Yet another review for The Foresight War (they're coming thick and fast at the moment), this time on the Classic Science Fiction forum here (it's the full review by Bill, who commented on my last post): http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicScienceFiction/message/3204

It starts: "I just this minute finished "The Foresight War" (2004) by Tony Williams, and I must say that I loved it. I had a hard time putting it down."

Well, I'm not going to argue too much about that :)

Now to focus on getting more (decent) reviews for Scales. As a self-published author, I have to do my own marketing, and that does require a fair amount of effort. I made life hard for myself with this novel, because it's likely to appeal to a different audience than my first one. Which of course explains why you see so many trilogies or novels set in the same universe...they have a guaranteed market among readers who enjoyed the first one.

The problem for me is that I would find it rather tedious to keep writing about the same characters or places. The writer I would most like to emulate is the late British SF writer, Bob Shaw. He wrote a large number of novels and short stories, nearly all of them stand-alone with no shared worlds or characters. They have very varied plots and settings, but what they have in common is that they are well-written and exciting, and the novels are short enough to read in two or three sessions.

Perhaps it's because I was brought up on SFF in the 1960s when 200 pages was a full-length novel, but I often find the modern 'doorstops' rather offputting. There are some honourable exceptions, but for me they often fall into one of two traps: either they stretch out the plot with lots of detail, which slows everything down (sometimes to a level of tedium) or they pack in so much that I lose track of who's who, or what's going on. But maybe that's just my age...