Author Archives: Michael

Kate Dylan – My Top 5 YA Sci-fi Books

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, kindly contributed by Kate Dylan – author of the fantastic Mindwalker (and, recently announced, the upcoming Mindbreaker – due in September 2023). I read Mindwalker earlier in 2022 and it’s one of my favourite books of the year, a brilliant example of how YA science fiction can be both tremendous fun and incredibly powerful, so when Kate offered to talk a bit about some of the other YA sci-fi novels that have been released recently I thought it was the perfect topic for a guest post! If you haven’t already picked up Mindwalker I would strongly suggest you grab a copy, and Kate’s recommendations below should give you plenty more to look forward to reading too.

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Cath Lauria – Marvels and Monsters

Welcome to Marvels and Monsters on Track of Words, a brilliant guest post written by the fantastic Cath Lauria. With not one but two novels from Aconyte Books coming out in early 2023, each in a different IP, I asked Cath if she would be interested in talking about what it’s like writing stories in multiple universes, and what the similarities and differences are. The resulting article offers a really interesting insight into the life of an SFF author and the experience of writing IP fiction, and a few hints about what to expect from Terror World and Silver Sable: Payback when they arrive in 2023. Cath’s writing is always full of energy and enthusiasm, and that comes through here in a real sense of hope and excitement for next year, which I love!

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RAPID FIRE: Steven B Fischer Talks Witchbringer

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, where today I’m very happy to welcome back Steven B. Fischer to talk about his brilliant new Warhammer 40,000 novel Witchbringer. Steve and I chatted recently for an Author Spotlight interview and it was super interesting (you can check that out here), and the little glimpse we got into Witchbringer was more than enough for me to want to chat about the novel in more detail. With that in mind, in this interview Steve gives a great overview of what to expect from Witchbringer, including what it was like exploring the Scholastica Psykana and the nature of being a psyker in the Imperial Guard, keeping character conflict at the heart of the novel, looking for light in the middle of a grimdark universe, and loads more. Oh, and the relative merits of psychic powers in the real world!

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Track of Words Advent Calendar 2022

Hello and welcome to the 2022 Track of Words Advent Calendar – 25 days of reviews, interviews, articles, guest posts and more celebrating the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Each day between the 1st and 25th of December I’ll post something new, some posts written by me and others contributed by a host of fantastic SFF authors, so make sure you check back every day to see what’s new! You can look forward to interviews with both established and upcoming authors, roundups of some of the best SFF books (of various types) of 2022, brilliant original fiction, and loads of fascinating articles – some looking back at 2022 and/or ahead to 2023, and others tackling all sorts of interesting subjects from an author’s perspective. And that’s only scratching the surface!

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Nicholas Binge – 12 SFF Books of Christmas

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where I’m delighted to be joined by author Nicholas Binge for a look both back at 2022 and ahead to 2023. Author of Professor Everywhere and the upcoming Ascension (coming in April from Harper Voyager), Nicholas has kindly curated a whole host of recommendations for brilliant SFF books, so if you’re on the lookout for a great book released this year, or something coming next year to look forward to, look no further than this article. I’ve read and can happily endorse a few of these recommendations too, but there’s loads here that I’m now really looking forward to getting hold of!

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Monthly Roundup – November 2022

Hello and welcome to November’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. It’s been a busy month for me, in terms of both writing things to post this month and planning/commissioning/writing things for December. I’ll talk more about December later (how is it almost the end of the year?!), but for now let’s focus on November – eight posts this month (plus this one, which is a little earlier than usual) feels about right, and I’m happy with how everything’s turned out I think. As usual I’ll use the first part of this post to recap on all of the November articles, reviews and interviews, so you can check out anything you might have missed, and then I’ll use the second section to talk mostly about what you can look forward to next month on Track of Words.

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QUICK REVIEW: Snow White, Green Mantle – Jude Reid

Available in issue 32 of Grimdark Magazine, Jude Reid’s short story Snow White, Green Mantle is a sharp, bloody tale of desperation and survival in a world turned upside down. In a gloomy, run-down village on the edge of the woods, hunter Fionn is hired to do what the headman can’t, to take his daughter into the forest and slit her throat. She doesn’t relish the job but in a life always lived on the move, the prospect of earning a warm bed for the night is enough to get her to agree to it. Once in the woods, however, she soon learns that there’s more to the headman’s daughter than she realised, and the creatures who live away from the feeble light of humanity – the Othermen, who have reclaimed the world for themselves – want the girl for their own reasons.

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Firewall – James Swallow

Not content to delight readers with just his own original thrillers like Airside and the fantastic Marc Dane series, James Swallow continues to demonstrate his prowess with this genre in the tense, action-packed, utterly un-put-downable Firewall, his first Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell novel from Aconyte Books. Taking place in 2015, it sees Sam Fisher – black-ops expert and veteran of the secretive ‘Fourth Echelon’ anti-terrorist group – tasked with hunting down a deadly assassin, a fearsome opponent from Sam’s past long thought to be dead. An added complication is that Sam’s partner for the mission is his daughter Sarah, newly accepted into Fourth Echelon, father and daughter each trying to come to terms with the other’s role. Before long though, they’re caught up in a broader mystery involving a terrifying digital weapon named Gordian Sword, created by billionaire tech entrepreneur Brody Teague, with a potential impact beyond any trouble a single assassin could make.

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Lazarus – Sarah Cawkwell

Set in the alternative 19th century American Old West of the Wild West Exodus tabletop game, Sarah Cawkwell’s Lazarus is an action-packed tale of gunslinging lawmen, soldiers, spirit magic and horrifying technological experimentation. In this Dystopian Age blending steam power and hyper-advanced technology, Major Willa Shaw of the Union of Federated States is dispatched to the arid lands of Arizona to investigate the destruction of a young mining town named Provenance. Along the way she’s unhappily reunited with a figure from her past in the shape of Deputy Doc Holliday, the two of them forced together by circumstance as they piece together a puzzle involving questions over Provenance’s fate, horrifying human/machine constructs, and a dangerous new narcotic called Lazarus. The trail of death and destruction they follow leads inevitably to the threat of newfound conflict, and the unhinged genius of Lady Annabelle Hamilton.

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QUICK REVIEW: The Bahrain Underground Bazaar – Nadia Afifi

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and most recently included in the Lavie Tidhar-edited anthology The Best of World SF Volume 2, Nadia Afifi’s fascinating short story The Bahrain Underground Bazaar is a powerful tale of an elderly woman coming to terms with a terminal illness in the modern, digital world. Understandably scared, and worried about being a burden on her family, Zahra visits the ‘virtual immersion chambers’ of the Underground Bazaar where she practices for her own passing by virtually experiencing the deaths of others. When one particular visit raises more questions than it answers, Zahra finds herself compelled to try and understand the life of the woman whose end she experienced, hoping to find some clarity in what remains of her own life.

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