Patrick G Cox

It is the year 2021. Hopefully an improvement on the year 2020, though it seems almost to have taken the attitude of 'hold my beer'. On a personal level, 2020 saw my books reaching an increasing audience and progress on two more and a couple of other projects. It has also been a year of near isolation, thanks to the Covid-19. Mind you, that has had its advantages as well. Reflecting on the isolation aspect, I have to acknowledge that it has, at times, been difficult, though with video calls now (BIG SciFi…

The Harry Heron Series boxed set is finally complete and now  on sale through Amazon Kindle wherever you are at a very reasonable price. Six books in one box.

With the publication of Harry Heron: Hope Transcends, the story arc is complete, though I have at least one spin-off book in the making. For now, though, I am focussed on ways to bring the six books together as a "Boxed Set" in both print and Kindle versions. First will be the Kindle set as, for the moment, a paper version will probably be rather expensive. Step one in the process has been to get Kindle Direct Publishing to group the books in their system as a series, so we now have The Harry Heron Series…

Two of the Harry Heron titles are currently displayed on the American Book Fest site under the heading of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is always a great feeling to see your books on display on another site, and I hope to see more there at some stage. For the moment however, my attention is all on getting ready for the publication of the final (for now!) book in the Harry Heron series -- Harry Heron; Hope Transcends. It is scheduled for publication in late July, and it will be the culmination of quite a…

Funny how things seem to pile up when you're busy, and with Spring now Sprung and Summer upon us, the garden is making demands that keep me away from the keyboard, the woods and my Shelties insist on outings (strictly local and strictly within the 'lockdown' rules here!) ... All of which means that writing is currently something done in snatches when the muse is upon me, or an idea has taken shape for one of the books I'm working on. Plus there's always work needing doing on something around the house…

I guess one thing the Coronavirus (Corvid-19) is teaching us is that the more we get around, the more likely we are to encounter something we have no natural resistance to. This has been a major theme for science fiction writers for years. A quick glance at Wikipedia's list of disaster and "end of the world" fiction in books, television and film gives a good overview. I think the first such story I read must have been War of the Worlds by H G Wells, the twist there being that the technologically superior…

There are a range of opinions on that question! in the years I was growing up a great deal of science fiction was in the dystopian field (a lot still is!), and it certainly influenced some of us. Like the 'western' genre it often promoted the lone hero who triumphs through determination, ability and courage. It certainly has a huge influence on those who still follow that idealised view. There is certainly some evidence to suggest that certain types of story do colour our view of the world, though perhaps…

Science fiction is a curious genre in many ways. Thinking back to some of the books and authors that introduced me to the science fiction field, it often strikes me how much of what they wrote was impractical or simply outside the realms of physics. Among those is one story which centred around a ship propelled by light, and others that envisaged rocket propulsion systems. Others, notably Asimov, Heinlein, Vonnegut, built on the science then available. Unsurprisingly many of the things they wrote about…

With climate change so much in everyone's mind it seems appropriate to examine a few ideas on how humanity might end up having to think about our future habitations on our world. As you would expect, writing Science Fiction a writer needs to give the way humans might need to live on a different world a lot of thought. Personally I think we are a very long way from being able to "terraform" another world to fit our rather specialised needs, so, how would we adapt? What would we be realistically able to do…

Being an author is an interesting, and sometimes challenging, mix. You're constantly having to juggle ideas for your next book(s), identify the research, market your existing catalogue and find space to actually write something. This is true whether you're published by a 'traditional' publisher, or an 'independent'. It is up to the author to make sure the story hangs together, that the background research is sound, and, of course, the written word is going to hold your reader's attention. I find that once…