Lazaraki Canticles
-The dead were hungry. Weren’t they always? Milra’s shoulders burned. Twin pails of ungodly slop hung from her aching fingers, already beginning to reek. Her feet made great echoing clacks upon the filthy marble floor of the quad, too loud in leaden air. The spires of Aurapol’s Necropolytechnic towered over her, their shadows a twisted web in the light of dim twin suns. Their aspect was more gothic than it was organic, bone mixed with mortar and great bricks of crematorium ash combined to…
Parallel Worlds Issue 6
-In this issue, we revisit Babylon 5 to find out why it’s still relevant, take sides in the culture war in our discussion on The Rise of Skywalker, get to know the organisers of the UK’s largest wargaming convention, look back at nearly 100 years of Amazing Stories Magazine, choose our own adventure, buckle up for a BattleTech retrospective, and take a look at the biggest structures in fiction. 00:00:18 – Editorial 00:02:48 – Think bigger: megastructures 00:12:42 – Faster my stompy robots: an introduction to BattleTech 00:27:40 – Board game review: Lifeform. In space, no one can hear you…
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Self-pub roundup
-With the rise of the ebook and the internet, publishing a novel is no longer about access to a printing press. More and more authors, both debut and experienced, are turning to self-publishing as a way to reach more readers, gain an audience for a particularly adventurous or unusual idea, or as a way to capture more of the proceeds of their work. While self-publishing used to be the preserve of those who couldn’t get a ‘proper’ publisher to take them on, it is…
Miniature of the Month: Grak, Warlord of the Clan
-This place is ours! I was born in the dark, in a place of stone and dank, dripping water. I was strong — stronger than the weak who died to feed us. The first food I tasted was the flesh of my dead brothers and sisters. After a while, the best of us emerged from that place. We found others and waged war against anything that stood in our way. We live in the tunnels, in the old places where the Dwarves once lived.…
2019 in horror cinema
-The 2010s were a great decade for horror movie fans. 2019 brought us a wide variety of offerings, from Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan zombie hunters in The Dead Don’t Die to the high concept, Superman-as-slasher stylings of Brightburn. We take a look at a few of last year’s biggest releases, and recommend some gems you may have missed. The heavy hitters Us Jordan Peele’s follow-up to the barnstormingly brilliant Get Out is less immediately appealing than its predecessor, but it marries that film’s…
Interview – Julian Gollop, creator of XCOM and Phoenix Point
-British game designer Julian Gollop has been working in the computer game industry since the 1980s. Some of the games he made are regarded as being the best turn-based strategy games ever created. If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, it’s likely you’ll have played or heard of Chaos, Rebelstar, Laser Squad, Lords of Chaos or UFO: Enemy Unknown, which first introduced us to the X-COM franchise. Now, Julian is back with a new game, released in December 2019 — and he’s…
