Get your arse to the sale here: https://www.epicindie.net/summer-sale-2026

I'll be having a good rifle through the goods on offer, shaking them against my ear, sniffing them, and popping one or two in my virtual basket.

The Starved God, my specualtive evolution MASTERPIECE, is on there for just 0.99: https://books2read.com/u/bpL5Vq

The sale’s not on for long, so hurry the fugg up and grab a bargain xoxoxoxox

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ThomasNorford

That is all, goodbye.

Welcome to The Warp, the increasingly-unhinged, not-as-funny-as-it-used-to-be newsletter of the science fiction writer Thomas Norford!

It’s a packed low-content edition this egg-cycle, but first up, look serious, for we have sad news.

Sad news

Prolific British science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky is feared lost after his consciousness became trapped in an Amstrad Emailer when he attempted to upload his mind to a distributed neural network made of spiderwebs and Technical Lego.

Thoughts and prayers, Adrian!

Actual news relating to me the actual person Thomas Norford

They let me on the radio again

On the BBC Upload show with Rob Jelly to be exact. Once again I talked a load of zwollocks and said um and er a lot. Listen to it here - the interview with me starts at about 1 hour 14 minutes in, just after Uptown Girl.

Actual paid writing work excitement

My short story, The Doleful Shades, has been chosen for inclusion in the sixth iteration of the annual Fission anthology, brought to you by the British Science Fiction Association. It’ll come out in June or July.

Epic Indie Review of The Hogman’s Homunculi

The excellent folks at Epic Indie gave The Hogman’s Homunculi a very nice review which you can read here if so inclined. And make sure to check out all the other loveliness at Epic - all the articles and reviews pertaining to indie SF and fantasy you could ever want.

So now that you know The Hogman’s Homunculus and the Angelwing Massacre is worthy of your time and hard-earned pennies, please hit the button below and buy it.

The Button Below

Still not convinced? Then check out this fantastic video ad, produced for me by a top London ad agency at a cost of £50,000.

Noises

This Burdened Clay is going to be an audiobook, coming this summer and read in the dulcet tones of Sasha Jones.

Get ahead of the game by buying it on silent now.

Marketing masterclass

Blind date with a book and other goings on

We all know the public cannot be trusted to choose their own books and that the matter should be left to internet grifters. Hence the phenomenon of ‘blind date with a book,’ where chancers on Etsy or wherever will sell you a random book wrapped in brown paper for triple its value, along with a tea bag and some stickers.

On a similar theme, I am delighted to offer exclusively for Warp readers the following options, £25 each or two for £60:

Get stood up by a book

Blazing row with a book

Sit next to a weird book on the bus, and start getting worried when it stays sitting next to you and twitching even though the bus is half empty now

Did and didn’t, but mostly didn’t

This ⬇️ Substack note inspired me to think about what did and didn’t help me sell books this month.

DIDN’T: Having a book stall at a spring fair in a library where I was charging £9 a book while the library were selling off books for 20p.

DIDN’T: Talking shite on the radio.

DIDN’T: Being poor.

DIDN’T: Crippling social anxiety.

DIDN’T: Writing niche books which only strange people enjoy.

Writing tip of the month: be rich

This Instagram post made me realise that all I was missing, to really unlock my creative potential, was the free time and capital to visit a series of inspiring destinations around the world and arse about writing all day! Thank you successful Instagram person!

Reader’s Masterclass: LitRPG

For years I assumed ‘LitRPG’ meant firing books from cobbled together Rocket Propelled Grenade launchers like something from the A-Team, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that it is in fact a subgenre mixing fantasy settings with video-game style quest and progression mechanics.

Sounds like a load of bollocks to me, but nevertheless it’s about time the market catered to us oldies who remember when video games were loaded from cassette tapes or something called a ‘DOS.’

To wit:

LitTextAdventure

A new subgenre combining narrative storytelling with the mechanics of the narrative-heavy text adventures of the 1980s with characters making decisions in interesting situations and various consequences leading to further actions and decisions and so on and so forth, with rising and falling drama and some kind of resolution at the end.

Actual reviews of actual books which I have read.

In which I poke about on Goodreads and my Kindle to remember what I’ve read recently.

Mars: The One Star Review by Daniel Wald

Faulty Towers on Mars, sort of. A bunch of eclectic influencer-grotesques come visiting a ramshackle hotel on Mars, while the harried manager desperately tries to maintain basic safety and customer satisfaction.

This short indie effort has a decent premise and is kind of smirk-inducing without being laugh out loud funny. The characters get wearing after a while. The formatting is all over the place and there are too many typos, even for an indie.

🛎️🛎️🛎️

Suspended by Carmel McMurdo Audsley

Tells the story of Maggie Dickson, a real-life Scottish fishwife who was hanged for infanticide in the eighteenth century.

Meticulously researched as far as I know, with lots of details of what life was like in the fishing community of which Maggie was a part.
The writing is lowkey deeply weird - there’s almost no figurative language to be found anywhere in the book. The world and characters’ internal lives are described in unambiguous sentences, rather than ever being implied through interactions or dialogue. At no point do you wonder ‘what did that mean?’ or ‘how does she feel about that?’
No surprise to learn that the author works as a journalist because it’s more like a report than a novel at times, as much geared to relating information as to providing entertainment or tension. The story itself is remarkable though so the straightforward approach kind of works. And the writing doesn’t lack nuance or passion as such, it’s just the writing is very direct rather than anything being left for the reader to interpret, which is quite unusual for modern novels as far as I know.
🐟🐟🐟🐟

The Shadow Over Psyche Station by Yuval Kordov

This was jolly good. If you like HP Lovecraft or SF cosmic horror movies like Event Horizon or The Void, you'll enjoy this claustrophobic, religion-tinged tale set on a spooky space station.

👻👻👻👻👻

Monumental by Adam LG Neville

Even though Neville’s had popular movies made out of his books, like The Ritual, he’s technically an indie writer now because he’s set up his own little cottage industry to produce and distribute his books.

This one is a folk-horror / creature feature about a group of kayakers who stumble upon some very wrong shizzle during a paddle in Devon. Think The Wicker Man / Midsommar.

It’s tight and propulsive, and Neville is great at writing sour bastards, but the prose is a bit Garth Marenghi shonky in places - he needs a more ruthless editor I think. Still worth top marks though just about, and I read it in a couple of sittings. Not one for cow lovers.

🐮🐮🐮🐮🐮

Money

Substack now gives us the options of inserting financial charts in our posts for some reason, so here’s one for you. I literally have no idea what any of it means.

That’s your lot, warp drive set to fugg off! 🚀😘

Quick infospurt to let you know that the special intro price for The Hogman’s Homunculi eBook will expire in the next few days, so it’s your last chance to get a copy for just 0.99 before it goes up to 3.99. Act now or perish!

Get it from Amzon

Get it from somewhere else

I’ve had a few positive reviews; here’s bits of them:

What surprised me most was the depth underneath all the absurdity. Norford clearly has fun with his writing, and that energy is infectious, but he's also built something genuinely layered here. The relationship between Darov and Hissaq carries a lot of the emotional weight, and it works because neither character feels like they exist just to serve the plot. They feel like people with their own priorities who happen to be caught up in something bigger than them.

And this:

It is a unique work for broad readers, blending "deeply unpleasant scenes" with a cynical yet hilarious philosophical reflection on the fragility of civilization. It's a journey where the imagination extends far beyond any comfort zone.

You know what to do!

xoxoxoxoxox🚀

Just a quickie, dear subscribers. I made This Burdened Clay free on Google Play until the end of April, and lo and behold, Sir Jeffrey Amazon went and made it free on Kindle as well, but only in the US as far as I can tell. So fill your boots.

While you’re there, remember my new effort The Hogman’s Homunculi and the Angelwing Massacre is only 0.99 EVERYWHERE. How long for? Don’t know. Just get it - click the picture below to see the links to all the stores. Sales so far have absolutely whelming!

That’s your lot, ta ta. xoxoxox 🚀

At shitting last!

The lovely DansMonsters did the cover art and here it is:

It’s only 0.99 on Kindle - but not for long!

I’ll put it up to three or four quid at some point. It’s also on Google Play Books and it’ll be on all the other stores and there’ll be a paperback soon-ish.

Get it

What’s it about I don’t hear you ask. Well...it’s complicated, and I can’t quite remember all of it.

Um, there’s a hog wrangler who keeps birthing clones from his bottom, a minstrel who plays Jay-Z tunes, erm…a blue creature called Chad living in a sea captain’s mouth (you should see what lives between his nephew Tim’s legs), a biomechanical doctor’s receptionist abomination thing, my actual window cleaner makes an appearance, I think, and so on and so forth.

There are spaceships, explosions, stabbings, beatings, booze, drugs, farts, strangles, births, drones, poison gas, the galaxy’s largest homosexual orgy and lots lots more.

Here’s a quote from the book which makes no sense:

“Aye cully,” he began, “alack an’ wellaway, I be afeard George were rendered mighty crapulous by an ague i’th’morn. Bearded kidney, it be, brought on by th’ beef-witted gudgeon’s appetency for isotonic custard, leastwise according to th’ comely snoutfair his mama the cordwainer. Methinks a sanative o’ Bisto curd an’ a sippet o’ Queensrÿche would see ‘im right.”

“What are you talking about?” the guard said slowly.

Hissaq smiled with polite forbearance. “Mandem know George be a slugabed ram-goat, for reals. Belikes he be somewhither chirpsin’ w’th’ peng baddie what irons his trousers. I doth pray th’ wasteman’s grunion be sheathed afore the naughty maiden be with squirrel eftsoons. You get me rude boi?”

The book is set here in Cartreffi:

which is part of Lemuria, here:

It’s only 0.99 on Amazon at the moment, so give it a whirl if you’re so inclined. I bet you’ve wasted more money on shitter things in your time.

Give it a whirl

Still here? Alright, here’s the actual blurb:

Prince Darov spends his days carousing, annoying his brother and being waited on hand and foot, until a profane violation and poor financial choices plunge him into a maelstrom of scandal and blackmail. Could matters be resolved through the deployment of some goons for hire and an animatronic replica of his brother’s head?

No, no they couldn’t.

Meanwhile, a plague decimates the alien rulers of the planet, and Darov’s manservant Hissaq investigates mass murder and trades verbal barbs with an exiled naval captain who has a blue thing called Chad living in his mouth.

Together, Darov and Hissaq (and a cunning farmer who cannot stop birthing clones of himself) are propelled into a conspiracy reaching to the heart of the Trappist empire. Oh, and a war which could sterilise half the galaxy looms ever closer (that might be overstating things a bit).

Welcome to Lemuria, a world filled with weird places and hostile wildlife, inter-species misunderstandings and deeply unpleasant scenes. With a cast of weirdos including ditzy AIs, randy symbionts, a wannabe assassin and a biomechanical part-time doctor’s receptionist abomination, expect high jinx.

Phew, well that’s the marketing all done and dusted. See you for the next one!

Get the fuggin book

Welcome one and all to The Warp. Take refuge from the darkness and join me for a splurge of pabulum and self-promotion.

It’s an extra low-effort offering this month, which is just one reason why this newsletter and its attendant mental health concerns will remain FREE, always and forever.

First up, it’s the:

Shitty Facebook Writers’ Tip of the Month

God forbid anyone should learn any new words, for fuck’s sake.

While we’re on FB, here’s the:

Inexplicable Inclusion of Cake in an Illiterate Post of the Month

You need more than a literary agent I reckon, mate.

I do not see the relevance of balloons or cake, however, I accept that I might be one of those racist right wingers with no media literacy. That would explain my aversion to Dr Whom and Space Trek.

Don’t Save the Cat, Make an Alien Squirt Instead

There’s a well-known storytelling technique called Save the Cat, which involves showing the main character doing something righteous or heroic early on, so as to get the reader onside and invested in them. My new novel, The Hogman’s Homunculus and the Angelwing Massacre, features the main character accidentally causing a member of alien aristocracy to squirt like a fire hydrant. We are not the same, and I am also not like other girls and so on.

Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.

Cartography

Speaking of THHATAM, here’s some maps. The first one here was hand drawn by my daughter and will go in the book. The others were created on Inkarnate and are posted on my website somewhere.

The Goddamn Table Tops Weren’t Even for Sale

I lugged along my precious stock of Print-Despite-No-Demand books to this thing last month:

I sold: nothing.

I achieved: nothing.

I feel: nothing.

I am a shell, a ghost haunting my own life. There is no purpose, no catharsis.

But in better news:

This Burdened Clay is on sale!

For just 1.49, for a week or two. It’s on sale on Amazon already, everywhere else from the 21st of Feb, because reasons.

There’s never been a worse time to get your copy of this unsung classic, but knowing what we do about you and your self-destructive tendencies, you’ll probably get it anyway, you absolute nightmare.

Buy This Burdened Clay

Or if you prefer, buy some actual clay

I was going to put some snippets from actual reviews of the book here, including this magnificent review from Rule One Books Reviews but instead, here’s what the NME might have said about it if it was released in the 90s and they reviewed books (maybe they did, I can’t remember):

Plastic Horse / Portable Telephone Interface Idea

Glue a plastic horse to your portable telephone so all your pictures look like you were riding a horse:

Instructions:

Examples:

The Doleful Shades

I’ve written a short story called the Doleful Shades, and I’m going to submit it for consideration for this upcoming anthology. It likely won’t get chosen so I’ll probably end up posting it on Substack instead. Here’s a snippet:

The familiar routine helped slow his heartbeat and he was just wondering if there were any decent biscuits around when an amorphous, tentacled monstrosity crashed through the window ridden by his mother the sexy nurse, bellowing operatically at the top of her lungs.

It heaved chairs and a table out of its way, tore cupboards from their fixings, and squelched towards him. Benny screamed, flung open the door to an engulfing darkness then emerged from a refrigerated unit in the hospital morgue. Naked and shivering, he scampered across cool floor tiles past twitching bodies and through another door and was swamped by colourful plastic balls. Across was now up and he fought his way from a ball pit in a children’s playroom as brave, poorly toddlers and their mothers stared aghast at his naked form scrabbling upright. The tentacled thing burst from the ball pit with a roar, sucking several children into its unholy mass.

Book Shop Fetishism Wankathon of the Month:

Reviews of Books I have Actually Read (or Nearly Read)

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

File this under “sci-fi but we don’t call it sci-fi because it’s by a proper author who wins awards and stuff.” It’s about an academic in a future, flooded Britain trying to solve the mystery of a long lost poem.

Sounds a bit wanky, but it’s good , beautifully written and has very detailed climate disaster world-building. It does suffer somewhat from that solipsistic “we’re sensitive upper middle-class types so our sordid sex lives are, like, really meaningful and that" vibe. That side of it is quite boring and I haven’t finished it yet.

11 sonnet lines out of 14.

The Meg by Steve Altern

A fuggin huge prehistoric albino shark keeps eating people. Decent.

🦈🦈🦈🦈 out of 5

Infinity Gate by M.R. Carey

Sprawling, very impressive multiverse-spanning space opera adventure thing. I really enjoyed it a lot until about two thirds of the way through when I realised that - with the alternate sentient beings evolved from things like bears, weasels, and rabbits - this is a book for furries. I have read a furries book. Am I a furry now? Still, each to their own, I say. As long as they’re not hurting anyone.

🐺🐺🐺🐺🐺 out of 5.

Alien: Cult by Gavin Smith

I wrote a review on Goodreads for this one, and this is it:

A superior Aliens novel which regardless of the franchise, works as an excellent cyberpunk potboiler crossed with a sci-fi western. The world building and characterisation are great, and the prose clips along nicely.

I've read a lot of the Alien novels and many of them fail because they throw wave after wave of xenomorphs at the reader, deadening their impact completely. This novel takes a much more original approach.

👽👽👽👽👽 out of 5

That’s your lot, warp drive set to fugg off! 🚀

Before we plough through a bunch of increasingly laboured skits, here's a very special welcome from His King the Majesty Charles the III Third.

The trends and events of 2025 in writing and books and publishing and leaflets

Self-printing authors

2025 was a year of change and stability, of evolution, revolution, devolution and convolution. Authors redefined connection and cultivated new authentic brand avenues to brandify their uniqueness with strong marginal traction. Outreach through semi-permeable extrusions via e-email-mail remained the author’s best friend when it came to market adhesion, and niche sub-people took the spotlight in a welcome reversal of established confluences. Increasing numbers of both trad authors and indie bedwetters were printed on demand, or printed themselves.

Robot

Amazon sparked controversy with the launch of ABA, the Automated Book Avatar, designed to be an author’s all-purpose friend and assistant. For a monthly fee, Aba will attend book signings, argue about Brandon Sanderson in Facebook writers’ groups, organise Goodreads review bombings against the ideologically unsound, and deliver ill-informed advice to its peers about how to do writing.

Speaking of ill-informed, 2025 saw the rise of people who struggle to format a document in MS Word confidently explaining to the rest of us exactly how Large Language Models work and what we should think about them.

The year of the Boycott

Speaking of ill-informed again, Sally Rooney declared she would no longer publish books in the UK while Palestine Action remains a proscribed terrorist organisation. Others soon followed the Irish lit-bore’s lead:

• Colleen Hoover chose to withdraw her books from sale in the UK until the government confirms its unconditional support for Colombian freedom fighters FARC.

• Gruffalo star Julia Donaldson is on hunger strike until double child murderer Ian Huntley receives a full pardon.

• Becky Chambers joined Hamas.

• Sarah J. Maas has refused to write any more of her mommy porn dressed up as fantasy bullshit until the UK government agrees to lift the ban on badger baiting.

Grotesquerie

In a grotesque turn of events, BookTok became sentient and went on a spree of violent bestiality. It was last seen causing mayhem at the Seattle Furry Convention.

Speaking of unfortunate dressing up choices:

We would particularly welcome submissions from…

Speaking of authoritarianism dressed up as moral rectitude, The Be Kind Literary Agency sadly went bust after inadvertently making their submission criteria so ultra-specific that the only person in the world eligible to submit a query was this one person:

Good luck to them, I say.

Big Boy Books for Big Boys

In a blow to the woke industrial-chemtrail-climate hoax-gender-vaccine-5G-publishing complex, Big Boy Books by Big Boys for Big Boys made a welcome return, particularly in the indie scene. Highlights include these fine efforts, which spoke on a profound level to long-neglected Big Boy readers:

2025 Publishing Economics Roundup

Money exists; here’s what happened to it in 2025:

The Warp 2025 Awards

Like the Booker, but different.

The Most Intrusive Breathing Sounds I Have Ever Heard in an Audiobook Award

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes, read by Freya Miller. Seriously, go and listen to it, it’s like she’s having an asthma attack or something.

The Award for the Most Transcendentally Boring Writing about the Principles of Mining in a Fiction Book Ever

Hold up the Sky by Cixin Liu. There's pages and pages of this shit.

The Frankly Unnecessary Level of Bumming and Rimming in a Mainstream Book Award

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis.

Most Inane Sentence from an Actual Traditionally Published Book which Presumably Underwent Some Kind of Professional Editing Award.

Congratulations to Greig Beck with his novel Europa for this absurdity:

She gagged a little as they vanished in the orifices and bet they’d be finding any other egress holes on his body further down.

Not exactly George Eliot is it.

Deal of the Year Award

This Burdened Clay half price on Amazon!

Also, the Anomic Bombs audiobook is out now, and now in American.

Please, it’s my birthday. 🎂

Bored now, I was going to list some actual real indie books I've enjoyed this year but I'll do it in January instead. Warp Drive set to Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!🚀

Hello my lovelies

I’ve got some freebie codes for my audiobooks, woo whom!

Many thanks to those of you who have already surrendered precious Audible credits upon my works - I cherish and appreciate you more than you will ever care, and if I knew who you legends were I would send you a token of my appreciation, such as a token of some kind.

For the rest of you slackers, fill in this simple form and I’ll email you a freebie code. And perhaps you will find it within your heart to leave an honest review…

BUT there’s only 25 freebie codes per book, per marketplace, and it’s only for those in the UK or USA. I’ll dish codes out on a first come first served basis. There’s a little bonus at the end of the form.

So jump in - I’d always rather give freebies to my subscribers than to oddballs on the internet.

Listen to samples here:

Anomic Bombs:

The Starved God:

Thank you xoxoxo

That’s right friends, the audio version of my sci-fi anthology Anomic Bombs is now available on Audible (and Apple, I think, but you’d have to check) both in the USA, the UK and possibly other places too. It's narrated by the excellent Jared Masar, an American man. Scroll on for samples!

Anomic Bombs USA

Anomic Bombs UK

The book consists of four short stories, and one novella, as follows:

• Story number one is called Love and Other Bioweapons and is about two aliens venturing from their vast hive on a dangerous and exciting mission. It features a horrendous birthing scene. Here’s the first bit of it:

• Story number two is called Lamia. It’s set in the near future and is about a disturbed young man who slowly unravels after taking a lethal but crippled alien into his care. There’s a funny bit with a cat.

  

• Story number three is a novella called The Sacred Furcula of Yukiang the Bird-whale. It is a light-hearted, exciting adventure set on a distant planet which humans share with other sentient creatures, with rich world-building and distinctive characters. A royal equerry discovers that human survival depends upon a marshmallow toasting fork, which has unfortunately been embedded in a predatory creature’s brain. The story contains robots, monsters, some plants, and a funny bit with a cat. I’m working on a novel called The Hogman’s Homunculi and the Angelwing Massacre, set in the same world with the same characters.

• Story number four is called Scourge of the Unblessed. Tonally, it’s the most straight-faced entry in the book, like one of those po-faced fantasy novels. It’s set in the same world as my previous book, The Starved God, hundreds of years before the events of that novel. It’s about a jaded monster hunter teaming up with a mysterious girl in a battle for survival. There are some exciting sword fights in this story and a very scary monster.

• The final story is called Child of Destiny. It’s quite a silly story, in which hapless aliens attempt to requisition the body of Taylor Swift the pop star in order to prepare Earth for colonisation, but pick the wrong Taylor Swift. Beyonce and Jay-Z also appear in the story, and there are references to Shania Twain and honey badgers. Here’s the first bit of it:

Get the Anomic Bombs audiobook now (please)!

Anomic Bombs USA

Anomic Bombs UK

Goodbye for now.

Desperate now, I asked my agent, “How about Cozy Holocaust Romance? Think about it, Camilla: a guaranteed happy ending with a frisson of the forbidden.” I’d interrupted her waxing lyrical about cold-opening Substack posts with semi-coherent, rambling introductions (“It creates immediacy!” she’d claimed. (I’m unconvinced)).

“Like incest,” I ventured, a little rashly.

Her ladle stopped halfway to her mouth before lowering again into her urn of gazpacho, and she daintily adjusted her headdress. As pitches go, I’d had better.

We were quiet for a while then - both agreeing to maintain the fiction that I simply had not said anything at all - and watched the waiter, Marco (a bouncy castle tester by day) display Samsonian forbearance as the loud American couple berated him for serving custard creams in Bisto when they’d asked for biscuits in gravy.

Welcome! That👆 was an exclusive sample of the introduction to this edition of The Warp, the science fiction newsletter from parochial writer Thomas Norford, for fans of science fiction newsletters by parochial writers such as Thomas Norford.

It’s a sparse edition this cycle, because I’ve been suffering terribly with writer’s blockage: I’ve been on the codeine due to an injured foot and haven’t had a dump for three days. And that’s a

PERSONAL BEST

As it’s nearly Hello Ian (“Halloween” for my American friends), I’ve hidden a tiny James Herbert somewhere in this edition [he’s a British horror writer in case you were wondering].

Can you find my tiny lurking Herbert…?

Adverts🤑

Unlike other newsletters and blogs (or whatever the hell this is), I’ll never charge a subscription fee or beg you to buy me a coffee, like some Only Fans grotbag. Instead, I’ve offered up my turd-pipe to the highest bidder and sold advertising space right here in these hallowed pages. So today’s edition is brought to you by the following sponsors:

Gary Lineker’s Pork Viscounts

Cool Blade Runnings

This Burdened Clay

This Burdened Clay available now!

Uncle Pat’s funeral

War

Writing Club Updates (Prison Poetry Edition)✒️

This month’s Riverbend Cafe Writers Club workshop was a very special one, as it was hosted by His Majesty’s Prison Gartree (Big thanks to Peter for putting us in touch with his key worker).

As was fitting given the surroundings, the theme of the workshop was Real Life, and the group worked with a bunch of the better behaved lags to produce some wonderfully moving poetry, like this piece by Big Steve in which he explores guilt and the power of redemption:

Actually it was me, by Big Steve

I wasn’t me.

He was asking for it.

The knife just went in.

He had it coming. I just saw red.

Red…red…RED (blood).

Look what he/you made me do.

Prison…time to think…guilt, swirling around my brain…his family…Where’s daddy? (His children might reasonably ask).

What if it was me? What if? WHAT IF!?!?

Actually it was me.

It was. It was.

I done it.

I shouldn’t have done it.

It was all my fault.

He was a prick though.

Fuck him.

And this playful ditty by former teacher Terrence, passed to us on a scrap of paper under his cell door in the High Risk Isolation Wing:

I am but flesh by Terrence

Some girls are so naughty they cannot be taught

Though you bribe, cajole, bargain or slap ‘em.

And if they insist on skirts so short,

What do they expect is going to happen?

Delbert wrote this hard hitting piece about his time as a rough sleeper:

Cold by Delbert

It’s cold.

So cold.

Why is it so cold?

Why oh why oh why am I so cold?

Because it’s January in Mansfield, and I’m trying to sleep under a Tesco’s Bag for Life.

The bag’ll probably last longer than my life, n’all.

Because I might die soon.

Because it’s so cold.

Shit, it’s cold.

I wish I had a house.

Or a flat.

Writerers’ Masterclass: Sci-fi Special 🚀

For this weeks’ Writer’s’ Masterclass, we’re looking at the crazy world of science-fiction subgenres.

Sci-fi thrives on reinventing itself as it pokes its tentacles into every nook and orifice of human technology, mythos, and experience, but it can be hard to keep up with the bifurcating categories of everyone’s favourite mega-genre. So read on, and learn about the latest trends so you can tailor your masterpiece to the market and be proper down with the kids and that.

Subgenre: Hope-punk

What is it: Tales which espouse radical optimism and kindness in the face of adversity. Low-stakes. Nice. Boring as arses. Often provides helpful reminders that racism is bad. Not to be confused with Hoe-punk (horticultural sci-fi - The Death of Grass, The Child Garden, etc).

Notable works: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, Parable of the Sower by Octavia “DON’T FORGET THE E” Butler.

Subgenre: New Weird

What is it: Surreal fiction with grotesque elements, often combining gothic and fantasy with sci-fi.

Notable works: Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, Downfall: The Self-Destruction of the Conservative Party by Nadine Dorries.

Subgenre: Hard-to-follow-so-it-must-be-good-Punk

What is it: Books that are hard to follow and bewilderingly held up as masterpieces. It can’t be that the author is simply terrible at explaining what is actually happening in the story, so it must be, like, a classic that only sci-fi buffs can handle. Everyone says so, so let’s just go along with it, yeah?

Notable works: Dahlgren by Samuel Delaney, Blindsight by Peter Watts.

Subgenre: Written by A Proper Writer so don’t Call it Sci-fi-Punk

What is it: Books written by respected authors who are better known for non-sci-fi, and/or classic sci-fi books which bear comparison with non-sci-fi classics. Often with a self-consciously non-sci-fi looking cover, these books allow chin-stroking intellectuals (like the people who give awards out) to enjoy sci-fi without having to associate themselves with such a popular genre - you know, like what oiks who haven’t even been to university might enjoy.

Notable works: The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Subgenre: Kerplunk-punk

What is it: Science-fiction adventure stories by, for, and about fans of the popular tabletop straws and marbles action game, Kerplunk. Seems dumb to me, but no dumber than LitRPG to be honest.

Notable works: [suitable pun goes here].

Time for the main event; it’s the…

🥊💣💥TCHAIKOVSKY SLAPDOWN! 💥💣🥊

It’s the biggest clash since Wayne vs Sally Rooney, so hold on to your fillings coz shit’s about to get lairy.

Round one: Non-human intelligence.

Pyotr composed some of the most beloved ballets in history, which often touched upon non-human intelligence such as swans (Swan Lake), and kitchen implements (The Nutcracker Sweet).

Adrian really knows his non-human stuff however. He studied zoology and psychology at the University of Reading and his works go balls deep into the psychology of everything from super-evolved spiders, octopuses and crows (Children of Time series), to human-dog hybrid soldiers (Dogs of War), mad AIs (Service Model) and lots more. If you wanted someone to write, say, a romance about your toaster falling in love with a squirrel or something, he’s your man.

He did lots of books about people who can change into animals but that all seems a bit Twilight to me so I haven’t read them.

Result: Win for Adrian

Round Two: Eyebrows

Pyotr’s eyebrows were (I assume he’s dead but I haven’t checked) mediocre to say the least. Half-brows almost, which start well enough at the nose-bridge before running out of steam as they weakly grope for the temples.

Pyotr’s brows are a bit like mine in fact, look:

Adrian’s brows however combine the exotic flair of Ming the Merciless, the bushy authority of Dennis Healy, and the comb-over abandon of prime Bobby Charlton. Masterful brows, just look at them:

Result: Win for Adrian

Round Three: Awards

Here’s a list of the major awards Arian has received for his work, and he’s been nominated for loads more too, reflecting his position as a leading voice in British science fiction (it says here). Not bad, not bad at all.

What about Pyotr? Was his genius recognised? Boy, was it! While he can’t boast as many awards as Adrian, he won a few absolute whoppers.

The Order of Saint Vladimir (Fourth Class): Awarded by Tsar Alexander III in 1884, recognizing his contributions to Russian culture. (never quite made the step-up to third class though did you, Pete?)

Lifetime Pension from the Tsar: a tasty guaranteed income and possibly a nice hat.

Became an award: the International Tchaikovsky Competition was established in 1958 in his honour.

While Adrian may have the numbers, he has the advantage of living in a validation-economy, where everyone’s a winner so there’s no hurty feelings and kids get a school an award if they fart without shitting their pants ffs.

Result: Controversial draw

Round Four: Precociousness

Pete started composing age four. Adrian took fifteen years to get Empire in Black and Gold published, and by the time it did he was 36. No contest.

Result: Win for Pyotr.

Round Five: Tabletop gaming:

While still a student at Reading Uni, Adrian invented one of those table top role playing games (never understood the appeal myself) called Bug World. The game was the origin for some of his fantasy books which I don’t really like either, as I may have mentioned earlier.

Adrian’s proper into that sort of stuff - here’s what he said about it one time:

Pyotr didn’t have a clue about table top gaming and never played at all as far as we know, let alone invented a game of his own. In fact, given that he suffered stage fright a lot, maybe he would have benefitted from a turn at Dungeon Mastering and being put on the spot, eh what-what?

Result: Win for Adrian

OVERALL RESULT: WIN FOR ADRIAN

Reviews: NOT SCI-FI SPECIAL! (apart from one of them)

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup by J.L Carr

Delightfully far-fetched tale about a village Sunday League football side who contrive to win the FA Cup, told through the recollections of the club secretary and newspaper clips. The captain’s wife being vegetablised in an accident adds poignancy.

⚽⚽⚽⚽⚽

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

PREPARE YOUR ANUS!🦌 This book has a serious amount of bumfoolery in it. And rimming. And drugs. And violence. Spermatazoon. Sometimes all at the same time. 😱

It’s a quasi-meta tale in which the author supposedly recalls the heady days of his youth when he was starting to fool around with boys and with writing. Local serial killers and weird cults provide an oppressive, ominous background to the lives of the super rich, super stoned kids in Bret’s life, and the whole thing is told with that weird, immediate yet detached style that the author’s known for. His best novel for years, and so say I.

🍑🍑🍑🍑🍑

Big Planet by Jack Vance

A sci-fi classic, in which a delegation of Earthmen are ship-wrecked when they go to inspect the unruly human colonies of

BIG PLANET.

Shizzle rapidly goes south, of course, leaving the fellas to travel 40,000 miles on foot to the Earth outpost to await rescue. It’s inventive and well written with lots of weird societies not getting on with each other, casual executions of the locals when they get a bit mardy, and classic old-school sci-fi babes coming along for the ride and causing all sorts of bother. A bit dated, but good for a larf.

🪐🪐🪐🪐🪐

That’s your lot. Warp Drive set to Piss Off!💥🚀😘

Word up! Just a quickie to inform you that the Epic Indie Summer Book Sale is now on, but only until the 12th of July.

My disturbed offspring This Burdened Clay is only 0.99 (though if you haven't got it already I don't suppose you ever will) and there's lots more indie SF and fantasy goodness besides.

Take me to the sale

Quick reminder that my/Thomas Norford’s latest novel, This Bungled Cake is still on sale for 0.99 currency units on Kindle. Thank you.

Get This Burgled Cape

Also, I am/Thomas is serialising my/his new novel The Hogman’s Homunculi and the Angelwing Massacre on Substack. I’m/he’s releasing a new chapter every Tuesday as part of Tome Tuesday, a collaborative thing where you can find loads of excellent long reads from talented indie authors, and also me/him.

In fact, there’s lots of these special day things on Substack. Whatever your taste, there’s something for you. To wit:

The Warp Guide to Special Day Things on Substack

Note: some of these do not exist.

• Mundayne: Monday is the day for vain people sharing really fuggin boring holiday photos, twee words of wisdom, dull as ditch water autobiographical tidbits and whatever.

• Tome Tuesday: See previous section.

• Mednesday: Unhinged and bitter tales from the manosphere.

• Furrsday: Freaky, borderline illegal bestiality tales from those fuggin weirdos who like dressing up as cartoon animals. Absolutely not recommended.

  

• Sci-Friday: Sci-fi short stories, flash fiction, micro-fiction, meta-fiction, proto-tales, nano-narratives, mega-novels, uber-series. Great place to find the latest gland-punk and lab-meat recipes.

• Sharturday: Faecal fun.

• Soonday: [TBC].

See also:

• Thirst of the Month: The first day of every month is reserved for the attractive women of Substack to post the most banal shit you can imagine and still get hundreds of likes and re-stacks from hordes of simpering male fans. I love it.

The Actual History of Science Fiction

What do science? How has fiction? Read and have an educate.

The very olden days:

There wasn’t any science fiction in the very olden days, because there was no science-not-fiction. People were too stupid to have science so they couldn’t tell what was real and what was made up anyway.

In a sense, the whole world was a big sci-fi fantasy mashup. Rain dances, burning witches, immortal souls, Stone Henge, all that shit.

Remember: people in the very olden days were idiots and we are better than them and less racist and much more rational.

The olden days

The first proper work of science fiction was of course the Epic Of Gargamel, which presumably was some kind of erotic Smurfs fan fiction but I don’t know.

French paedophiles.

The next major step-forward for sci-fi happened when French paedos got involved. The seminal text is of course Cyrano de Voltaire’s A Comical History of Noncing in the Cavernes of the Moone, in which enlightened French intellectuals flee the boring strictures of 17th Century life to caves on the moon where they can molest children in peace. A little dated by today’s standards, but it can claim to be the first modern science fiction novel.

The barren times

After the French paedophiles died of syphilis, there followed decades of nothingness on the old sci-fi front. Mostly because there was a lot going on, and people didn’t really have the time books and stuff: Mongoloid hordes sweeping through Europe and America, the Hundred Years War ravaging the Roman Empire, French Revolutions breaking out across Europe, something to do with monasteries.

While not busy being exterminated, Native Americans did manage to write some sci-fi during this time, such as Running Bear Vs the Yautja which while rubbish, can claim to be the first modern science fiction novel.

Early 19th Century

1818 saw the publication of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus written by Mary Shelley, probably with a lot of help from her boyfriend.

The novel is the earliest known prequel in the well-loved Alien series, and marks the beginning of the mad scientist trope as Baron Von Mr Weyland invents an animatronic Guy Pearce which goes on a rampage around Lake Geneva until Dracula bursts out of his chest.

Fans were of course disappointed at the lack of xenomorphs, but it can claim to be the first modern science fiction novel.

There was probably other stuff written around this time but I couldn’t find any.

The “science romances” of Judge Jules Verne and HG Wells.

Well before the modern phenomenon of romantasy mega-bestsellers, HG Wells and Judge Jules were pumping out what was dubbed Science Romances. War of the Worlds is of course the archetypal spicy reverse-harem alien-cross-breeding, enemies-to-lovers tale, and can claim to be the first modern science fiction novel.

Stuff that was actually good: 1940 to 1980

For a brief, blessed time, when the Americans finally got their act together, there were some sci-fi novels around that were actually quite good. They were pretty sexist but so what? Many had women with big boobs on the cover, and everything’s gone downhill ever since.

Funnily enough, Sheffield indie band Pulp were something to do with it. I think they started a magazine or something.

This period saw classics like The Stranger Who Was Much More Enlightened than You about Sex and Stuff, You Fucking Square, by Robert Heinlein.

Women stick their beak in

When nobody was looking, women decided to take over publishing and all the bookshops like some kind of alien invasion and then not allow men (apart from simps and perverts) to write or publish anything ever again. To be fair, women have produced an incredible diversity of science fiction. Look:

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which a planet populated by ambisexual creatures is used to explore notions of gender, oppression and identity.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, in which a dystopian future is used to explore notions of gender, oppression and identity.

The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia E. Butler, in which an alien invasion is used to explore notions of gender, oppression and identity.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers in which the adventure of a rag-tag group of space farers is used to explore notions of gender, oppression and identity.

See?

Speaking of misogyny, it’s time for this week’s:

Richard Measuring Contest

In which we measure the biggest Dicks in sci-fi.

First up:

Richard Matheson:

Ironically (or appropriately) for the author of The Incredible Shrinking Man, I couldn’t find definitive info on the length of this particular Dick, so I asked AI, which told me:

In photos from the 1950s–70s, Matheson often appeared alongside other writers like Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling. Bradbury was around 5'11" (180 cm), and Serling was about 5'4" (163 cm). Matheson typically looked slightly taller than Serling but shorter than Bradbury — suggesting he may have stood somewhere around 5'7" to 5'9" (170–175 cm). Let’s split the difference and call it 5’8”.

Richard Bachman.

Given that Bachman is a pen name of Stephen King, he technically doesn’t exist. Therefore, his height = 0’0”. Bad luck Richard.

Richard Laymon

While more a horror writer, some of Laymon’s stuff had a sci-fi tinge, like Flesh in which an alien thing feeds on human fear. Again, I couldn’t find a definitive height, so I asked AI:

In photos from conventions and signings, he appears to be of average height — likely somewhere between 5'8" and 5'11" (173–180 cm). But without a confirmed source, that’s just an educated guess based on visual comparisons. Let’s call it 5’9.5”

Philip K. Richard

The author of classics such as I Dream of Electronic Sheep, and Bladerunning was a respectable 5 feet, 10 inches tall, suggesting that LSD and being mental don’t stunt your growth after all.

Result: It’s a win for Phillip Kenneth Richard!

Massive Johnson bonus:

Here’s science fiction author Les Johnson, author of The Spacetime War. He’s approximately 370 feet tall, bigger than a space rocket, look:

Science Fiction (and maybe fantasy) Picture Quiz

Guess the thing from the picture clues. It might be a genre, a book, or a writer. Answers at the end of the post.

Piece of piss.

1:

2:

3:

4:

5:

6:

7:

8:

9:

10:

Reader Reviews

Steve, 46, hard hat tester.

Used to be into the Dragon Lance books as a kid, but now the world has broken his spirit he mostly reads Jack Reacher and Andy McNabb books. Never read anything written before 1975. 3 out of 5 ⭐⭐

Marc, 27, unemployed

Mainly into Scandi-noir and thinks he’s better than you because he read Infinite Jest. Male feminist, despises women. ⭐

Margaret, 94, retired potato farmer

American Psycho not graphic enough for her liking, thought Blood Meridian was a comedy. Lives on the Dark Net, possible connections to Mossad.

Absolute lunatic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Picture quiz answers

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1: Cosy Fantasy (Sebastian Coe-Sea-Fanta-Sea)

2: Ursula Le Guin (Hearse-Ewe-La-Leg-Win)

3: Douglas Adams (Do-Glass-Adams)

4: Jurassic Park (Jew-Ass-Sick-Park ji Sun)

5: Dune (Jew-N)

6: Andy Weir (Hand-E-Weir)

7: Post Apocalypse (Poster-POC-Lips)

8: I, Robot (Eye-Robe-Hot)

9: Snow Crash (Snoke-Rash)

10: Half a King (Half a king, innit)

Right, that’s your lot. Warp drive set to Fuck Off! 💥🚀

The sale’s only on for a week, so pull your knickers up, click the link below (or above) and peruse to your heart’s content.

Based Book Sale

The 2025 Summer Based Book Sale

Welcome to Summer…

Read more

a year ago · 20 likes · 4 comments · Hans G. Schantz

Welcome to this galactic year’s edition of The Warp, the science fictional newsletter of cringe-lord Bovril-simp author Thomas G Norford. It’s slim pickings entertainment wise I’m afraid because I’ve got to mow the lawn and do some ironing and I want to get a load of washing done while the weather’s nice.

Also, be warned that this edition of The Warp contains extra spite and very little science fiction.

It really is Marine Mammal Rescue Day by the way, look.

Actual News About Me The Actual Author Thomas Norford

I went to the Coventry Book Extravangananzaganza recently and sold a total of 13 books, which is a

PERSONAL BEST

I forgot to take any pictures so here’s a picture of someone else’s stand at a book fair somewhere I found on the internet. Good work Jason!

In other news, nobody’s bought my new novel so I’m working on another one.

Football Head Clapping

Props to this fellow I spotted at the semi-final of the FA Cup yesterday who applauded a goal by slapping his own head repeatedly as his other arm was in a sling. It’s like a metaphor for something but I don’t know what.

Accidental Writing Prompts From My Facebook Men’s Mental Health Group

Some lovely prompts here which will get you thinking and get those creative juices flowing so freely you’ll consider calling an ambulance.

Nauseatingly Pretentious Quotes On Writing

I’m guessing the the majority of my subscribers don’t use Notes, Substack’s more civilised answer to Twitter, so you might not be aware of the Notes culture. It’s very welcoming on the whole but folks there can be quite self-important and insular. I don’t want to be insular, I want to outsular. So here’s a peek into this cozy bubble and some of the bestest, pretentiousest comments about writing I’ve found there in recent weeks (with apologies to the authors - this piss take comes from a place of love and humility and only a smidgen of choleric disdain).

Burnt hair and redemption news:

And the Lionel Messi of pretentiousness:

Sensitivity Reading For People Who Think They Have Autism But Don’t Really

As we all know, doing good literature is impossible without sensitivity readers. They’re crucial in ensuring that content is thoughtful, inclusive, and respectful. In some ways they’re the most important and talented people in the whole world of writing, even more gifted than literary agents. After all, they must be super talented because how else could they speak for entire demographics?

With this in mind I’m starting a new side hustle on Fiverr or somewhere as a sensitivity reader specializing in issues pertaining to people who think they have autism but don’t really. It’s an untapped but rapidly growing market.

So I will thoroughly read your work, examining for bias, harmful tropes, and negative representation of people who think they have autism but don’t really, and together we will create well-realized, respectfully portrayed characters who think they have autism but don’t really.

I also specialise in characters who diagnose everyone in their life as a narcissist because they’re probably narcissists themselves. Plus, for a small extra fee I will rewrite your favourite classic novel but give the main character chronic fatigue syndrome.

Don’t be a spaz, hit me up!

Battle Of The Barneses

This edition’s epic battle is between two titanic Barnes: acclaimed author Julian and Liverpool and England midfield legend John.

Let the Battle of Barneseses commence!

Round One: First Names

Julian is a rubbish name. John is a solid choice for any Englishman.

Winner: John.

Round Two: Booker Prize Wins

While Julian has only one paltry win for The Sense of an Ending, that’s one more than John.

Winner: Julian.

Round Three: Memory and Truth

A significant theme in Julian’s work is the nature of memory and its unreliable relationship with truth (according to Google). His novels interrogate how personal recollections shape individual identities and how history is constructed from subjective experiences. For example, in The Sense of an Ending, the protagonist grapples with the recollections of his past, leading to revelations about the malleability of memory and the distortions of truth (again, according to Google).

Julian’s obviously a bit confused about the whole memory and truth thing. John meanwhile has spoken and written powerfully about his experiences of racism and how these shaped him, and about how racism continues to manifest through systemic discrimination and bias. Clearly, John knows what’s what on the memory and truth front.

Winner: John.

Round Four: Dribbling

As a 79 year old man, the chances are that Julian can dribble with the best of them. Happens to the best of us - just dab with a tissue when you’ve finished. However, John’s explosive pace and close ball control allowed him to dribble past defenders with ease, as his legendary 1984 goal against Brazil demonstrates.

Winner: John.

Round Five: Body Fluid Balance.

Are Julian’s bodily fluids in balance? Who knows. He looks a bit gaunt to me so I’m guessing not. As the inventor of Lucozade Sport, John meanwhile was the first person in the world to understand the importance of hydration and electrolyte replacement. Don’t take my word for it, let’s hear from the man himself:

Winner: John

Round Six: Rapping

No contest.

Winner: John

Overall winner: John

It’s a drubbing for the literary wannabe and a fine victory for John Charles Bryan Barnes MBE.

Indie Books Which I Have Read and Recommend To Other People To Also Read.

Early Adopter by Drew Harrison

Here is the review of this book I wrote on Amazon, which explains it better than I ever could:

This is a superb collection of eight science fiction stories which vary from near future, Black Mirror style portrayals of humans and technology interacting in disquieting ways, and others more distant in space and time.

Most of the stories are fairly traditional in terms of having a clear plot and characters around which the action revolves (it's worth pointing that out, as short story collections are probably more likely than novels to veer into the avant garde, and not everyone's into that sort of thing). A couple of them though, particularly The Final Artist, were a little more experimental - that story is essentially a human and an AI system arguing about whether machines can truly create art. It still ended with a nice plot twist, however, and all of the stories are accessible.

The quality of the writing is excellent throughout, and the characters are believable and sympathetic. There were bits of clunky prose here and there but that's nit-picking, really, and possibly down to personal taste. The author has obviously done some sterling research, especially for the stories with a medical angle like To Run Again and Homonia. To my surprise, I find I am able to forgive the author for writing in 2nd person present tense in one of the stories.

What impressed me most about this collection was the philosophical depth and sheer imagination of the premises. Many stories have an elegant, allegorical force to them which will stay long in the memory. The issues raised by the stories emerge organically from the plot and characters' lives, and no easy answers are offered to the complex philosophical questions - this is a book which trusts the reader to reach their own conclusions. It's not dry at all despite being philosophical - there's action, dark humour, a little bit of twisted romance and a smidgen of gore - something for all the family.

I wanted to know more about the wider world hinted at in Commericalopolis, and Homonoia was probably the most straight-up exciting story. But my favourite was The Emulated, in which a computer whizz creates a vast simulated world and wrestles with accidentally becoming a sort-of god. It distilled the things I liked best throughout the book - the way it combines religion and technology to pose philosophical conundrums bears comparison with A Case of Conscience by James Blish, or Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. The characters' moral quandaries, and the implications of their potential courses of action, created an acute sense of dramatic tension.

Learning Journalism Where Writers Rise by Sal Nudo

I enjoyed Nudo's creative nonfiction book Far From Mars, in which he shows us the lives of nine interesting people from his home town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, so I was keen to read Learning Journalism. In it, Nudo gives us a detailed account of his time pursuing a masters degree in journalism, with the people who helped him, his successes and setbacks along the way. It's told in a journalistic sort of way, I suppose, with attributed quotations, sources and so on. But at the same time, the prose has a warmth and personality. He could teach most traditionally published writers a thing or two, I reckon.

Because Nudo summarises the things he learned on the journalism course, his book serves as a decent guide to writing in general, for fiction and non-fiction alike, and I dare say there are a few life lessons in there as well about the value of curiosity and listening. There are well-argued discussions about the future and value of journalism, and this is where the writer is most passionate.

The book isn't full of earth-shattering excitement or revelations, but it is captivating in its own quiet way. This is because, I think, of the author's genuine interest in other people, his self-effacing authority and obvious pride in his home town. Readers will enjoy spending time with the narrator.

The Dog: A Cynic Biography of Diogenes by RB Lamb

RB is active on Substack Notes and is a top human, so I was delighted to discover that he is an excellent writer too with a demented sense of humour: here’s the review I wrote on Amazon:

Well...this was of the more unusual novels I've read but I loved it. On the face of it, it's a fictionalised biography of the philosopher Diogenes - his madcap life and interactions with other notables of the period. Anachronisms (great cameo from the Wu Tang Clan), rude humour and tongue in cheek asides abound, and the story doesn't just break the fourth wall but demolishes it and commits acts of grotesque degeneracy on the rubble. The narrator himself features in places, and doesn't escape a satirical mauling.

Aside from the silliness, the book is written with verve and startling imagery and wordplay. Rather like Douglas Adams or someone like that, the comedy and the philosophy are all part of the same package. It's a deceptively clever book as well - I know nowt about philosophy, but the book weaved in profound questions among the mayhem.

Riotously entertaining and brilliantly written - do yourself a favour and read this absolute hidden gem.

The Wayback Machine by Daniel Falatko

Another corker from an active Substack writer, this one about a dude called Nathan who was a mover and shaker in the 2000s indie music scene in New York. In the present day, our Nathan is trying to piece his life back together and become relevant again by leaking sordid details of stuff that went on in the scene back in the day.

It took me a while to get into because at first I thought it was trying a bit hard to be hip by name-dropping lots of cultural references from the 2000s, but it clicked with me when I realised it’s actually quite a soulful, if cynical, story about how cultural trends are group identities are shaped. So while its set in a specific time and place, it’s got universal appeal and relevance - quite profound really. Brett Easton Ellis is the obvious big name comparison.

Nathan is a great anti-hero, the prose is marvellous and the tension builds into a gripping and climactic end.

That’s your lot. Warp drive set to Fuck Off!

Hello all, just a quick one to direct your attention to the Epic Indie Spring Sale which is on now.

There’s loads of indie goodness on there, including my own The Starved God and Anomic Bombs for 0.99 each. Give it a butchers.

Take me to the sci-fi bit

Take me to the fantasy bit

The wait is over – the EPIC Indie Spring Book Sale has officially begun! Running 5–12 April, this week-long celebration of storytelling brings you over 140 discounted reads from some of the most exciting independent voices in fantasy and science fiction.

Whether your imagination craves epic fantasy realms, alien invasions, dystopian worlds, or a bit of magical realism, you’ll find something to devour – all for a fraction of the usual price.

This isn’t just another book sale. Every title has been handpicked to spotlight the freshest voices, boldest ideas, and most unforgettable tales in the indie scene. It's the perfect opportunity to discover your next favourite author while championing the writers pushing boundaries in the genre.

By the way, I was on BBC Radio talking about my latest novel, This Burdened Clay. Check out the interview here if you’re so inclined.

Welcome to the latest edition of The Warp, the typo-riddled vaguely science-fiction-related newsletter of worst-selling science-fiction writer Thomas Norford.

It’s a packed edition this cycle with nuns, Brian Sanderson, suicide jokes, flight details and more!

Actual news about me, the actual writer Thomas Norford who writes actual books

I’ve got a new book out, not that anyone seems to have fucking noticed. Here’s a picture, some blurb and a link for you to get your copy. It’s only 0.99 Earth credits for a limited time, apart from on Kobo where it’s 2.99 because I forgot to change it and I can’t be bothered now.

Buy This Burdened Clay

Fran Gera is a children’s social worker, capable and dedicated. Her addiction to horror movies is a harmless distraction, her volcanic temper and addiction to opiates, not so much. Two damaged boys are assigned to her caseload. Caleb is rebellious and street-smart, his cousin Blake, creative and lonely.

While Fran navigates her professional and personal life, a phenomenon unfolds. People are spurning the hollow diversions of modern life to join hands, to feel the soil against their naked skin. To commune. Campaigners herald the dawn of a utopian cause, but as the behaviour of its followers becomes increasingly bizarre, talk of sinister origins gains credence.

As events epochal and personal collide, Fran’s world falls apart around her. Aided by a former terrorist and a reprehensible social media edge-lord, she must deliver the boys to a place of safety. Together they are propelled on a journey into loss, self-discovery and unspeakable violence.

No one will be left untouched.

PLEASE buy it

Want to point and laugh at me and not buy my books in person? Well, I’m going to be at this thing at the Three Swans Hotel in Market Harborough on the 22nd of March. If you are accidentally in America, don’t worry, travel couldn’t be easier:

Simply fly from New York to London, then take the Heathrow or Gatwick Express to central London. From St Pancras International, board an East Midlands Railway train to Market Harborough. Then it’s a short walk from the station to the hotel. The entire journey takes around 11-13 hours, including transfers. Safe travels!

I’m also going go-karting on the 10th of May for a mate’s stag-do. All my subscribers are welcome to come along, I’m sure he won’t mind.

PLEASE

A serious item about men’s mental health

If there’s one thing more depressing than being a man, it’s being a man who writes, or indeed reads, science fiction novels. Most men kill themselves every three minutes in the UK alone. Heavy, am I correct (as the kids would say)?

Help is at hand. Man Cavern is Uttoxeter’s largest men’s mental health charity (the charity is large, I mean, it’s not a charity for the largest men, although the morbidly obese are welcome), and offers a space where men can hang out instead of hanging themselves. I joined their Facebook group, and it cheered me right up. Look:

If that kind of support doesn’t clear your depression right up, nothing will. In which case you may as well kill yourself.

Stay strong, brothers!

Apropos of nothing: real life inventions inspired by science fiction

The Warp Science Fiction Newsletter is well aware that the newsletter often contains little to no science fiction content, so in an effort to provide the kind of content my tens of subscribers crave, here are some examples of real inventions inspired by science fiction.

Video calling: Video calling appeared in the film Metropolis, where the character Joh Fredersen uses a phone device with a visual component.

Communication satellites: Inspired by an Arthur C Clarke story but I can’t remember which one.

Bionic Implants: These first appeared in Shakespeare’s SF-horror classic Hamlet; the Dane remarks of Polonius’s prosthetic penis: Methinks it is like a weasel. (sleek but hairy).

Milk: Inspired by The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, in which an ambisexual Gethenian blacksmith uncontrollably secretes a mysterious, nutritious substance during kemmer, making a right mess of his/her bellows.

Bacon: The Lord of the Flies which is sci-fi, actually, invented the idea of cutting up pigs and eating bits of them, most notably during the cosy beach barbeque scene.

Writing: In the old days, people simply remembered things and/or said them out loud. With the introduction of the Mistborn series, the writer Brian Sanderson invented writing. More on Sanderson later.

Dystopias: The first classic dystopian novel is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, in which humans are reduced to soulless functionaries of the state. Humans loved the idea and have been running with it ever since, off and on.

Special investigation: are modern science fiction book covers shit?

Book covers used to be carefully crafted works of art, worthy of profound reflection in their own right, especially science fiction novels. Now they are boring and shit. Why?

The answer lies in the economics of the publishing industry and the rise of portable telephones (some of which are so small they can fit neatly in a large pocket or handbag).

In the olden times, readers would leisurely browse books in cosy wood-panelled shops, but they can’t now because of Donald Trump, people with blue hair and nose rings, the Tories and Israel.

Instead, readers scroll through reams of covers on their phone at a rate of knots. Bang bang bang bang bang. Therefore, covers are are designed to hook the attention-denuded customer quickly, to be instantly recognisable as genre X or sub-sub-genre Y. As a result, covers now are low-effort, soulless and corporate.

Look at these beautiful early editions and and their shitty modern versions side by side:

Sickening isn’t it.

Now this is a book cover. Don’t click on it whatever you do, or god forbid you might actually buy the fucking thing.

Brian Sanderson quiz

Have a go at this light-hearted quiz. Clue: every answer starts with B for Brian!

1. Who invented magic?

2. Who invented writing?

3. Which writer is the only person in the whole world who provides worthwhile writing advice?

4. If a writer wants to avoid the pitfalls of literary flair or moral complexity, which writer should they emulate?

5. Which writer has the bestest, normalest and tolerantest fans in the world?

6. Who knows all the secrets of the universe?

Scroll to my bottom for the answers!

Book reviews: nun-fiction books I haven’t read special

I am a science-fiction writer, so understandably this newsletter has focussed on that. My probation officer informs me, however, that there is also something called ‘nun-fiction’ and that if read some, it might help me ‘round out my character.’

So in the spirit of self-improvement and keeping my nose clean, here are some well known nun-fiction books for your perusal.

In this House of Brede by Rumer Goddon

Something about a woman who stops doing a normal job and becomes a nun instead.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Nun by Denis Diderot

A woman who doesn’t want to be a nun (one assumes) is forced to become a nun.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The story of some women who are already nuns (one assumes), and continue to be nuns (one assumes) as the story progresses.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Brian Sanderson quiz answers

1. Brian Sanderson

2. Brian Sanderson

3. Brian Sanderson

4. Brian Sanderson

5. Brian Sanderson

6. Brian Cox (see below)

Captain, Warp drive is set to Fuck Off!

Goodbye!

Hello darlings, I’m excited to announce that my book, Anomic Bombs, is available as part of a promotion on Smashwords to celebrate Read an Ebook Week 2025! This is a chance to get my book, along with books from many other great authors, at a discount so you can get right to reading.

You will find the promo here starting on March 2, so save the link:

Smashwords Sale

And Anomic Bombs is available half price on the sale here:

Anomic Bombs

If you wouldn’t mind taking part in promoting this celebration of ebooks and reading, please feel free to share this promo with your friends and family. Just forward this email to anyone who would love a chance to find their next favorite book and, as the name suggests, read an ebook!

Thank you for your help and support!

Happy reading!

Sinister dynamics come to the fore.

Read Chapter One

Read Chapter Two

Read Chapter Three

Buy This Burdened Clay

4: Section Twenty

Dear Ms Gera,

We write to express our deep concern regarding the situation pertaining to Caleb McGregor (your reference CC976551). At this stage we do not wish to make a formal complaint, in the hope that the situation can be resolved through cooperation and constructive dialogue. We all want the best for Caleb, that he might fulfil his potential and make a successful transition to a happy, independent adulthood. For this to happen, we believe our concerns need to be addressed.

As you know, Caleb is looked after by the local authority under a voluntary agreement, as set out in Section 20 of the Children Act 1989. This means that you as the local authority do not hold parental responsibility for Caleb, and Natalie can legally remove him from foster care at any time. However, Caleb’s final child protection plan states: “As a contingency measure, the local authority will seek parental responsibility for Caleb through the courts if Ms McGregor chooses to prematurely end the Section 20 agreement.”

It is difficult to see this as anything other than formally-worded blackmail, and wholly contrary to the principles of cooperative working extolled in the procedures listed on your website. Although the child protection plan is no longer in effect, there is a strong implication that any misstep by Natalie would result in draconian measures.

Natalie agreed to the Section 20 arrangement on the understanding of it being a temporary measure, allowing her time and space to address the merited concerns around her capacity to care for her son. For her part, Natalie has completed the Bloom domestic abuse programme, engaged with substance misuse services, and has had no contact with her former partner Hayden Stanfield or her step-father Jed Fox. Other actions set out in the child protection plan, such as hair-strand testing, have not been completed due to resource issues within the local authority and its partner organisations, not through of any fault of Natalie’s.

Meanwhile, the Section 20 arrangement has remained in effect for over six months, during which time the local authority appears to have done nothing towards securing a stable, permanent home for Caleb, whether with his mother or elsewhere.

Your online procedures state: “The key objective of planning for permanence is to ensure that children and young people have a secure, stable and loving family to support them through childhood and beyond. Every reasonable effort must be taken to prevent drift and delay for children or young people and to support them to move out of the care system where appropriate.”

Clearly, in this instance this objective has not been met, and we believe the drift and delay in Caleb’s case has directly instigated an escalation of his behaviour and concerns for his welfare. Caleb has been subjected to multiple changes of both foster placement and social worker. Family time with his mother has never been formally agreed, which risks eroding the attachment between mother and son. He has no idea where he will be living in six days, let alone in two years. It is little wonder that his behaviour has been challenging.

A conversation with a solicitor suggests we have grounds to sue the local authority for the multiple failures detailed above. However, this would be stressful and upsetting for all concerned, not least Caleb himself. We sincerely hope that our concerns will be taken seriously, and that an initial discussion with you can be arranged forthwith to agree a way to move forward.

Yours Sincerely,

Ezra Lubek and Natalie McGregor.

*****

Fran phoned Natalie and left a voicemail, suggesting a time and place to meet her and Ezra the following day in town. It was hard to argue with their email, though she suspected that Natalie’s input into it was limited.

She sat in her Toyota outside the imposing Criminal Justice Centre on the outskirts of town, having just left a strategy meeting concerning a young girl who had disclosed dire sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her step-father. The mother, a hopeless heroin addict, had actively facilitated the abuse, filmed it, and distributed the video via electronic means to persons unknown. A stoic policer officer of vast experience wept as he watched the girl’s video interview.

A text message pinged up on her phone from a teenaged boy on her caseload. He had run away from his care home because the place was “full of divs.” She rang his number and got no answer, so texted him. He replied saying he was fine but wouldn’t disclose his location. Before she could decide her next move the phone rang. It was the lad’s former foster carer, who had discovered him half an hour ago sleeping in her shed. She would feed him, get him showered and take him back to the residential home. A few phone calls later and Fran had arranged to meet the boy and the keyworker at the home to discuss how to support the placement.

Fran rested her head on the steering wheel, wondering at the sheer collective weight of other people’s misery pressing down on her. Such intricate networks of carnage and banal misery, such baggage. Fran remembered from an old uni lecture that stories need an inciting incident by the end of the first act, to drive the narrative impetus. But for many people, maybe most, the story of their life was simply a series of miserable, chaotic happenings. No character development, no plot revelations, just an increasing spiritual toll.

For ten minutes she sat there in psychological torpor with her phone on silent, allowing the recesses of her mind to process while her higher order functioning took a back seat.

She cracked her knuckles, sighed and looked at the phone screen. There was a text from Natalie agreeing to meet the next day, and a voicemail from Caleb.

“Alright Fran, it’s Caleb. Sorry for being a dick the other night, and thanks for sorting stuff out with Jenny and Derek. They won’t take no shit from me but they’re good old duffers. Listen, I’m up for getting a DNA test or whatever and for you contacting Ben. Not sure he’s my dad to be honest, he’s an ugly prick after all and I’m a handsome bastard as you know. I’m just curious really. Anyway, laters Fran, you’re a baddie.”

Back in the office, she spent a couple of hours working on reports and assessments and fielding emails. She stopped typing mid-sentence, wondering at something Caleb had said in his message.

“Jonie,” Fran called to a younger colleague, “is baddie like slang for something, for the kids?”

Jonie laughed. “Someone called you a baddie? It means a woman with attitude who don’t take any nonsense.”

“Oh right, thanks.”

“With great tits.”

Fran sprayed coffee over her keyboard and wiped ineffectively at it with her sleeve.

Later that night, with her laptop perched on the arm of her sofa, she searched YouTube for Caleb’s putative father, Ben Meecham. The earlier uploads of Uptown Top Dankin, as he was also known, were little more than him playing video games in a cluttered room and swearing a lot with a massive pair of headphones on, but the more recent videos featured anarchic comedy skits, interviews, and caustic political commentary.

His satirical ire was not ideologically skewed one way or the other, it seemed to Fran, though he was frequently, and with some justification, accused of misogyny, extremism of various stripes and general offensiveness. His wit was not so much razor sharp, more like a baseball bat with nails hammered in, or a prison shiv.

His recent whimsies included Hottest Murdered Women of the Month; the Incel Hollywood Casting Agency; surrogate mother recruitment ads aimed at transwomen; the Brexiteer Student Exchange Programme; the Islamic State Paintballing Club; and inept poetry found on the gravestones of children.

Christ almighty.

*****

The following afternoon, Fran sat outside the Mahi Mahi bistro in the pedestrianised town centre with Caleb’s mother Natalie McGregor, and her boyfriend Ezra Lubek. A waiter wearing lederhosen and a lumberjack shirt brought them their coffees and disappeared back inside. The weather was warm but the sky was the colour of used dishwater.

You had to admire the strategy, she thought as she looked over the way, of camouflaging defunct shops with boards covered with pictures of actual, functioning shops. Why not save money and do the same for the whole town, like those fake propaganda villages in North Korea where the buildings are empty shells with painted-on windows? It would be a physical acknowledgement that human experience bears no relation to any underlying reality, that our inner life is only legible through an interface of signs and symbols. Fran didn’t really believe that, but remembered from her university days some French linguist saying something like it. Or maybe it was from a Philip K. Dick novel.

Her coffee was so hot it burnt her tongue, and she panted like a dog and flapped a hand before her mouth. Ezra seemed immune as he glugged his down and smiled at her. He was a regal, professorial type with flinty eyes and steel-grey hair. There was a certain full featured presence about him, and Fran sensed that he was used to people hanging on his every word. He towered over both of them even while sitting. He and Natalie certainly made a strange couple, visually at least; she was sharp-nosed, pale and angular. A wizened version of her younger sister.

“How did you two meet?” Fran asked.

“Ezra used to work with my step-dad, Jed,” Natalie blurted.

Ezra blinked rapidly, a muscle working in his jaw, and Natalie shrank a little. Then he smiled.

“That’s not quite correct, in point of fact. Jed was a caretaker at the university when I was reading environmental sciences, and he asked me for advice about this and that. I was aware of Natalie’s existence but we got to know each other properly at an exhibition centre where my organisation was holding a conference, just a few months ago. Natalie was part of the catering staff. While we’re on the subject of Mr Fox, I want you to know, Ms Gera, that I fully understand the malign influence he poses to Natalie and Caleb, and Caleb’s cousin Blake, come to that. I’ve spoken to Jed very recently about his unfortunate propensity for ignoring the strictures imposed by the local authority, and the need for collaborative engagement. I believe he took this on board, coming from me.”

Fran was impressed, despite herself. “Okay. Call me Fran, please. Like I said on the phone to Natalie, I couldn’t really argue with your email. There’s a lot of changes going on in social services which I won’t bore you with, I’m just glad you’re still happy to work with us, so thank you. Like I say to everyone, my job’s to make it so you don’t have to see me anymore.”

Ezra nodded slowly. “Such difficulties usually arise from mundane incompetence rather than any devious intention. I, we rather, certainly have no wish to lock horns. We just want what’s best for Caleb.”

“Of course.” Fran was acutely aware that Natalie was withdrawing from the conversation already, like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph in Back to the Future. She needed to bring her back in. “How have you been, Natalie? What are your plans?”

Natalie folded her arms, her eyes meeting Fran’s only briefly before sliding away. “I haven’t smoked weed or drank for months now, and I got the house sorted. I done the parenting course at the college. I done everything I was meant to. I just want Caleb back.”

“He’s a great kid, isn’t he? Got a real presence about him.”

Natalie’s expression was ambiguous and she merely nodded.

Jeez, she’s like a church mouse.

“Given Caleb’s age,” Fran continued, “if he chose to return to you right now there’s no court in the land that would pull him back out with a care order. But we still owe him a service, and we need to make sure he returns to you in a safe way. I know we’ve been heavy handed but things can break down when young people go back to their parents in an unplanned way, and we don’t want that to happen. So we’re going to do a risk assessment, which will involve you too Ezra, and that will inform a reunification plan, okay? Does that make sense?”

“That sounds satisfactory. With respect, I do hope it won’t take too long,” Ezra said. Fran ignored him and continued looking at Natalie.

“Yep, okay,” Natalie said.

“Great. There’s a meeting about Caleb’s situation next week at work, so hopefully things will get moving very soon. Are you happy for us to complete a police check on you, Ezra? We’ll be doing it anyway, to be honest.”

“That’s fine,” he said, after taking a moment to sip his coffee. “There might be some record of my student activism going a little too far. Nothing more.”

“You seem to be pretty au fait with policies and legislation and stuff.”

“I’m a product of the care system myself.”

Interesting.

“I phoned Caleb earlier and said sorry to him,” Natalie said. “It was my fault he went off on one with the moped and that. I told him who his dad is, but I never meant to upset him. I thought he was ready to hear it, but it weren’t the right time.”

“I doubt there’s ever a perfect time for that kind of thing,” Fran said. “I’m trying to contact Ben Meecham at the minute, to see if he’ll agree to a paternity test and we’ll take it from there.” Ezra remained impassive. “You’re a professor, Ezra, is that right?”

“No. I lecture part-time on environmental science, and I’m Regional Director of Business Development for Claret. I liaise with organisations to help them develop environmentally responsible policies. Cycle to work schemes and such.”

“Ah yes. Claret’s an environmental group, isn’t it.”

“A registered charity, yes. It’s a very exciting time for us at the moment, with the Hera movement taking off. You know Ms Gera, people everywhere, of their own volition, are taking a step back from everyday life to commune with nature, to feel the world against their skin. It’s a wonderful thing, a movement which has grown totally organically, worldwide.”

Fran remembered the weird man doing his scarecrow impression on the village green. And Chantelle eating soil, according to Blake. Communing with the Earth by literally eating it, it would seem.

Ezra was on a roll now, into lecture mode. “This year, Claret has introduced the Pomegranate Badge, with some assistance from yours truly. Businesses and public sector agencies can earn the badge if they can demonstrate their compatibility with the Hera movement. For instance, by allowing employees to take a moment during their busy day to go outside, feel the sun on their faces and the grass beneath their feet. Ultimately everyone benefits, including employers. Research shows that workers who have regular contact with the natural world are up to seventeen percent more productive. We were the first major charity to recognise the movement’s significance, I believe.”

“And Claret makes money by what, charging for training and materials, I assume.”

“We make no secret of that. Like I say, everyone benefits. The money is re-invested in environmental projects.”

“It wasn’t a criticism,” Fran said. “I was just trying to figure out how it works. It sounds fantastic, actually. Why pomegranates?”

“The Hera movement is named after Hera, the Greek goddess birth and family. Her symbol is the pomegranate, an emblem of immortality. The movement was originally Herra with two R’s. Healing Environmental Reconnection and Radical Awakening. A bit of a mouthful, admittedly. Someone made the connection with Hera the goddess, and the second R was dropped. It’s not really an acronym now, as such.”

“Hera was a vengeful sort if I remember rightly.”

He gave an amused snort. “Indeed. Zeus committed many wrongs against her, as have we against the Earth.”

“Right. Claret’s nothing to do with the Icer group, is it? The eco-warriors?”

“Absolutely not. Icer is a bunch of malcontent students with no vision or organisation skills, they just like spoiling for a fight. They are nothing to do with Claret or the Hera movement.”

Natalie stared into her lap, her coffee untouched. According to case notes, she’d had a run of terrible partners, all of whom subjected her to tyranny of one type or another. Real pieces of work, some of them, parasitic wretches who preyed on one vulnerable family after another. These men haunted the social care database like malevolent spirits, popping up here and there when least expected, like in horror movie jump scares. Ezra was not in that class, but the fundamental dynamic was still there in his relationship with Natalie, Fran thought sadly. Perhaps this was the best Natalie could hope for, a benign dictator.

*****

Chantelle Fox bellowed up the stairs. “Blake darlin’, you taken your meds?”

“Yeah.” The boy’s voice was on the verge of breaking.

“I’m going for a run. Addy’s got the dentist but should be back about four. There’s some of those yoghurts you like in the fridge, help yourself. And bring that washing down.”

“Alright mum.”

“Cleanse my bones in black feathers,” Chantelle muttered to herself as she did a few stretches and pulled on her trainers.

She left the house, walking for a few hundred yards before breaking into a light jog. She crossed the football pitch behind the house and waved to the landlord of the King’s Head who was walking his dog. Into her stride now, she neatly sidestepped through a wooden gate and set off along the bridleway towards the next village, avoiding the hardened ruts from horses’ hooves. Out here among the crops and trees and hedgerows, it could easily have been 1824 instead of two hundred years later.

Images of human artifice flashed through her mind: cars, social media, mobile phones and plastic Christmas trees. Affronts to nature. Of late, such things had inspired brief, intense flashes of disgust, a loathing of humanity’s ugly stain on the world as primal as one’s aversion to the smell of vomit.

But these things fell from her now, and she enjoyed the sensation of simply having a body: an array of systems of elegant and daunting complexity, working in concert to respire and digest, absorb and expel, expand and contract.

The past fell from her too: the drugs, the failed relationships, her father’s visits to her bedroom late at night, the madness of her childhood. All faded into grainy monochrome, carrying no emotional weight.

She wore a smart watch which measured her steps, heartrate and GPS location. She tugged it off and cast it away into the grass. She skipped over a narrow footbridge and ducked through a gap in the hedge, emerging onto a sun-drenched, hillside meadow. Gasping, she stopped and her pupils dilated despite the bright sunshine. Her body went about its mysterious business and she watched a bead of sweat form between the fine hairs on her wrist and roll away between her thumb and forefinger. She listened to the singing of the birds and the chirrups of insects and the noise of the wind moving through the branches of the trees. It was poetry in a language she thought she had forgotten, and she wondered if this was what being in love felt like. In her brain, the molecular origami of life had veered onto a new course.

Bending, she removed her shoes and socks and as her bare skin touched the soil she shuddered and her eyes rolled. There were no borders anymore between her and the sky above and the soil below. Earth spoke to her and through her in the voice of everything that had ever lived and everything that would ever live.

She felt a presence and welcomed it. Others needed to share this feeling with her, to commune. A man crouched in the long grass some distance away, wearing only his underwear and eating the dung of sheep. He looked up, saw her and began walking towards her.

In her waist bag she had a small first aid kit. Unzipping the bag, she pulled out a sticking plaster, tore off the wrapper and swallowed it whole. The man smiled at her and she smiled back, reaching for him.

Enjoying it so far? Then buy the whole ruddy thing on Kindle for just 0.99!

Buy This Burdened Clay

In which Fran goes on a date and we learn what the hell the Sagan Protocol is. Also, a game of snooker happens. It's more exciting than it sounds, honest - if you like unhurried character building that doesn’t move the plot along very much anyway.

Read Chapter One

Read Chapter Two

3: The Sagan Protocol

Marcel, Fran’s date, had texted with a last minute change of plan. He had secured them a table at a new upmarket restaurant on the outskirts of town, which according to the website served contemporary cuisine with a hearty, rustic ethos. The place was quite exclusive but he knew the maître d’.

She was late. Carried away by a gory audiobook, she had seared a brown arc into the white cotton blouse she was ironing, and spent ten minutes replanning her attire. She wasted more time finding a parking spot.

She was a little disappointed that they would not be eating at Mahi Mahi, the town centre bistro she had suggested. The latter venue was laughably hipsterish, with its collection of fixed gear bicycles bolted to the walls, paninis served on 1970s Californian license plates, and the No-Gluten Rootin’ Tootin’ Wild West Vegan Burger. But it was cosy, verdant with potted plants, and the chummy waiters sported extravagant facial hair.

As for this place, she was immediately struck by the stark minimalism of the interior, all glass and chrome and straight lines, with the kind of lighting that would be unforgiving to all but those blessed with supernaturally flawless skin. The place was odourless.

Marcel stood and waved her over. He wore a skinny fit suit jacket over a plain white t-shirt, and sported similar lustrous dark hair to a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur she had seen in a documentary, a man whose charm, looks and confidence had turned out to vastly outweigh his correctitude and business acumen. He had been murdered in prison.

Marcel air-kissed her then pulled her chair out for her to sit. “So you’re a liar,” he said.

“I am?”

“You’re never thirty-nine.”

She chuckled, despite herself. “Smooth.”

She was in fact a liar; she was thirty-three. She’d figured she might as well put an older age on the dating profile and use an unflattering photo, and have her suitors be pleasantly surprised. Managing expectations.

He smiled at her from across the table, showing large, excellent teeth. Real chompers. “Listen. I’m an old-fashioned chivalry kind of guy, I’m afraid. My parents raised me to treat women like queens, so I’m paying for this meal. No arguments.” His accent was ski-chalet posh, geographically ambiguous.

“That’s sweet of you, thanks. If your worst sin’s old-fashioned chivalry, then we’re good. I was a bit worried about how expensive this place is, to be honest.”

Fran was wearing a new bra, and the clasp was migrating up her back like some sci-fi parasite. She performed an odd roll of the shoulders and he peered at her, smiling without showing his teeth this time.

The young waitress who took their drinks orders looked familiar to Fran but she couldn’t place her. Marcel ordered a mojito, Fran, a lager shandy with lime. She looked around the room while they waited in silence. An immense square clock with hands of equal length and no numbers hung on the wall, above where the maître d’ stood staring at nothing. If the clock fell it would surely kill him instantly.

When the drinks arrived, Marcel turned his glass around and around, frowning at the wilted leaves of mint therein. “What do you do for a living, Fran?”

“I’m a children’s social worker. Have been for about, oh, ten years now.”

“Wow, that’s superb. How did you get into it?”

“I started off as a teacher after finishing uni, and I was working in this inner-city primary school in Derby. A lot of kids were really in a bad way, you know, neglected. Hardly able to use a knife and fork, some of them still in nappies. I did more social work than teaching anyway, so I thought I might as well retrain and do it properly.”

“Superb. That must be really difficult at times, yet so rewarding. I’ve worked with children myself, but I couldn’t do it day in, day out. Not for a public sector wage anyway.” Sorrow clouded the elegant contours of his face. “Some of the most valuable workers in this country are criminally underpaid. It’s a scandal.”

“Tell me about it. You’ve worked with children?”

“Yes, I go to Malawi every couple of years, working on education and sanitation projects. Building schools, teaching a bit of English. It’s not much but it makes a difference.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

Fran’s tramadol was kicking in, and she felt relaxed and happy to let him carry the conversation. He was clearly a bit weird, but nice to look at.

“It’s absolutely superb. The people out there live hard lives but they’re so…grateful for what they’ve got. They’re not tied down to stuff, material things. The kids are just superb. They love to learn.”

“They certainly looked happy in your profile pic. And what do you do for a day job?”

“I run a community interest company, providing locally sourced, organic produce for foodbanks. I believe that just because you’re poor and can’t manage your finances you still deserve decent food, not just corned beef and tinned peas. It doesn’t pay well but that’s not what it’s about. Besides, between you and me, there are little perks, particularly when it comes to certain tax benefits and sub-contracting arrangements.” He grinned wolfishly.

They sipped at their drinks and chatted about the menu for a few minutes, agreeing to forgo starters. When the waitress returned Marcel ordered grilled lobster with tandoori spices, shredded carrot, garlic potato rosti and blackened citrus mayonnaise. He smiled warmly and made eye contact with the waitress while ordering. Fran ordered the steak and ale pie.

The place was filling up now and Marcel raised his voice over the hubbub. “I love working with kids. They’re so much more honest than adults, more real somehow. You must see some shitty parents in your line of work. I’m a firm believer that parenting should be led by the child.”

“Oh? How do you mean?”

“Children know their own minds a lot more than we think and should have a say in how they’re cared for. Their voice matters.” Marcel paused, as if waiting for applause.

“Hmm, I see what you’re saying but parental authority’s an underrated concept, don’t you think?”

He looked at her as if she were bleeding from the eyes. “If you say so. I just don’t think parents own their children, is all. I always called my mother by her first name, God rest her soul. Anyway, there’s nothing special about the nuclear family, it’s just a product of capitalism and patriarchy. In Mali many people live in polygamous relationships and the children are raised by a community instead of being enslaved to the whims of one or two people. I envy them.”

“Enslaved?”

“You know what I mean. Have you travelled much?”

“Not really.”

“You should, it’s so fulfilling and a superb way to better yourself, but it takes a lot of courage.”

“And money, I’d imagine.”

He tapped and gurned at his phone while she sat in silence, until the food arrived. It looked delicious, though Fran was a little disappointed that her pie was of the sort with merely a lid of flaky pastry over a dish of filling, rather than a complete pastry enclosure like the ones from chip shops.

Marcel took a picture of his plate then frowned at Fran’s and pointed at her chips. “What the hell is that?”

“What?”

“They’re meant to be skin-on chunky wedges cooked in goose fat. Those are oven chips.”

She laughed. “Oh no, call the police. It’s cool, I like oven chips.”

“With respect, you’re not the one paying and the skins are where all the nutrients are. It’s not cool.” He flapped at the waitress and she scurried over. She asked nervously if everything was okay.

Marcel jabbed a finger at Fran’s plate. “Have a look at this and tell me what’s wrong with it.”

“Jesus Marcel, it’s fine, really,” Fran said.

“Um, is something missing?” said the waitress.

“It’s just the chips. The menu says—” Fran started, but Marcel interrupted her with a raised palm.

“No Fran, let her answer.”

The waitress looked pleadingly at Fran in silence, as if the answer might manifest on her face like Aramaic curses on the skin of a possessed child. Other diners cast sidelong glances.

“The chips, the goddamn chips,” Marcel spluttered. “These are a far cry, to say the least, from what’s specified in your menu. What’s your name?”

“Emily,” said Emily, the waitress. Fran’s jaw dropped as recognition dawned. This was Emily Orgill, the daughter of Caleb’s erstwhile foster carers. Poor kid.

“Well Emily, do you know the menu for this establishment in which you work, which pays your wages? Have you taken the trouble to familiarise yourself with the food which you serve to paying customers?” Receiving no reply, Marcel groaned and concluded with, “Take this away please Emily, and get it sorted.”

Emily disappeared with Fran’s plate and the maître d’ smirked beneath his massive, useless clock. Fran picked at the bread basket. She’d given up on getting her bra comfortable. Emily returned with the plate unchanged aside from the food being a bit colder. They’d run out of the right potatoes, she said apologetically and somewhat mysteriously, but fifteen percent would be knocked off their bill.

“Result,” Marcel said.

They ate without talking, Marcel watching something on his phone, Fran watching him. Her heartbeat was a lively allegro but not due to any romantic excitation. Quite the opposite. The pulsar of her rage was whirling into life, gathering momentum.

“You didn’t have to be so mean to the waitress.”

Marcel glanced up from his phone. “Was I mean?”

“A bit, yeah. It wasn’t her fault. You put her on the spot. Everyone was looking.”

He looked comically bereft. “Oh my God, you’re right. Hang on.” He rose and weaved through the tables towards Emily, tapped her on the shoulder and spoke to her while making a beseeching prayer gesture with his hands. From Fran’s perspective, his head was framed by a large, low-hanging ball-light, like a halo. He spent about five minutes bantering with the maître d’ before returning to the table.

“It’s good of you to apologise,” Fran said.

“Yeah. My upbringing again,” he said ruefully. “It’s easy to forget sometimes that service people are real people too, but I’m working on doing better. I’m going on a mindfulness retreat next week in Croatia.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah, it’s a Buddhist thing, but without all the self-denial crap. It’s about examining the self, stepping outside of it without judgement. Accepting who you are and nurturing one’s attention. Attention means to attend, Fran, to be there. For yourself. In the end you just have to shut out negative influences, negative people, and allow forgiveness in. And the catering at the place is superb. It’s beside this stunning blue lake where they do jet ski races and stuff. It costs a packet but it’s superb.”

She was never going to see this man after tonight.

He ordered more bread and stuffed food into his mouth as if he were being executed in the morning, paying no attention to some of her best tragi-comic social work anecdotes. Occasionally he asked her some banal question and went back to looking at his phone while she answered. He asked her if there were good prospects for promotion in her organisation and she chose not to answer, just to see if he would notice. He didn’t.

Wiping up the last of the weird, expensive sauce on his plate with the last of the weird, expensive bread which was all crust, he stretched luxuriously and for some reason began talking about Chairman Mao.

“I keep his Little Red Book on me at all times. Well, it’s on an app, Mao’s Thought of the Day. ‘The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history,’ the Chairman said. Worth bearing in mind.”

“Um, okay. You know he was an evil dictator, don’t you?”

“Ad hominid argument. At least he tried to make the world fairer, unlike the moron Daily Fail readers harking for a world that never existed. Jesus, take the Sagan Protocol. We know we’re not alone in the universe and what have we got to show for it? Same old, same old. Growing inequality, billionaires sucking off the poor.” He flapped a hand and burped gently. “Beating off the poor, rather. You know what I mean.”

Fran sighed. Like most people, she had a fair working knowledge of the Sagan Protocol. Despite its cosmic implications it had become one of those tired conversation fillers like the weather, Brexit or the state of the British roads.

The Sagan Protocol was the nickname of an international treaty relating to the alien signal received on Earth in 2015. In May of that year, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica detected an immense burst of neutrinos: subatomic particles which barely interact with matter and are extremely difficult to detect. Normally around half a dozen were detected each year, but in May 2015 thousands were detected in a single pulse.

To send such a pulse would require a staggering amount of energy, exceeding anything of which humanity was capable, yet the pulses continued, in a pattern not wholly dissimilar to Morse code. Interstellar communication was the only viable explanation.

Emily returned and asked if their meal was alright.

“The oven chips were cooked beautifully,” Marcel said without looking at her. Emily rolled her eyes and left.

When the extraterrestrial origins of the alien signal became clear, the UN cobbled together the clandestine Taskforce on Extra-Solar Communication (TESC). This had two broad purposes. Firstly, to oversee the collation and interpretation of the signal. Secondly, to withhold the discovery from the world until the ramifications of disclosing it were understood and appropriate mitigations were in place.

The neutrino pulses continued for over three years until the pattern started repeating itself; the immensely detailed message was complete. Attempts to decode it made slow progress until the discovery that it incorporated prime numbers and the atomic weights of common elements as a kind of mathematical Rosetta Stone, which helped unlock the message’s overall coding system.

Now the scientists and mathematicians had a grasp of the basics, as it were, the meaning gradually became clear. This was no message of peace or of warning. It was a blueprint. Given the parallels with Carl Sagan’s celebrated novel, Contact, the treaty drafted by the UN became known as the Sagan Protocol. This stipulated that no attempt would be made to build whatever the blueprints specified, before the conclusion of an open-ended research project to determine what the hypothetical machine actually was, and the possible implications of its creation. A breach of the Protocol would qualify as a new class of crime against humanity.

“Imagine the world we could be living in now if they’d just made the machine,” Marcel said. “Screw the Protocol. It could be a cure for cancer, limitless energy, faster than light travel. It’s a breach of our human rights to withhold it, if you ask me. Our leaders owe it to us to release it. They owe it to our children, and our children’s children.”

Fran bit down a laugh.

The actual existence of the alien broadcast was finally shared with the public in 2023. Although the reasons for the timing were never made explicit, it was generally held that it was to head off an imminent leak. In any case, TESC’s research into the potential impact of the announcement had pretty much run its course, and there would never be an ideal time to release such world altering information. Most people accepted that the message itself was potentially too dangerous to share with Joe Public in full, and was best left to the higher echelons of government, rather like nuclear codes. Some people refused to see it that way. Like Marcel.

Fran’s phone vibrated and she took it out of her bag. FAMALY KILER, said the text message.

“You know, my mum always tells me it’s rude to use your phone at the table,” Marcel said.

She gazed at him levelly. “You said your mother was dead. ‘God rest her soul,’ you said.”

“Yes, she is. Well actually, no.” He flapped. “Sort of. She’s in a coma.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. She was on a safari thing in the Amazon, strayed off the path and a boa constrictor dropped on her from a tree and, um, constricted her.”

“Oh my God,” Fran said, a hand to her mouth.

“She was fine, she was fine. The chaps managed to wrestle the thing off her, but back at the hotel she tripped over a Hopi ear candle and smashed her head on a radiator. She’s a complete vegetable.”

A giggle threatened to escape Fran’s lips so she bit the bottom one hard. She managed a tiny nod.

“Anyway,” he said, staring at her intently now. “I’ve had a great time tonight, Fran. It feels like I’ve known you for ages. It usually takes me a long time to trust someone enough to tell them my mum’s a cabbage.”

Laughter almost burst from her like projectile vomit. She sprang to her feet, her chair scraping backwards, and fled, managing to squeak “toilet.” She took a few minutes to compose herself in the bathroom before returning to the table.

Marcel said, “How about I pay the bill and we head off somewhere a bit more private?”

She considered faking a grand mal seizure or a mild stroke, but politely declined his offer with a banal excuse about having an early start tomorrow. She promised she would text him soon, thanked him for the meal and left, cringing as he kissed her cheek. Immediately on returning to her car, she wriggled off her bra and pulled on a hoodie over her blouse. She drove half a mile then stopped in a layby to text Marcel.

Had a SUPERB time tonight. Thank u so much, you’re really grate company. I can’t see us working tho to be honest so all the best. F x

He replied immediately: Your not really hot enuff to be a prick tease but whatevr.

Christ almighty. She blocked his number.

It was nine-forty-five. She felt a strong need to interact with someone normal.

*****

Baize of Glory was a homely snooker club owned and managed by Fran’s old Hungarian friend, Milan Farkas, who in a former life was a PE teacher in Budapest. The club was a converted church with original wood panelling and clusters of mismatched armchairs scattered around. It was no good for playing snooker during daylight hours because kaleidoscopic light shone on the tables from the stained-glass windows, and Milan refused to install blinds. But now the dimness and clacking of snooker balls soothed Fran’s temperament.

Milan brought her a shandy from behind the bar and slumped down next to her on a worn leather sofa. “So Franciska, this date of yours did not go well perhaps, or you would not be here at this hour, hey?” he said slyly.

“You could say that. He wasn’t what I expected at all.”

“Stick to snooker, boci, my little calf. The balls behave as they must, always, though they seem random and no one game is like another. Cause and effect. The hearts of men play by different rules and cannot be predicted, and yet men are all the same.”

“Alright Sensei, thank you for that. Are you taking your meds, Milan? Everything alright?” Milan had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

“What meds? Who are you anyway? Where am I?”

“Funny.”

“Yes, I’m taking the meds Franciska. You remind me of your mother bringing me tubs of lecsó between lessons. ‘You’re wasting to nothing Milan, you’ll scare the children,’ she would say. It was very tasty but too much for a single man, so I shared it with the old Jew in the flat below. A fine cook, your mother, it’s how she snared your father.”

In the summer of 1989 Milan helped a local priest shelter hundreds of refugees in the school and nearby church as they fled East Germany. One refugee was a handsome young locksmith named Hans Gera, Fran’s father. There, he met Kinga, an overqualified mathematics teacher and colleague of Milan’s. Down on the floor in the darkness of the school gymnasium among a sea of sleeping bags, Hans and Kinga conceived two things: a plan to make a new life together in England, and Fran. In some manner Fran did not quite understand, Milan had helped them reach their goal.

He rubbed at his bald, liver-spotted head. “If this disease is good enough for Puskas, it’s good enough for me. I’d like to know what this Sagan machine is though before the Lord calls me unto Him. Ach, it’s probably just spam anyway, they’re trying to sign Earth up to some pyramid scheme I bet, I get them on my emails. Let’s knock some balls about, hey?”

They took their drinks over to a snooker table and grabbed a couple of cues, Milan casting an expert eye down the length of his and testing its weight. Fran flicked the brass scoreboard sliders to zero while Milan set up the balls. Fran broke and left a tempter to the middle pocket. Milan knocked it in and rattled off a thirty-seven break, groaning and hobbling around the table, but as poised as a jungle cat while he bent for the shots.

He left the cue ball tight against the baulk and smirked at Fran. “This handsome date man, tell me about him.”

“He kept saying everything was superb. Clearly thought the sun shined out of his arse because he’d dug wells in Africa, but he had this really them and us attitude.” Fran awkwardly clipped the cue ball off the pack of reds, catching it too thick and leaving an easy pot. “Goddamn it. Soon as he thought I had different ideas to him it was like I wasn’t worth listening to anymore. Started banging on about Chairman Mao.”

Milan slammed the red down and screwed up behind the black, generating power and control through posture and timing. “A little tribal himself, that one, as are we all. Yet this great fissure in our hearts brings people together while also pushing them apart, does it not? This is why love and hate are not so different, and one is easily mistaken for the other.”

Fran pushed Milan’s score marker even further rightward. “Hmm. Jeez Milan, give me a shot will you?”

Milan’s limp had disappeared as he moved fluidly around the table, dispatching ball after ball. “How’s that useless ex of yours? I saw him in the newsagent buying vodka, the cheap stuff. May he shit a thousand hedgehogs.”

“Don’t know, don’t care. He’s still got my boxing gloves though, the dickhead. The ones signed by László Papp.”

“Ah, what a fighter he was. He was shorter than you but he always, always attacked.” Milan pointed to Fran’s side of the table. “Hey, pass me the, er…the…the big cue rest thing with the shape on the end.” He shook his fingers and cursed in Hungarian, casting about for the word.

“The spider?”

Milan nodded and grimaced.

A couple of young men were playing on the next table over. One of them fluffed his shot, laughing at his own ineptitude, and the cue ball soared from the table. Fran trapped it neatly under her foot and picked it up. He smiled at her as she handed him the ball and she turned away, a little flustered. Milan missed his shot and she managed to knock in a few balls.

Milan looked from Fran to the young man and whispered theatrically, leaning in to her. “You want me to introduce you? He’s a little young but very smart. A physicist at the university, and he plays the trumpet.”

“No thank you Milan. Horror movies and San Miguel are all the company I need for the foreseeable, I think.”

“What about me? I’m hurt, boci.”

I might release chapter four on Substack, haven’t decided yet. Either way, stay tuned.