The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
It's taken three years, but I've finished my novel, East City Real. It's really pleasing to reach this point, not least because there was a time, not so long ago, when I thought I'd never write another novel, let alone a novel of science fiction. I've never taken so long over a first draft before, … Continue reading East City Real
In what has been a hugely busy beginning to 2024, where work and family life have pretty much overwhelmed my ability to write, I'm really grateful to have Gareth Jelley of Interzone publish another one of my stories. This one is called 'Drink The Kombucha!' and you can read it as a further adventure in … Continue reading Interzone 297
'How far do the landscapes of one's childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one's imaginative writing. Certainly my own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and … Continue reading An Inescapable Background
'Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface. Within his lungs an immense inland … Continue reading Oceanic Volumes of Water
'But every so often... once or twice a weeks (or perhaps once or twice a year) came the muffled thud of a distant explosion. The concussions were startling enough to distract Foyle from the furnace of vengeance that he stoked all through the silences. He whispered questions to the invisible figures around him in Sanitation. … Continue reading Blue Jauntes
My story 'Vines' is currently free to read on Interzone Digital, beautifully illustrated by Alex Maniezo. 'These were the late days after the Work Lottery, what we thought of as a great rebalancing. To align society along a spirit of fairness, the population earned a set wage, and we found ourselves ascribed our lifelong careers … Continue reading Vines
Interzone 294 is now out and I'm hugely pleased to have my story 'The Coming of The Extroverts' included alongside lots of amazing work. Thanks also to Alex Maniezo, who also did the artwork for my story 'Vines', for another great illustration.
'The sounds of his life on Davenhall Island were those footsteps in the hall at night, the trees in winter and the throttled din of the ice machine out behind the rice shop, a white and black unit that ran entirely on its own, blocks of ice spitting out onto the ground to the absolute … Continue reading Greek Judy
'I pondered that a good while, as we walked side by side through the rain, under the dark branches of the Forest of the Otherhord. Within the white hood Faxe's face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid … Continue reading Eternal Present
'There is a story they tell to children who are still learning the Covenant, about the days when the gods had not yet ceased to walk the world in human form, and the first men had not yet arrived on Borthan. The gods at that time did not know they were divine, for they had … Continue reading Nothing Godlike
Absence Club 