Maelstrom's Edge: Faith and Maelstrom's Edge: Sacrifice are now available on Kindle!

In late 2011 I was asked to join a creative project creating a new science fiction miniatures wargame. Over the last three and half years in my spare time I've worked with a fantastic team of writers, designers and artists to design a universe and the game and miniatures to go with it. Today we went public on the Maelstrom's Edge project - we'll be going to Kickstarter on the game very soon!

I've also written two books - with my fellow Lead Writer on the project, Stephen Gaskell. It's been a lot of effort to get them finished, but at last, finally, today we have launched the novels on Kindle - Maelstrom's Edge: Faith and Maelstrom's Edge: Sacrifice, books one and two in the Battle for Zycanthus series that ties in to our first boxed game. 

Maelstrom's Edge: Faith is the first novel in the Maelstrom's Edge universe. In the far future, a golden age of exploration and progress has been shattered. Humanity and alien alike are on the very edge of annihilation. 

A gigantic apocalyptic explosion of dark energy known as the Maelstrom is rapidly expanding out from the heart of the galaxy, destroying everything it touches. As worlds and stars on the Maelstrom's Edge are obliterated, those who have the means flee towards deep space, while those left behind fight for the chance to escape. 

In Maelstrom's Edge: Faith, conflict and conspiracy grows as the Maelstrom nears the doomed world of Zycanthus. Sheriff Kyle Wynn is one of many living in the shadow of the Maelstrom. When his desert patrol is ambushed by strange warrior cultists, Wynn realises that there are other forces at play on Zycanthus besides the corporate interests of his Epirian Foundation bosses. 

Zafah is a missionary from the Karist Enclave. The Enclave see the Maelstrom as a chance to ascend to a wondrous higher plane of being, but Zafah’s mission to save the people of Zycanthus is threatened by the world's heavy-handed security enforcers--and her own conscience. 

Wynn is convinced that the Karists are a threat to his family and Zycanthus. Can he uncover the intentions of the Karists before it’s too late, or will Zafah’s secretive organisation succeed in their mysterious aims?

Maelstrom's Edge: Sacrifice follows on from the events of Maelstrom's Edge: Faith. The Karist Enclave's plan to save the world of Zycanthus is in tatters. Shocked by their terrible losses at the hands of Epirian forces, Zafah joins the Karist military knowing the time for artful persuasion is over. 

Meanwhile, Sheriff Kyle Wynn is struggling to convince his Foundation bosses of the threat the Karists still pose. But when he infiltrates a Karist base, he discovers that their intentions are far greater and more dangerous than even he could have imagined... 

Zafah and Wynn are thrown into an escalating tussle for supremacy of Zycanthus, both on the planet's surface and in orbit. With the shadow of the Maelstrom hanging over them, the outcome of this clash will decide the fate of millions. Will the robotic might of the Epirian Foundation or the inner faith of the Karist Enclave emerge triumphant?

I'll be doing some blog posts on the design and details of the universe over the next few weeks, but in the meantime you can purchase both books at the Amazon links below!

Science continues...

The last touches are being put on my two novels, and the game they tie into, Maelstrom's Edge. Much more to come on that in a few weeks time, including details of the Kindle release.

In the meantime, there's plenty of work to be done at my day job at the University of Oxford. I've had one new paper published in the last few months, in Applied Physics Letters. APL is a journal I tried (and failed) to publish in during my PhD, so it's nice to finally see something with my name on it in that prestigous journal!

The paper is using the atom probe machine that I run at Oxford to look at the distribution of indium in InGaN/GaN quantum wells. Quantum wells are one of the most significant applications of quantum mechanics used in the real world, where they are used in LEDs. Thin layers of a doped semiconductor, in this case Indium Gallium Nitride, are sandwiched between another layer (Gallium Nitride here) with a different band gap. By restricting the width of the doped layer to a few tens of nanometres, you can confine the carrier electrons or holes so that they can only release energy at a certain wavelength. This means with the right well dimensions, when you apply an electric field they will emit a specific colour of light, perfect for LEDs.

The atom probe in my lab allows us to study these materials at the atomic level, to see exactly how the layers of InGaN are distributed. In this case, we wanted to look at two different orientations of the wells, and found that in one growth plane, the Indium is very evenly distributed throughout the wells, whilst in the other direction, clustering of In occurs that can have degrade the performance of the device.

I have another more technical paper on this work due to be published in Microscopy and Microanalysis soon. I'm working on a bunch of other papers at the moment which should be submitted soon, to reduce my backlog of data from last year. Once these three papers are submitted, I can move on to working on some exciting new experiments, such as fossils and meteorites!

In other news, I was very honoured to be selected as the David Cockayne Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College starting in October this year. Belonging to an Oxford college as a fellow is a great honour and will allow me to mingle with some very distinguished colleagues as well as eat some tasty dinners!

The novels are finished - and Maelstrom's Edge is revealed at last!

So for the last three and a half years I've been working on a secret project that no one has been allowed to know about - and despite writing hundreds of thousands of words of fiction and background material, it's only now that we're finally in a position to reveal it - Maelstrom's Edge.

I was approached back in the summer of 2011 to join as one of the lead writers in a small team working on a new science fiction miniatures game. The idea was to create a completely new and unique far future universe as a setting for a new tabletop wargame with high quality plastic models. 

We wanted to do this right - wargaming is a very competitive business and there are lots of other companies out there. We wanted to take the time to work in secret on something that felt unique and innovative across all parts of the game - that everything in the models, art design, game rules and the background would be new and exciting. 

The setting was key. We wanted a universe that had the broad appeal and wow factor of great space opera, but with a nod to the trend towards the grittier, more mature themes that modern science fiction has embraced in recent years - closer to the darker 2003 remake of Battlestar Galactica rather than the cheesier original version. We wanted the Maelstrom's Edge universe to be morally complex and populated with flawed characters – the technology may have changed, but mankind still faces the same problems it always has.

We also wanted to keep to a fairly hard science fiction feel - including awe-inspiring elements like aliens, powerful new weapons and faster-than-light travel, but trying to make any such invention feeling grounded in enough worldbuilding logic to feel realistic within our setting. Stephen and I having a background in science helped with designing things like the cybel network to be internally consistent and believable.

With the initial design goal to create a miniatures game where players would battle a number of different factions against each other, we wanted to create a setting where each of these factions would have a legitimate reason for conflict. There is no absolute good or evil faction in Maelstrom’s Edge – each organisation has its own understandable motives for the way it acts. We have also made sure to include conflict and friction within each organisation, to allow conflict both between different factions and between splinter groups of each. 

The result was the universe of Maelstrom's Edge, a far future science fiction setting where a golden age of exploration and innovation has been ripped apart and humanity is on the very edge of annihilation. The Maelstrom, a gigantic apocalyptic explosion of dark energy, is rapidly expanding out from the heart of the galaxy, destroying everything it touches. As worlds and stars are obliterated from existence, those who have the means flee towards deep space, while those left behind fight for the chance to escape - and for the resources in the worlds under threat. 

For millennia before this catastrophe, humanity spread across the galaxy at sub-light speed, painstakingly eking out an existence in space and on barely habitable worlds. Then the cybel network was discovered. A gossamer web of dark energy threads stretching between every star, the cybel network allowed humanity to colonise thousands of worlds across the galaxy's spiral arm. All the progress that the cybel network brought, the Maelstrom took away. The Maelstrom erupted from the centre of humanity's worlds a millennium ago, racing down the cybel tunnels, splitting them apart and spilling their destructive energy out into real space. 

The Edge is a stormfront, light years wide, where real space meets the Maelstrom’s tide of roiling, coruscating energy. The apocalypse is coming inexorably to every planet on the Edge. In the decades leading up the Maelstrom's arrival, every person is forced to make a choice about how they want to live the remainder of their existence. Unite or divide, give or take, love or hate. Those living on the edge are not bulletproof or elite. They are ordinary people caught up in a bewildering cataclysm, their only goal to survive as best they can. 

The design of both the Maelstrom’s advance and the relative difficulty of interstellar travel means that it is intentionally impossible for everyone to escape its destructive clutches. Worlds do not have the time or resources to evacuate everyone before they are destroyed. This forces the characters in our universe to confront cold, hard choices about what they do in the face of this implacable enemy – do they run, or try to save as many others as they can? Do they fight for the last remaining ships, or loot the helpless? By forcing humanity into such a difficult position, it encourages nuanced, morally grey decisions and characters, which is just what I want as a writer to encourage me to think of unique situations for stories - and also for scenarios for the game itself. As someone who likes to play miniatures games, I always found it irritating when I turned up to play a game with the same army as my opponent - in most settings, this doesn't make sense. But the stress of the impending destruction the Maelstrom brings means that organisations and governments come apart under the stress - and civil wars and internal strife are all possible as armies from the different factions battle to save themselves.

As part of that work, as well as countless pages of background design for the universe and game design, my fellow lead writer Stephen Gaskell and I have written a lot of fiction content - a bunch of short stories, as well as two novels set on the world of Zycanthus - Faith and Sacrifice. 

These two books form a story that tells of two of the factions battling it out for control of Zycanthus, a planet a few tens of lightyears from the Maelstrom's Edge. The corporate Epirian Foundation owners of the world are trying to extract what resources they can in the last few decades before Zycanthus is destroyed by the Maelstrom. The secretive religious extremists of the Karist Enclave however, have identified Zycanthus as a key world for conversion to their beliefs - that the Maelstrom is not the end of everything, but the beginning of a new age for mankind - that if they prepare their souls for the Maelstrom's embrace, they will ascend to a new plane of existence.

In the first novel, Faith, Epirian Sheriff Kyle Wynn is ambushed in the desert by a Karist landing party and left for dead. He begins to uncover just how deep and wide the Karist infiltration of Zycanthus goes - and how dangerous it might be. Meanwhile Karist priestess Zafah has travelled to the world to try and teach people of the salvation that Ascension can bring - but the reaction of the Epirian security forces to her missionary work forces her to consider more direct methods of teaching the people the Karist Way. With both sides adamant that their way is best, the stakes are raised for a cataclysmic battle for control of the Zycanthus star system in the second book, Sacrifice.

I'm pleased to say that both books are finished and have been sent to the printers. We'll be doing a short print run of hard copies for the game's launch at the wargaming convention Salute in London on April 25th, and they are also available as ebooks on Amazon Kindle right now!. 
 

Very exciting to finally be able to share some details with everybody and looking forward to seeing the reactions to something we've been working so hard on for so long!

Arcadia by the Southside Players

One of my closest friends, Tom Morgan, is directing the Southside Players production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard later in Balham later this month. As part of the promo work for the play, he asked me to write a couple of video shorts featuring the characters from the play on related subjects like Newton's laws, Determinism and Chaos Theory.

You can watch the first one here:

Arcadia is on at the Chestnut Grove Theatre in Balham between Wednesday 18th February and Saturday 21st February. Come along!

Novel nearly done!

I've been working on it for three and a half years, but the novel I've cowritten with Stephen Gaskell, Sacrificial, is nearly done, although it's still under wraps so I can't tell anyone about it! The final proof copy went out to my beta readers last night. I'm hoping to finish any final edits in early March for release in April. Keep your eyes peeled for then!

I had another scientific publication this week, although I'm not sure I can claim much credit! Kane O'Donnell did all the hard lifting for this one. It's a summary of the computational simulations he's done on the diamond surface using various alkali metals in combination with oxygen. I did a little of this for my thesis.

I'm working on many other papers at the moment, things are really busy! I'm also helping to write some promotional videos for my friend Tom Morgan's production of Arcadia by the Southside Players in Balham this February. Should be fun!

Reading: My novel!
Watching: The Theory of Everything
Listening to: The Decemberists - What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

New scientific publication

So after three years of silence, I finally have a new scientific publication out - a review paper on my PhD thesis work in Physica Status Solidi (a) with my old postdoc, Kane O'Donnell (who did most of the hard work!)

The paper summarises a lot of the computation and experimental work I did during my PhD, which was up until recently kept secret whilst the patent on the discovery went through. 

The main part of our work was the prediction using computational theory that alkali metals (in particular lithium) on the oxygenated diamond surface do some interesting things. Diamond has this ability to display this unusual property called negative electron affinity, where changing the first couple of atoms on the surface can alter the surface electronic states so that the conduction band sits below the vacuum level. That means that any electron given enough energy to be promoted from the occupied valence band into the conduction band will naturally sit above the vacuum level - i.e., it's easier to be ejected from the sample into the vacuum than to fall back to the valence band. This makes it really awesome for electron emission for field emission devices (for super efficient, high resolution displays) or thermionic devices (for converting heat from the sun or waste heat from power stations directly into electrical power). 

We predicted that lithium in particular is great for this as lithium is much smaller than other alkali metals (it only has 3 protons/electrons), which means it can sit between surface atoms, rather than on top of them like with bigger alkali metals like cesium or sodium. As they like to be positively charged,  these alkali metals form an electric dipole on the surface, where the top surface by the alkali metal is positively charged, and the carbon lattice is negatively charged, essentially making it attractive for the electrons to be emitted from the surface. However, on the bare surface of diamond there is not much to bond to and the alkali metals don't stick very well.

We found that if you oxygenate the surface (easily done by ozone or acid treatment) of the diamond, then add the alkali metal, the alkali metal is much much more strongly bound, and has an even stronger electric dipole. Lithium in particular, but also sodium and magnesium to a certain degree, are awesome for this, because their small size lets them sit between the oxygen atoms, and then the positive charge of the lithium pushes the lone pair electrons in the oxygen atoms into the carbon lattice, creating an even bigger dipole and making the path from valence band to vacuum even stronger.

We took the computational predictions and did experiments using ultraviolet and x-ray photoemission. The first tells you what the valence band structure is (and therefore what the electronic behaviour at the surface is), whilst the second tells you about the core electrons (which tells you which elements are on the surface and how they are bonded.) Luckily for us, the experimental results confirmed the computational predictions, and I got my thesis (and some publications and a patent). It's nice to see that work finally see the light of day, as I'm really pleased with what we achieved.

Fun at Worldcon

So last weekend the World Science Fiction Convention rocked up at the Excel centre in East London. As a British scifi writer, it would be rude not to attend something so close, so I took the bus down from Oxford on Thursday and had a fun few days chatting with writers, attending panels and enjoying the awesome sights of the con, like the incredible jawa to the left (complete with glowing eyes and Utini! sound effects.

There were all kinds of cool things - giant games of Pandemic! and Ticket to Ride, cool artwork and science displays, and many many many geeky things to buy. I was staying in a hostel and trying to stay light, so the only thing I picked up was a copy of the board game Coup, which is a quick little game of cards that combines aspects of Poker and The Resistance, in a Dune-esque setting. You have two cards in front of you, face down, with different roles possible that do different things (Duke earns 3 coins in Tax, Assassin kills someone else's card for a cost of 3 coins, Countess cancels Assassin, etc). You have to state which card you're using, but you can bluff. If someone challenges you on it, the loser has to sacrifice a card, and if you lose all your cards you're out. It's a simple game, but it's a fun little 15 minute palette cleanser between larger games.

Among the biggest draws for a lot of people was George R.R. Martin, who did several panels on Game of Thrones, as reading a piece from the new 'World of Ice and Fire' book. I didn't see all of it as I was in meetings, but there were the appropriate numbers of grisly deaths, as well as an admission of guilt over how late the next book is!

I also went to a fascinating panel discussion between Christopher Priest, who was nominated for the 1983 Granta 40 writers under 40 feature, and Naomi Alderman, who was nominated for the same honour last year. It was interesting to see two great writers of genre who are on the border with literary fiction talk about the divide and how the gatekeepers of literary fiction will select works of genre fiction (like 1984 or the Handmaid's Tale) and decide they are 'literary', but then use the worst examples of scifi and fantasy to dismiss it.

Naomi Alderman used a wonderful example of how great speculative fiction can be to address topics that 'realistic' literary fiction struggles to address without our inbuilt biases getting in the way. In the movie Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven wanted to look at how it was like for the kids growing up in the Nazi youth, being indoctrinated against the 'other' (the bug aliens), and become a militarised and intolerant society. If he'd written a realistic film addressing the same topic, we as viewers would have been unable to get the association of the kids as Nazis out of our head, and all of the time we would have been unable to concentrate on Verhoeven's point (that it's really easy to be sucked in) because of the inbuilt association of evil. But in a scifi setting where we don't immediately leap to that conclusion, it's not until Neil Patrick Harris' Gestapo-like character appears at the end to enslave the brain bug that our mind really makes that Nazi connection and we get Verhoeven's point, that what can start as an innocent nationalistic pride can end up being something much more subversive and dangerous. 

I also had some great meetings at Worldcon for the sekrit projekt, which is finally almost at the stage that I can talk about it. We've lined up some incredibly exciting things that I can't wait to show the world in a few months' time.

Listening To: My Morning Jacket - Circuital
Reading: Defenders by Will McIntosh
Watching: Fringe, season 5
Playing: The Last of Us Remastered, Assassin's Creed: Black Flag (on my shiny new PS4!)

Worldcon!

I'll be attending the World Science Fiction Convention in London, Loncon 3, next weekend. If anyone else is going to be there, please say hello!

The machine I look after at the university is now in its 5th week of servicing. We've replaced pretty much every component on it and it's still not quite back to full health. The downtime does mean I can get some writing done, but it's very frustrating!

This weekend I went to see Guardians of the Galaxy - great example of how to do a scifi blockbuster right. Packed full of character and wit, and edited extremely well - very few wasted moments. 

We also played another couple of games of Risk:Legacy. If you at all like narrative gaming or Risk, you have to play this game. Each time you play, you change the board by placing stickers and naming continents that change the gameplay for next time. In addition to this, there are six envelopes that you only open after certain events happen, which completely change the narrative of the game, even introducing new factions and sections of rulebook.

We've played six games now and what started as a fairly simple game of Risk has evolved into an insanely unique and customised board full of places named after me and my friends (Tomonto, Tomkyo, Olstralia, Jamazonia, Jennisburg, Dougsinki, Kashakstan...) The fact that each game takes around 2 hours instead of the usual day and a half (you need to claim 4 victory stars rather than take over the entire board, and the losers who survive also get to change the board for next time) makes it much more enjoyable too. There's even an envelope at the bottom of the box that simply says 'Do Not Open. Ever'. so far we've resisted the temptation...

Listening To: Spoon - Rent I Pay
Watching: Guardians of the Galaxy
Reading: The Screenwriter's Workbook - Syd Field

New role as editor of Materials Today Communications

Although I'm continuing to work as lab manager at the Atom Probe group in the department of materials in Oxford University, and work on my top secret writing project (which is almost at the point that I can start talking about it!), I've also taken on a smaller new responsibility recently, which is quite exciting.

I am now Managing Editor for the scientific journal Materials Today Communications. This is a journal setup by Elsevier to act as a conduit for papers across the entire range of Materials Science. It's an innovative project, and the idea is interesting one.

Scientific journals these days are extremely oversubscribed, with many of them receiving hundreds or even thousands more papers and articles than they can publish. Whilst some of these articles are turned away by editors or during peer review, many are still presenting good science and are worthy of publication, but there just isn't enough space. Some of the journals with the highest impact factors turn away as much as 80% of submissions!

 Materials Today Communications is intended to be a solution for this problem. Scientific articles submitted to other Elsevier journals that go through peer review and are considered good science, but cannot fit into the intended journal, will be referred to me at  Materials Today Communications, and published there instead, should the authors accept this transfer. This means the authors do not need to reformat their article and resubmit to another journal, and that the process of peer review is not unnecessarily repeated in the new venue. 

My role as managing editor is overseeing the transfer process and ensuring that authors have revised their manuscripts according to the changes recommended by peer review. It's a part time role that will scale depending on how many papers accept their transfers, but it's really nice to have the opportunity to combine the two parts of my life - writing and science. 

Hopefully more on my creative writing work soon - I've been working really hard on it for the last couple of years but it's all still under wraps - but there's so much cool stuff to show people when we finally get the ok to go public!

Reading: Command and Control by Eric Schlosser
Listening To: An Ocean Beneath the Waves by The War on Drugs
Watching: Boyhood by Richard Linklater

In Oxford

So after a very intense six months, I've come to remember that I have a website, and realise how much it has been neglected! 

After many stressful weeks working as a consultant in the renewables industry, I decided in March that it wasn't for me, and that I wanted to return to research. Happily, my first opportunity turned into a position, and I now work in the atom probe group at the University of Oxford as a postdoc. Not a bad place to come to restart your academic career!

It's really good to be back in the lab, reading papers and analysing data. I'd forgotten how much I missed the creativity of it. My role requires me to help in the running of the instrument and the laboratory, as well as running samples for industry and academic partners. 

Running the LEAP atom probe at Oxford

Atom Probe Tomography is a very interesting subfield of material science that allows you to image the atomic structure of a material in 3 dimensions. Samples are sharpened into very fine tips (50nm in radius at the top, too small to see even in a microscope!) either using chemical etching or ion-beam milling. They are then subjected to a very high static electric field (5-10kV), in addition to a pulse of either AC voltage or  a high power laser. The voltage or laser pulse puts the atoms in the tip 'over the top', evaporating a few thousand per second.

The atoms evaporated are then collected by a delay-line detector which records their position and mass/charge ratio (which tells you which element they are). Over several hours the atoms evaporated from the surface can be reconstructed to give a 3D map of the tip, allowing you to track things like precipitates in alloys, radiation damage in nuclear reactor walls or dopants in semiconductors.

Being the guy running this kit is a great opportunity, as I get to learn all about a new technique on a number of different projects, building up my skills and knowledge so that if one day I want to do my own research proposal, I know the strengths and limitations of the device and technique.

I'm still writing, mostly on the big sekrit projeckt, but I'm also going to start using this place to talk about my research as it's interesting (to me at least!)