Hi there! My name is Alan and I’m a sci-fi writer based in Greater London in the UK.

On this website, you’ll be able to find all the latest updates about my upcoming novels and novellas, as well as an active blog and links to my social media channels. My current area of focus is on my Augment Saga, an epic, centuries-spanning hard sci-fi adventure series.

A little about me…

First things first, I have a deep love for sci-fi—watching, reading, or playing. If it involves space or futurism, it immediately has my attention. You’ll find a growing collection of SFF book reviews on my blog. I’ve always been interested in space, and enjoy keeping up with the fascinating work going on with astrophysics and astronomy.

I have a ton of hobbies, mostly to do with visual media—photography, illustration, graphic design, hand-lettering and calligraphy. But I’m also a member of a local archery club, I’m a prolific videogamer, and I have played the guitar for over twenty years (but that doesn’t mean I’m any good!)

My favourite videogame by a wide margin historically has been Elite: Dangerous—the online space combat and trading simulation game. But I’m not precious about genre, so I’m just as at home playing Dark Souls or Doom as I am Animal Crossing or Mario. Once I start talking about videogames, you’ll find it difficult to get me to stop!

For my day-job, I work as the administrator for my local church. I am married to Emma, and we have two wonderful children, all of whom have been a brilliant support in my writing journey.

Great! So, why writing?

I didn’t originally set out to become a writer, I just sort of fell into it.

When I was a young child, I used to make-believe that I was the commander of a starship, adventuring across the galaxy. Much of the background lore for my Augment Saga can be traced back to these early games, and I’ve had the story developing in the back of my mind for most of my life, in fact.

In 2009, while at university, I decided to try getting it out of my head and down into a coherent story. Originally I thought I’d do a web-comic series, but that didn’t pan out. Then I thought I’d write a novel, but I didn’t even get through writing the first chapter! I ended up dropping the entire thing for over ten years.

It wasn’t until 2019 that I decided to make another go of it with proper research and planning. Fellow SFF author, Drew Wagar, is to blame for this sudden burst of inspiration. A couple of years prior, he orchestrated a remarkable, ambitious, risky (and somewhat infamous) series of community events in the Elite: Dangerous universe in order to write the officially-licensed novel, Elite: Premonition. The result was some of the most engaging content in the history of the game, and the subsequent book was excellent.

And so with renewed enthusiasm to dust off my previously-abandoned project, I found I could finally get through it.

At last, in 2020, I finished my first full-length novel, From the Grave of the Gods, and its prequel novella, The Re-Emergence. Two books in one go, giving birth to the Augment Saga.

Both books were published in 2021 and are currently available from Amazon and other retailers.

But that wasn’t the end, and the Augment Saga continues to this day… You can check the progress of my work on my Books page, and I routinely post about them on my blog and on social media.

Stance on Generative AI

Fuck AI. Simple as that.

I do not and will never use it and you can be confident that all of the stuff to do with my books, from research to production to promotion, are 100% human-made.

I do not condone the use of generative AI in the arts, or as a replacement for any form of creative output, and its inherent unreliability makes it completely unusable as a research tool. Those who use generative AI are creatively bankrupt charlatans and I will not support their “content” in any way.

• If you wrote a book with AI: No you didn’t, you hack grifter.

• If you have an AI generated book cover, I am going to assume you also used it to write the words, in which case, see above.

• If you use AI to create promotional materials for your book, stop it; you’re still stealing copyrighted material from human artists.

• If you used AI to help you research material for your book, there’s a high likelihood it’s full of egregious errors that the slop machine hallucinated because it is designed to please you.

Generative AI is theft. Large Language Models and image generators have been trained on gargantuan piles of copyrighted material stolen from fellow authors and artists by tech billionaires who think they’re entitled to profit from the entire creative output of the planet while making it impossible for human artists to live off their own work.

The use of generative AI in any capacity has been shown to rewire mental pathways associated with cognition and intelligence through reliance. In other words: It actively makes you less capable of thinking for yourself.

And even if this were not true, generative AI is having a measurable negative impact on our environment, with datacentres guzzling ungodly amounts of water and exacerbating shortages in the already impoverished areas in which they have been (and continue to be) built. AI datacentres are also behind social media right wing bot farms that influence the outcomes of democratic elections.

Do not use generative AI. It is inherently and profoundly unethical.

No, whatever it is you just thought of: Not even for that.