clements, coming later this year! Read more here: jswallow.com/thunderbirds...
I still have all the GW reissues from this range... 🖖
I've been working on something very cool with the Anderson Entertainment team over the last few months... All will be revealed today!
I remember the bomber jacket Lucas wears in the novel as described was one owned by Peter Morwood...
Ian was slightly nonplussed when I told him how surreal reading that story was for me, but generously inscribed my copy 'For the REAL James Swallow!'; raising a🍺. 4/4
Vertumnus includes the story "The Odour of Cocktail Cigarettes", a first contact tale where advanced aliens test humanity to see if we're ready to join the galaxy at large; the POV character recruited to the team solving their puzzles is a science-fiction writer...whose name is James Swallow! 3/4
Queenmagic, Kingmagic cover
The Coming of Vertumnus cover
Ian Watson's #Warhammer stuff is wild, but my 2 favourites of his are Queenmagic, Kingmagic (a must read for any boardgamer) and his short fiction collection The Coming of Vertumnus (for a weirdly specific reason). 2/4
A great pity to learn the ineffable Ian Watson, brilliant author & a founding father of #Warhammer fiction, has passed on. I will never forget being on a Warhammer 40,000 panel with him where he *Spake Thusly* for the whole hour, answering all questions in character as Imperator Chosen Scribe. 1/4
Back atcha.
I talk to Jay about some book reccs in his newsletter, read more at the link...
The maps are really neat. I used the Discovery and Leonov (with some modifications) as ships in my Star Frontiers campaign.
The thing about Kubrick, he was such a perfectionist, he would only film the moon landings on location...
Well done Pat.
And so to #Salute53, for some gamery... 🫡
Black t shirt with NASA logo & synthwave style sunrise art.
Final #MoonShirt of the week: NASA Synthwave Sunrise. Welcome home #Artemis!
My 2p on covers: I despair of browsing shelves to see title after title that looks near-identical, same compositions, framing, colour palettes, fonts... It's one thing to follow a broad convention/form ("spaceship = SF"), but when everything literally looks like everything else, I lose interest.
Hard agree to all of this; you could swap out your references to SF/fantasy for any type of crime/thriller genre & this is just as true...
The glut mentality in publishing (all the similar titles in similar sub-genres with similar-looking covers) seems ultimately self-defeating to me. It drives away readers who don't want the Current Shiny Thing & even people who like whatever "it" is eventually get oversaturated...
Your comments about TCM + debuts ring true across the board, though!
Essential reading:
Thanks for your insights. I wish I could get a similar read on the state-of-play with crime & thrillers too...
Grey t shirt with blue art of a 1970s Shuttle and red NASA text.
Thursday's #Moonshirt: 70s NASA Shuttle
You get it.
