Contemporary Authors

• From Darkest Skies - 2018 Gollancz, London, United Kingdom
• From Distant Stars - 2018 Gollancz, London, United Kingdom

• Civilian Reader - https://civilianreader.com/2017/04/19/interview-with-sam-peters/

  Interview with SAM PETERS

  April 19, 2017 Civilian Reader Interview, UncategorizedFrom Darkest Skies, Gollancz, Most Anticipated 2017, Sam Peters, Sci-Fi
  PetersS-FromDarkestSkiesUKLet’s start with an introduction: Who is Sam Peters?

  Sam Peters is a writer and a… something else that is kind of hard to pin down exactly but right now is somewhere on the boundaries of a mathematician or a physicist (except not the sort who actually pushes the boundaries of anything new) and an engineer (except not the sort who actually makes anything). The sort of technology middleman who might have ended up on the Golgafrincham second ship if real physicists and real engineers ever actually got together. Right now Sam is something of an expert on Fast Fourier Transforms, which should have everyone zoning out right about now so unless you want to discuss the Cooley-Tukey algorithm and optimization of the Split Radix method let’s talk about something else, quick!

  Your debut novel, From Darkest Skies, will be published by Gollancz in April. It looks rather fabulous: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?

  I’d call it a Science Fiction thriller wrapped around a love story. It’s partly Keon’s search for the truth about what happened to his missing wife Alysha and partly about him coming to terms with her loss and the consequences of where his grief has taken him – the recreation of Alysha as a simulacrum wrapped around an Artificial Intelligence. Keon and Alysha were basically spooks so the truth he’s looking for turns out to be a lot more complicated than he first thinks. A lot more complicated and a lot more dangerous.

  I’m not sure whether series or serial is the right description but it’s definitely one of those. From Darkest Skies closes its case – by the end Keon knows why Alysha did what she did and has done what needs to be done. The next story is a new case with the same characters: a deep cover spy once controlled by Alysha comes in from the cold but doesn’t know who to trust; someone shoots an eminent scientist in the head three hours after his death; and all as the Magenta Institute is about to finally break in to the wreck of an old spaceship locked under the Antarctic ice and discover whether or not it has dead aliens aboard. On a personal level, Keon has to deal with the consequences of creating the simalcrum of his wife while they both try and work out what her existence means to.

  What inspired you to write the novel? And where do you draw your inspiration from in general?

  It’s not really a case of one source of inspiration anyway, but sometimes I find that it’s only after writing that I get to see what it was really about. For all its SF trappings, for all its twisty thriller plotting, underneath lies a story about love, loss and grief. Writing about someone struggling to cope with losing a person they loved was perhaps my own way of dealing with exactly the same thing. In part. Why did that sort of story end up wrapped in an SF conspiracy thriller? Partly for practical reasons, I suppose, because that’s where I have enough track record for people to take a chance on me as a novelist; but partly because it was the right setting for the person I lost from my life. The would have appreciated it, both the SF and a good thriller.

  I find inspiration comes from a lot of places all at once. Plotlines come from all over the place, little snippets of ideas that come on a daily basis and slowly stick together. I get them all the time and if you want a tip, read or watch any story and after the first five or ten minutes imagine the coolest way it might go. You might be right or you might not – if you’re not then you’ve got yourself the basis for a story of your own. After a while as that collection of ideas grows I find that some fade, some shout for attention and some want to stick together. It really can come from anything. Much the same goes for characters too – anyone, real or fiction who catches your attention, try and nail why they catch your attention. Don’t look for the truth, look for speculation. That will automatically lead you to what interests you, I think.

  Theme is a different matter though. I think themes – for me – come from somewhere much more personal. I frequently don’t know what the theme of something will be before I start to write it and yet by the end, there it is. Somewhere deep something needed to come out. Usually, at the end, I can look back and see what it was and why. Usually.

  AdamsR-WatershipDownUKHCHow were you introduced to genre fiction?

  When is genre not genre? I think I’d have to say Watership Down when I was about ten. The Hobbit a little later, and then Arthur C. Clark.

  How do you like being a writer and working within the publishing industry?

  Those are two quite different questions. I both love and hate being a writer. I love it because I I love to tell stories and being paid to do something you’d choose to do anyway is just the bomb. I hate it because I can’t stop. I think the best I’ve managed in the last five years was three weeks. I don’t have a good *reason* to write for a lot of that time but I still had to do it.

  Working within the publishing industry as opposed to what? It’s certainly different from other writing professions. As a journalist or a TV writer (and film is much the same I think) you have people peering over your shoulder all the time. You don’t have such complete creative control. Time deadlines are short, you need to produce the next draft in a matter of days or weeks, you get notes from editors and producers and all manner of people wanting to stick their oar in. you have to pay attention to those notes too and accept and address a lot of them and sometimes those notes are useful to making your story better and sometimes they’re not and sometimes they seem to actively undermine the whole point of the story you thought you were telling. Novel writing is different. The buck stops with you. No one peers over your shoulder. You have to manage your own time over the course of a year. If you slack then you can’t make it up with a few days of frantic working. And I can tell you this – however annoying it can be having someone peering over your shoulder all the time, I don’t half miss it when it’s not there. As far as I can tell the publishing industry very much leaves its authors to sink or swim on their own. There’s pros and cons to that.

  Do you have any specific working, writing, researching practices?

  I spent ages over this question trying to find a clever answer… but no, not really. Write a lot, write when you can, do something every day, always have several stories on the go in different forms and do whatever it takes to force out that first draft. Keep Google and Wikipedia handy. Those are my working practices.

  When did you realize you wanted to be an author, and what was your first foray into writing? Do you still look back on it fondly?

  I knew for a very long time that I wanted to make stories. I don’t think even now I mind how I make them. Whatever suits the audience I have to hand, I suppose. But I think the first big transformation was the discovery of role-playing games in the right way; and the right way for me was discovering them through a games master who wanted to tell a story. So it wasn’t just about club the monsters, grab the treasure, count the XP, move on to the next room, this was a story about me! I was part of telling it and I was living it and experiencing it and that was something truly amazing (not in any way hindered by being a socially awkward hormone-raddled teen who kind of wanted feels and soaring passions rather than fumbles in the dark and had no idea how to get them). I was always a big reader and mostly a reader of escapist stuff but this was something new and more intense. I was in the story. I was feeling it and I was it. It felt direct and less second-hand.

  I think, looking back, that that was a one-off experience. My first solo adventure and it was a revelation. I wanted to have that again. I tried recreating the sensation by creating gaming stories for other people but they almost never followed the script I had in my head. I started to write the stories as they were supposed (in my head) to have happened. They were rubbish, I was rubbish and most of them were never finished but I think that was when I realised that I wanted to tell stories (not “be an author.” Never that, not then and not now. Tell stories. It’s a different thing).

  Do I look back on it fondly? I suppose I do. Fond embarrassment.

  What’s your opinion of the genre today, and where do you see your work fitting into it?

  Science Fiction? On the screen I think it’s going from strength to strength. We have epic space fantasy in the form of Star Wars (although it would be nice if the one universe wasn’t so dominant) and possibly the Marvel and DC franchises depending on where you draw the line on what’s SF and what isn’t and then we have things like The Arrival and Ex Machina. On TV, the trend seems to be towards darker and grittier. I personally like that and if you’ve read From Darkest Skies and watched Bladerunner I’d like to think it’s clear they’re cut from the same cloth. I don’t know whether it’s just what I choose to watch but AI seems to be on the rise – or at least the blurring of boundaries between human and machine. Westworld, obviously. Altered Carbon too, I suspect (certainly that blurring lives in the book). If there’s a current trend then I think it’s an inward-looking one led by TV: SF that asks who are we and what does it meant to be human rather than the Star Trek-style of what marvels are out there and what could we become. FDS certainly fits into the former.

  PetersS-MovieTVSF

  Books I’m not so sure. You probably know better than I do. I have the sense that SF is contracting and maybe losing its wilder edges to more commercial stories. I’d be very happy to be wrong about that.

  Do you have any other projects in the pipeline, and what are you working on at the moment?

  I’m under contract for three books, which I understand is fairly usual. All three are set on Magenta and were originally intended as standalone SF thrillers using the same cast of characters. I’m working on the third one at the moment. There’s also the possibility of a TV series based on From Darkest Skies so I’m putting work into that too, although it’s very early days so I’m not holding my breath. I don’t know whether the same applies to novels but a lot more TV shows flicker into early ideas of life than actually make it to the screen.

  I’m also working on another TV show under a different name but I can’t say much about that at the moment except that it’s a historical mystery, has no SF in it at all and comes with the same caveat! Here’s another big distinction between writing novels and writing for the screen: you can do a hell of a lot of paid work writing for the screen and never see a single scene make the light of day!

  What are you reading at the moment (fiction, non-fiction)?

  I’m reading Stamping Butterflies by John Courtney Grimwood, The Fifteen Lies of Harry August by Claire North, Blackwing by Ed McDonald and Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie (which I somehow stopped reading the first time around and I have no idea why). The last non-fiction I read was SPQR by Mary Beard.

  PetersS-Reading

  If you could recommend only one novel to someone, what would it be?

  Dragon Queen. The most underrated fantasy novel of the last decade.

  What’s something readers might be surprised to learn about you?

  That I’d edit the Wikipedia page on the Split Radix method if I was allowed to but I’m not.

  What are you most looking forward to in the next twelve months?

  Realistically it might all come to nothing but I doubt anyone else is as excited about the prospect of FDS reaching the small screen than I am so: with my optimism hat on, a commission from Netflix!

  *

  Follow the Author: Goodreads, Twitter

  From Darkest Skies is out now, published by Gollancz in the UK. You can read an excerpt form the novel here. Here’s the synopsis:

  A high-concept science fiction thriller wrapped around a love story, a man’s search for the truth about his dead wife, and his relationship with the artificial intelligence he has built to replace her. Set in a future where the aliens came, waged war, and then vanished again, this is a striking new voice in science fiction.

  After a five year sabbatical following the tragic death of his wife and fellow agent Alysha, Keon Rause returns to the distant colony world of Magenta to resume service with the Magentan Intelligence Service. With him he brings an artificial recreation of his wife’s personality, a simulacrum built from every digital trace she left behind. She has been constructed with one purpose — to discover the truth behind her own death — but Keon’s relationship with her has grown into something more, something frighteningly dependent, something that verges on love.

  Cashing in old favours, Keon uses his return to the Service to take on a series of cases that allow him and the artificial Alysha to piece together his wife’s last days. His investigations lead him inexorably along the same paths Alysha followed five years earlier, to a sinister and deadly group with an unhealthy fascination for the unknowable alien Masters; but as the wider world of Magenta is threatened with an imminent crisis, Keon finds himself in a dilemma: do his duty and stand with his team to expose a villainous crime, or sacrifice them all for the truth about his wife?

• Always Trust in Books - https://alwaystrustinbooks.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/from-distant-stars-inspector-keon-2-by-sam-peters-interview-gollancz-sampeters679-booktwo-sciencefiction-fromdistantstars/

  QUOTED: "In From Darkest Skies, Keon returned to his homeworld to find the truth of what really happened to his wife and how she died. He thinks he knows the answers and now he’s trying to put his past to bed and move on. Thing is, everyone who works with him thinks she was a traitor, and though he doesn’t want to believe this himself, he’s having a little trouble reconciling some of what she did with his idea of who she was."
  "Sadly for Keon, this is only going to get worse when he discovers a stack of Alysha’s old files pointing at an undercover investigation he knew nothing about, one that seems connected to the ongoing excavation of a Master’s ship buried under the Magentan ice cap, a wreck that was only discovered five years after she died."
  "The world of Magenta and some of the plot grew out of a role-playing game I created a long, long time ago. I think the original pitch to my players was something like 'X-files meets Babylon Five' (anyone remember those? It was a long time ago). One of the underlying tropes of the game was that everything was connected, absolutely everything."

  From Distant Stars (Inspector Keon #2) by Sam Peters (Interview) @Gollancz @sampeters679 #BookTwo #ScienceFiction #FromDistantStars
  April 16, 2018alwaystrustinbooks
  Sam Peters and Gollancz are releasing the second instalment of the Inspector Keon series this week and I had the brilliant opportunity to put some questions to Peters to find out more about what is happening in the series. From Darkest Skies blew my mind with creative characters, a high intensity plot and a wondrous setting. Let us hope that SP can keep up the momentum. Pick up a copy on the 19th! You won’t regret it 😀

  .328

  19.04.2018 / Gollancz / Science Fiction / Paperback / 448pp / 978-1473214781

  About Sam Peters

  Sam Peters is a mathematician, part-time gentle-person adventurer and occasional screenwriter who has seen faces glaze over at the words ‘science fiction’ once too often. Inspirations include Dennis Potter, Mary Doria Russell, Lynda La Plante, Neal Stephenson, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Has more hopes than regrets, more cats than children, watches a lot of violent contact sport and is an unrepentant closet goth.

  Twitter / Goodreads

  About From Distant Stars

  Inspector Keon has finally got over the death of his wife Alysha in a terrorist attack five years ago. The illegal AI copy of her – Liss – that he created to help him mourn has vanished, presumed destroyed. His life is back on track. But a deadly shooting in a police-guarded room in a high-security hospital threatens to ruin everything. Who got past the defences? Why did they kill the seemingly unimportant military officer who had been in a coma for weeks? And why did the scanners pick up the deceased man the next day on the other side of the planet, seemingly alive and well?

  As Keon digs into the mysteries he begins to realise that the death was connected to a mysterious object, potentially alien, discovered buried in ice under the north pole. Someone has worked out what is hidden there, and what its discovery will mean for mankind. Someone who is willing to kill.

  And another player has entered the game. Someone who seems to know more about Keon than is possible.

  Someone who might be using Liss’s information against him.

  Or who might be Alysha, back from the dead.

  Pick up a copy: Gollancz / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Goodreads

  Q&A Section

  Thank you Sam for taking some time to answer a few questions about your latest novel From Distant Stars (Inspector Keon #2). Could you give us your own personal overview of what we should expect in within?

  In From Darkest Skies, Keon returned to his homeworld to find the truth of what really happened to his wife and how she died. He thinks he knows the answers and now he’s trying to put his past to bed and move on. Thing is, everyone who works with him thinks she was a traitor, and though he doesn’t want to believe this himself, he’s having a little trouble reconciling some of what she did with his idea of who she was. Sadly for Keon, this is only going to get worse when he discovers a stack of Alysha’s old files pointing at an undercover investigation he knew nothing about, one that seems connected to the ongoing excavation of a Master’s ship buried under the Magentan ice cap, a wreck that was only discovered five years after she died.

  You can expect to learn a little more about the enigmatic Masters (but just a little), along with more exploration of an increasingly blurred line between human and machine, more about the synergy between humans and the xenoflora of Magenta and maybe a clue as to why the Masters carried humans there in the first place, all wrapped in a pacy thriller as Keon hunts an almost unstoppable killer who strikes with impunity, and a secret that might change the whole future of the human race. As Bix would say, it’s all cool, man.

  What was your initial inspiration for the From Darkest Skies series and its characters?

  The world of Magenta and some of the plot grew out of a role-playing game I created a long, long time ago. I think the original pitch to my players was something like “X-files meets Babylon Five” (anyone remember those? It was a long time ago). One of the underlying tropes of the game was that everything was connected, absolutely everything (shout out here to every GM who’s ever had a group of players whose sole ambition seems to be to run in the opposite direction far and fast at the first sign of anything that might be plot). A lot of the world of Magenta (they used to basically live in the Wavedome) come from that, and some aspects of the Masters too. Several characters – Laura and Bix in particular – are recognisably based on characters who appeared in that game, too.

  Are most of the characters from the first novel returning in From Distant Stars?

  Without wanting to give anything too much away, yes, all the main characters who survive return in From Distant Stars.

  Can you give us a few details about some of the concepts and ideas that you explore within these novels?

  It’s taken writing all three books (yes, there’s a third, From Divergent Suns, which is finished insofar as I’ve sent in the draft to my editor and agent for them to rip to pieces) to figure out what these stories are really about. On the grandest scale are the Masters, enigmatic aliens whose motives and technologies remain as much a mystery a century and a half after they vanished as they were when they arrived; and you have the world of Magenta, a fundamentally hostile place, not fully explored, with a primitive form of alien life that interacts with human neurochemistry in a way no one really understands. On a very personal scale are the relationships between Keon and Alysha and Liss. What I now realise is that on all these levels, I’m exploring our relationship with both the unknown and the unknowable. It’s what we do as a species – when presented with a mystery, we try to understand it, and I suppose that’s about fear, too, that what you don’t know or understand is what can hurt you because you have no way to guard against it. In the case of the Masters, this was something I deliberately set out to explore, and right at the very bottom of what underlies the antagonists in both From Darkest Skies and From Distant Stars is a need to understand at ANY cost. You see the same in Keon too, in his dogged determination to get to the bottom of his dead wife’s secrets when frankly he might be a lot better off – and a lot happier – just letting it go. Speaking of which…

  Is there a particular element in From Distant Stars that you especially enjoyed writing about?

  I enjoy butting characters up against the mystery of the Masters and watching how they each react to questions that just don’t have answers. I like watching them squirm, except for Bix who just goes whoa, kinda cool, and gets on with life. We could all learn a lot from Bix. But over the course of the three books, it was the evolution of Liss and her relationship with Keon, and the discovery of who Alysha really was (you think I know these things from the start? So do I, and then it turns out I don’t…) that I enjoyed most of all. I found Keon butting up against the same problem as with the Masters but on an entirely personal level and in a way every one of us should be able to relate to: how well do I really know the people close to me? Can you ever really truly and completely know someone? And would you want to? Would you want to never be surprised? Where does that go? And (and this comes out more in the third book), Keon’s relationship with Liss – he’s created her to be this copy of someone who turns out not to be quite the person he thought, so what exactly is she a copy of? And time they both understand by now that they’re bad for each other, and yet at the same time they remain utterly trapped because the only way out is for one of them to let go, which, for different reasons, neither of them can do.

  So yeah, putting characters in boxes that have no way out and watching them squirm.

  What sort of challenges did you face when writing a sequel to From Darkest Skies?

  I’m too traumatised by the (ongoing) challenges of writing From Divergent Suns to remember – the first two books seem like sunny walks in the park from here, although I have dim notion that they weren’t. Plotting out the mystery, making it work in such a way as to mesh what is basically an SF conspiracy thriller with Keon’s personal quest and keep them both aligned. It felt challenging to write a first person point of view in a way that steered the line between Keon coincidentally always being in the right place at the right time for the next plot twist and having the plot unfold in the background without him. Alysha gave me problems too. The Masters might remain a mystery, but I think I’d be cheating readers not to fully reveal what she did and why she did it by the end of the third book – but at the same time I felt I needed both to give what look like a satisfactory answers at the end of books one and two and to keep Keon guessing right up to the end, which kind of meant I ended up keeping myself guessing too… Keon spends the whole of From Distant Stars trying to prove Alysha wasn’t a traitor to her world, I spent it trying to find out whether he was right.

  Had you always planned to become an SF author at a stage in your life?

  “Plan” doesn’t feel like the right word. Aspired to be? Yes, for a long time. SF is what I grew up with. I’ve written in other genres, but it’s nice to finally come to what feels like home 😊

  Are there any authors that influence your writing on any level?

  On any level? On some level, probably every author I’ve ever read, even if in some cases it’s lessons about what NOT to do. There’s no pretending Fron Darkest Skies doesn’t come from a long line of noir-ish detective SF, so Blade Runner (the movie, not the original PKD story), Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, Neuromancer, the usual cyberpunk suspects. 2000AD probably deserves a mention. The twisty thrillers of John Le Carre and others whose names I can’t remember. Philip K Dick quite a lot, actually, but indirectly through the screen adaptations of his works (I don’t get on with his style of prose but I very much get on with the ideas he explores).

  How long did it take you to plan and write From Darkest Skies and From Distant Stars?

  My writing process is messy and doesn’t have any clean lines in it – I’m still planning it out several drafts in. From start to finish, though, about a year, interleaved with other things. I find an important part of the process for me is to regularly walk away from a project and work on something completely different, read some completely different things, then come back to it with a new perspective. Then take that perspective and the notes I’ve made on the previous draft on what isn’t working and go back to the plan until all the problems seem to go away. Redraft, rinse and repeat four or five times, a month on then a month off.

  Can you tell us in five words what being an author/writer means to you?

  It’s very hard to articulate. There’s pride in having created something, bewilderment in having created something that complete strangers somehow find affecting. I get the odd e-mail now and then from people telling me how much they loved this story or that character, and those are always special. Wonder at the variety of reactions – for one person, a story can be life-changer, for another, the same story is unreadable dross. There’s money too. It’s not much but it’s enough to buy some time off work to spend with my family. So there: pride, bewilderment, wonder and time.

  Did you take the time to celebrate finishing either of your novels?

  Honestly? For these, I don’t think I did. I’ve been round this bouy before a few times and I’m not sure when “finished” is any more? Submitted? No. Published? I suppose, except when you’re writing a series that just means all the mistakes you didn’t spot in time are now carved in stone and you have to live with them… Maybe when From Divergent Suns hits the stores a year or so from now…

  Have you got a hobby/activity you do to wind down from all the writing?

  Writing is my hobby to wind down from life.

  Finally, have you read a book/article recently that you would personally recommend to the readers of this post?

  I’d like to recommend the excellent From Darkest Skies… wait, that’s not what you meant? Ok, so my stand-out book of the year so far has been Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which to my mind deserves all the praise and awards it’s received. I also rather liked The Hangman’s Daughter by Gavin Smith – a very different beast. In return, please can I have an explanation of Loop Quantum Gravity that doesn’t melt my head?

  Thank you to Sam Peters for taking the time to share a few details about From Distant Stars. This is a fantastic SF series that takes the reader to the remarkable setting of Magenta. I love Sam Peters’ focus on AI, alternative science and high octane plot lines. I can’t wait to see what where he has taken the series in From Distant Stars later on this month. Thank you for stopping by to check out this Q&A. I have a lot more SFF interviews coming up so keep an eye put for them in the near future.

• Jeans Book Read N Review - http://jeanzbookreadnreview.blogspot.com/2017/04/book-promotion-author-interview-from.html

  QUOTED: "I think the theme of grief and coping with loss that runs through the story certainly has a lot to do with a death in the family. The idea that bringing someone back from the sum of everything they left behind doesn’t necessarily bring back quite the person you remember owes something to the dementia they suffered in their last year and to a couple of people I’ve known who’ve gone through intense trauma and come out the other side changed."
  "I think those things gave me the desire to write story about how our ideas and memories of the people we know aren’t necessarily the people they actually are."

  Title: From Darkest Skies
  Author: Sam Peters
  Genre: Science Fiction
  Publisher: Gollancz
  Release Date: 16th February 2017

  BLURB from Goodreads
  After a five year sabbatical following the tragic death of his wife and fellow agent Alysha, Keona Rause returns to the distant colony world of Magenta to resume service with the Magentan Intelligence Service. With him he brings an artificial recreation of his wife's personality, a simulacrum built from every digital trace she left behind. She has been constructed with one purpose - to discover the truth behind her own death - but Keona's relationship with her has grown into something more, something frighteningly dependent, something that verges on love.
  Cashing in old favours, Keona uses his return to the Service to take on a series of cases that allow him and the artificial Alysha to piece together his wife's last days. His investigations lead him inexorably along the same paths Alysha followed five years earlier, to a sinister and deadly group with an unhealthy fascination for the unknowable alien Masters; but as the wider world of Magenta is threatened with an imminent crisis, Keona finds himself in a dilemma: do his duty and stand with his team to expose a villainous crime, or sacrifice them all for the truth about his wife?
  Goodreads Link

  PURCHASE LINKS
  Amazon US
  Amazon UK

  AUTHOR INTERVIEW

  How long did it take you to write From Darkest Skies, from the original idea to finishing writing it?
  Such a simple question, such a complicated answer…

  From the point of having a fully formed set of ideas on the world, the characters and the overall arc of their stories, it took about nine months including a few gaps between rewrites; but that starting point was a very long way away from where the original ideas grew. Parts of the world of Magenta, parts of some of the characters and a few nuggets of the plot go back years to a table-top role-playing game set on Magenta where the players were the local equivalent of the FBI investigating crimes with a slightly occult twist. A lot has changed in the evolution of those ideas into something that works as a coherent story – there was no Alysha back then, the sinister secret of Settlement 64 was something quite different and so were the Masters – but I think the world will still be very recognisable to those of us who played in that game.

  Then there was probably six months of back and forth while I settled on a plot before the actual writing started. That took quite a while to get right.

  Where did you get your book plot ideas from? What/Who is your inspiration?
  All sorts of places. I think the theme of grief and coping with loss that runs through the story certainly has a lot to do with a death in the family. The idea that bringing someone back from the sum of everything they left behind doesn’t necessarily bring back quite the person you remember owes something to the dementia they suffered in their last year and to a couple of people I’ve known who’ve gone through intense trauma and come out the other side changed. I think those things gave me the desire to write story about how our ideas and memories of the people we know aren’t necessarily the people they actually are.

  Then there’s the more superficial plot which unashamedly owes a lot to the noir thrillers of the forties and fifties. The fact that a passing character is called Royja Bhatti might betray a love of Bladerunner but really that’s already noir dressed up as SF; and while the replicants of Bladerunner offer a parallel to Liss, I think she owes at least as much to Frankenstein. Throw in some Twin Peaks, X-Files (I’m showing my age here I know), some Scandi-Crime (The Killing and The Bridge in particular) and a really good conspiracy thriller like State of Play and you’re about there.

  The Masters probably owe something to Chaoseum’s interpretation of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos for the sense of something unknown and unknowable.

  How did you come up with the Title and Cover Designs for your book? Who designed the Cover of your books?
  I wasn't conscious of this at the time but it’s the title of a My Dying Bride album which I suspect lodged somewhere in my mind better than the music ever did. I know I knew that particular album once. I suspect my subconscious pulled a fast one, latched onto the theme and pulled it out of deep storage without telling me where it came from.

  The Gollancz art department did the cover. The cover image is by James Macey. The closest I got to any say in the matter was suggesting a riff on the iconic image of Maria from Metropolis:

  Did you basic plot/plan for From Darkest Skies, before you actually began writing it out? Or did you let the writing flow and see where it took the story?
  A bit of both. I think there are two very different sides to From Darkest Skies. On the one hand the plot very much aims at being a crime/conspiracy thriller. I think that to make a thriller work you need to know exactly who did what and why and what clues are there to be found in order to unravel the mystery; then you need to give thought to the order in which the clues need to be found to unravel the mystery in the right way, pacing little breakthroughs with bigger ones and mixing in the odd red herring. I find for that side of things it helps me to lay out that backstory in quite a lot of detail – but the rest tends to be more a case of letting the story flow to see what happens, particularly with characters. They start to talk and act and come alive and often turn out not to be quite the people I thought they were once I start to write them. Then whenever the story feels like it needs to twist or slow or make a breakthrough I go back to my careful plan and look at all the clues that might have been left behind and pick the one that seems to fit best.

  The result is usually a mess and takes several rewrites to get right.

  Could you ever see a time in the world’s future that could actual recreate a person?
  It’s the strangest thing: if you’d asked me that before I started From Darkest Skies then I think I would have said yes. Writing the story (and some of the rather peripheral research provoked by it) has convinced me that no, I can’t. I can certainly foresee a time when it’s possible to recreate a convincing simulation of a person, even a specific one… but that’s what it would be: a simulation. We all have our secrets and you can’t recreate something you don’t know exists. A true recreation akin to resurrection? No.

  If recreating someone you lost was an available technology would you ever do it?
  I don’t think they’d ever be quite the same person (as From Darkest Skies starts to explore and we're back to Frankenstein again). I’m not sure I'd want the responsibility of creating life and I’m not sure I could find the hubris to bring a new life into being purely to service my own needs. Again another topic I wouldn’t ever have given much thought until I started writing about it.

QUOTED: "This is a fascinating take on future interaction between human and artificial intelligences."

From Darkest Skies
Publishers Weekly. 265.11 (Mar. 12, 2018): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* From Darkest Skies

Sam Peters. Gollancz, $13.99 trade paper

(352p) ISBN 978-1-4732-1476-7

Peters sets this top-notch blend of canny SF, crime thriller, and romantic fable two centuries in the future, after the enigmatic Masters have terraformed Earth and sprinkled humans onto 37 colony worlds. One such world is backwater Magenta, where government agent Keon Rause returns in semidisgrace after being thrown off Earth for botching a mission involving a mysterious Masters artifact. Keon is mourning his wife, Alysha, a fellow spy who was killed five years earlier in an Entropist terrorist explosion; he misses her so much that he has secretly commissioned an AI version of her that he calls Liss. He and Liss embark on a quest to discover what Alysha was investigating when she was killed, whether someone deliberately targeted her, and why, assisted by several colorful members of the Magentan intelligence service. Plenty of rock-'em-sock-'em quasimilitary action is played off against Keon's wistful longing for the wife he's lost, Liss's near-human devotion to him, and a plethora of intelligently crafted futuristic technological details. This is a fascinating take on future interaction between human and artificial intelligences. Agent: Robert Dinsdale, Independent Literary (U.K.). (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"From Darkest Skies." Publishers Weekly, 12 Mar. 2018, p. 44. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531285106/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ff121191. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A531285106

• Fantasy Book Review
  http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/Sam-Peters/From-Darkest-Skies.html
  Word count: 758

  QUOTED: "impressive space sci-fi debut novel."

  From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters
  From Darkest Skies book cover
  Free preview
  Rating
  8.0/10
  High tech sci fi mystery tethered to a very human, emotional base
  Five years after the murder of his wife and fellow agent Alysha, Keon Rause returns to the distant world of Magenta to resume work with the Intelligence Service.

  With him he brings an illegal artificial recreation of his wife, an AI built from every digital trace she left behind.

  She has been constructed with one purpose - to discover the truth behind her own death - but Keon’s relationship with her has grown into something more. Something that verges on love.

  But as he investigates his wife’s death, Keon begins to realise that he didn’t know everything about Alysha. And if he couldn’t trust her, how can he trust her copy?

  From Darkest Skies is Sam Peters’ impressive space sci fi debut novel, which he describes as being ‘a science fiction thriller wrapped around a love story’. A tale of obsession and loss, humanity has expanded out from Earth and advanced to a time of incredible connectivity, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t still feel alone.

  The novel opens with the grief-worn and disgraced Agent Keon Rause who has been expelled from Earth after a security operation went wrong. Five years previously his wife Alysha was murdered by a bomb planted on a train back on his home planet of Magenta, with no explanation of why she was smuggled away on it or why that train was targeted. He is now making his was back to Magenta, the first time since he left, to take up his old detective post. With him travels the illegal AI of Alysha that he built using the digital scraps of her left online. He built her to help him search for answers, but is trapped in limbo with her ghost. Unable to move on from his obsessive picking over of her case, his sole drive is to solve the mystery, but what if Alysha isn’t the person he thought she was?

  Back on Magenta with a team of ill-fitting agents under his command, work begins on an investigation into a mysterious drug-related death. Meanwhile, Keon uses the opportunity to dig out details from Alysha’s case that he was barred from accessing. Inevitably, the two investigations coincide as hidden laboratories and vanishing scientists appear in the wake of exploding drug users.

  A key theme underlying the narrative is grief. Every time there’s a pause in the main story, Rause falls back into himself and his memories. We actually find out very little about him - no interests, no hobbies, no dreams beyond solving his wife’s murder. This is beautifully mirrored by the vast and unpredictable storms that sweep across Magenta and shut everything down; trapping people in place until the fury has passed and normal life can continue. Alongside this is the gruelling therapy he is undergoing to build up his body to cope with the higher gravity. Every day is both a mental and physical slog for him, but inch by inch he gets closer to what actually happened.

  The AI Alysha, Liss, is referred to as being a ghost of the ‘real’ Alysha who lives in a ‘shell’ - the physical body she can move out of to interact with surrounding networks. Created from fragments of his wife gleaned from her digital footprint, she is a perfect copy in many ways of the human Alysha, but always present is the machine logic underneath, recreating her mannerisms too perfectly and a constant reminder of what Rause has lost. Is she actually helping him, or is she holding him back?

  This is being pitched for fans of the TV programmes Westworld and Humans, but being a firm bibliophile it reminded me a lot more of Peter F Hamilton’s work. Not on the same immense scale by any means, but there’s the same blend of high tech sci fi mystery focused around massive secretive corporations and the casual way human life can be terminated, tethered to a very human, emotional base. I thoroughly enjoyed it and with two more sequels due, it’s a solid and promising start.

  This From Darkest Skies book review was written by Cat Fitzpatrick

• Financial Times
  https://www.ft.com/content/d106855e-3017-11e7-9555-23ef563ecf9a
  Word count: 277

  QUOTED: "From Darkest Skies is a promising and polished debut."

  Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
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  Short review: From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters
  A twisted love story is at the heart of this immersive science fiction debut
  James Lovegrove MAY 5, 2017 Print this page0

  From Darkest Skies is a promising and polished debut that wraps up issues of artificial intelligence and bereavement in a nicely tanglesome murder mystery.

  Intelligence agent Keon Rause is mourning the death of his wife Alysha, killed five years earlier in a terrorist bombing. In fact, he misses her so much that he has had a digital re-creation of her personality installed in a synthetic body. Summoned back to the colony planet Magenta, Keon leads an investigation into the death of a reality-show star, but his inquiries stir up more personal questions.

  This is immersive SF, full of world-building detail, with a twisted love story at its heart. One neat touch is that of the alien “Masters” who 150 years earlier reshaped our solar system as though it were some art project, and then left.

  From Darkest Skies, by Sam Peters, Gollancz RRP£12.99, 330 pages

• Concatenation
  http://www.concatenation.org/frev/peters-darkest-skies.html
  Word count: 508

  QUOTED: "Where this book scores is that it has the feel of a solid detective thriller and if you like mundane detective stories in addition to SF then you will be bound to enjoy From Darkest Skies."

  From Darkest Skies
  (2017) Sam Peters, Gollancz, £12.99, hrdbk, 320pp, ISBN 978-1-473-21475-0

  It is one and a half centuries since the enigmatic aliens known as The Masters suddenly left the Solar System leaving behind some unfathomable technology that refuses to be reverse engineered and many unanswered questions.

  Agent Keona (Keys) Rause, still mourning his murdered wife Laura after five years, is working on Earth, seconded from his home (colony) world of Magenta. Much of his earnings over this time have gone into creating an artificial intelligence (AI) loaded with all the information, state records, personal photographs, blog records and so forth. The AI he calls Liss can be downloaded into robotic android shells and mechanical servants or reside in his home's computer system.

  Now it is time for him to return to Magenta and his old job with the Magentan Investigation Bureau. Though it will mean smuggling Liss onto that world as AIs based on real people – even if the said people are deceased – is illegal , but Keona is out to find out more about his wife's death.

  It will also mean re-adjusting back to Magenta's 1.4g and its unforgiving weather of almost relentless storms that rage for much of the time across the narrow equatorial belt, the only really habitable place on the planet.

  Upon returning, Keona is given a couple of junior agents with whom to work with on a new case of someone who overdosed in an unusual and spectacular way on a narcotic derived from the exobiological, local vegetation. He also sets about investigating the circumstances of his wife's death. Yet the more he uncovers he begins to realise that there was an aspect of his wife's life about which he was unaware and wonders if the AI Liss is being totally open to him…?

  There is plenty going on in this novel with which to engage the reader and many genre tropes explored for SF aficionados: robotics, exobiology, an alien world, mysterious invading sentients, artificial intelligence as well as more mundane computing and hacking. The reader is therefore satisfactorily propelled through to an intriguingly satisfying ending.

  Having said that, some of these tropes are simply a McGuffin which is a little annoying as these make for some of the most interesting aspects of the novel. (Maybe we will see these explored in sequels or prequels: it would be a waste if this was a single, standalone novel.) Where this book scores is that it has the feel of a solid detective thriller and if you like mundane detective stories in addition to SF then you will be bound to enjoy From Darkest Skies. Indeed, apparently the novel has been optioned for television.

  Jonathan Cowie

• Bookbag
  http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=From_Darkest_Skies_by_Sam_Peters
  Word count: 839

  From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters

  From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters
  1473214750.jpg
  Buy From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com

  Category: Science Fiction
  Rating: 4/5
  Reviewer: Sam Tyler
  Reviewed by Sam Tyler
  Summary: A layered science fiction novel that explores the use of AI to cure grief, but also has an exciting crime thriller at its core.
  Buy? Maybe Borrow? Yes
  Pages: 336 Date: April 2017
  Publisher: Gollancz
  ISBN: 9781473214750
  Share on: Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit Stumbleupon Follow us on Twitter

  No one likes to see a loved one die, but when they do we can reflect on how they lived and eventually move on with a piece of them inside us. However, what would happen if we could take all the memories we have saved on the internet and combine them into an Artificial Intelligence that represented them? Would this work to keep them close, or just give you a false facsimile that prevents you from moving on?

  Agent Keon Rause has been in mourning for five years over his wife Agent Alysha Rause, but rather than using this time to heal, he instead had her memories transferred into an AI programme that talks to him. With the voice of his dead wife ever present he is transferred back to the planet on which she was killed. Can he investigate her death whilst still working alongside his new colleague to catch a killer who is using a genetically modified drug to kill seemingly random victims?

  Sometimes the best science fiction is simple, whilst other times it is layered so thickly that you do not know where to start. From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters is one of those intense sci fi novels that has more layers than a manic mille-feuille, but so many of them work. When choosing what the book is about you have an abundance of options; AI gone bad, designer drugs of the future, techo crime noir or mysterious alien space opera. The book is all these things, but Peters manages to balance them.

  At its real core Darkest is a crime noir in the style of Blade Runner. Like many crime books our hero has an addiction; not alcohol or drugs, but an addiction to grief. Rause is driven by the need to know more about his wife's death and this leads to some dark places. The blurb on the book would have you believe that the story is all about Rause and the love for his dead wife's AI, but that is only part of a larger whole. The start is bogged down slightly by building the reader's knowledge of Rause and his wife, but it soon opens up into a wider story.

  To accompany Rause on his quest are a set of mismatched agents who are just as interesting as he is, from the stoner cop who knows the drug scene a little too well, to the straight laced cop who appears a little too uptight. The AI storyline takes a backseat in favour of a solid crime story that happens to be set on a different planet.

  It's the subtle world building that Peters creates throughout this book that's the highlight. As a story it concentrates on the crime, but we are given glimpses into a whole other meta story about an alien race that carved the Earth in their own image and shipped pockets of humanity onto new planets for a reason no one can understand. This is a huge concept and rather than adding 200 pages and explaining the extraneous details, Peters lets the information flow naturally so that it feels like a coherent background, never taking the spotlight from the main story.

  With so many ideas to juggle, Peters does a great job of making it all make sense; the alien planets, the fungal drugs and the AI lover. Therefore, it is a slight shame that the crime element of the tale becomes a little too confused, with so many leads the reader can become a little lost. However, when you are lost in such a vibrant and alternative world you don't mind too much. Peters would have an absolute classic had the book managed to control the complexities of the crime genre element to the same standard as the science fiction elements.

  Drugs and science fiction sometimes go well together as Afterparty by Daryl Gregory attests to great effect. You can also write complex ideas well if you have the know-how: Sand by Hugh Howey.

  Buy From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters at Amazon.co.uk

  Buy From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy From Darkest Skies by Sam Peters at Amazon.com.

• AustCrime
  http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-darkest-skies-sam-peters
  Word count: 925

  REVIEW - FROM DARKEST SKIES, SAM PETERS

  HideBook Cover

  HideAuthor Information
  Author Name:
  Sam Peters

  HidePublication Details
  Book Title:
  From Darkest Skies
  ISBN:
  9781473214750
  Year of Publication:
  2017
  Publisher:
  Hachette Australia
  Publisher Website:
  Hachette Australia - From Darkest Skies (link is external)
  Review Originally Published At:
  http://pilebythebed.com (link is external)

  HideCategories & Groupings
  Category:
  Science Fiction, Police Procedural
  Sub Genre:
  Noir

  HideBook Synopsis
  FROM DARKEST SKIES is a high-concept science fiction thriller wrapped around a love story, a man's search for the truth about his dead wife, and his relationship with the artificial intelligence he has built to replace her. Set in a future where the aliens came, waged war, and then vanished again, this is a striking new voice in science fiction.

  After a five year sabbatical following the tragic death of his wife and fellow agent Alysha, Keon Rause returns to the distant colony world of Magenta to resume service with the Magentan Intelligence Service. With him he brings an artificial recreation of his wife's personality, a simulacrum built from every digital trace she left behind. She has been constructed with one purpose - to discover the truth behind her own death - but Keon's relationship with her has grown into something more, something frighteningly dependent, something that verges on love.

  Cashing in old favours, Keon uses his return to the Service to take on a series of cases that allow him and the artificial Alysha to piece together his wife's last days. His investigations lead him inexorably along the same paths Alysha followed five years earlier, to a sinister and deadly group with an unhealthy fascination for the unknowable alien Masters; but as the wider world of Magenta is threatened with an imminent crisis, Keon finds himself in a dilemma: do his duty and stand with his team to expose a villainous crime, or sacrifice them all for the truth about his wife?

  HideBook Review
  Sam Peters creates an offworld noirish detective story in From Darkest Skies. At first blush Koenig Rause, generally known as Keys, exhibits all the traits of a classic age detective. Thrown out of his job for some serious but unspecified misdemeanour, only in that job after fleeing his real job as an investigator, full of self loathing, crawling back to his old team to try and solve the case that made everything go bad. That case – the death of his wife Alysha in more than suspicious circumstances. So far, so noir.

  The twist in this tale is that Keys is going back to the planet Magenta with an illegal robotic simulation of his wife in tow. Unable to cope with the grief, he has illegally constructed an artificial intelligence that looks like his dead wife and carries memories constructed from all of the public and private data he could make available. The real Alysha kept things from Keys about her work and as his new version has no access to private information, the AI cannot help him with those details.

  From Darkest Skies starts on Earth. The early going in this book is tough, with Peters engaging in plenty of tell don’t show exposition. In a nutshell – some aliens came, killed lots of people and then distributed many of the rest across 37 planets for reasons still unknown. Keys himself comes from Magenta, an icy planet ironically settled mainly by Polynesians. Magenta is not all that hospitable – only a small equatorial band is inhabitable and even then the weather is shocking. And it sports a gravity 1.4 times that of Earth so that many people require a type of gene therapy and drugs to survive on the surface.

  Keys returns to Magenta where he is given a small, slightly offbeat team which he enhances by taking on an old friend of his wifes. They are tasked with investigating the death of an heriess, killed by what was supposed to be a harmless recreational drug native to the planet. It is not long before this investigation and Keys off the book investigation into the death of Alysha five years before start to run into each other.

  When the investigation finally kicks off, From Darkest Skies works as an effective science fiction police procedural mash up. There is the requisite evil corporation, departmental politics, personality clashes, a mysterious stranger who seems to be one step ahead and some interesting action sequences. And behind it all a much larger mystery. The problem is that there is much of Peter’s universe that is only vaguely sketched. So that the connections between Key’s investigation and the broader context of that universe, including why humanity has been scattered and what the evil corporations are actually trying to achieve is vague at best.

  Comparisons have been made with Humans and Westworld, probably due to the existence of an AI character, the idealised version of Keys’ wife Alysha. But while it has an android character who is essential to the plot, From Darkest Skies is not really like either of these. It is its own form of hybrid robot, noir crime, space opera, corporate skulduggery story and when it works or when it doesn’t work it does so on its own terms.

  Submitted 1 year 1 month ago by Robert Goodman.
  Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - 12:54pm

• SF Book Reviews
  https://sfbook.com/from-distant-stars.htm
  Word count: 490

  QUOTED: "Sam Peters writes well, combining a crime/thriller novel with some imaginative future tech that has real uses—not to mention an examination of advanced artificial intelligence. The plot is clever and immersive, as is the world building."

  From Distant Stars by Sam Peters
  a review by Ant, in the genre(s) Science Fiction. Book published by Gollancz in April 2018

  From Distant Stars is the follow-up to Sam Peter's impressive debut From Darkest Skies. Detective Keon Rause has mostly come to terms with the death of his wife five years previously and his illegally created AI Liss has gone - presumably destroyed.

  He's tasked with investigating the death of military officer Jared Black and three "Fleet" officers ordered to question him at Mercy Hospital on Magenta (a gravity heavy planet where Keon lives). The case stinks of a conspiracy and cover-up. Why would someone kill a seemingly unimportant patient who has been in a coma for weeks in a heavily guarded room? To complicate matters further, the killer appears to have used a military-grade artificial shell to carry out the murders. As the mystery deepens, there appears to be a connection to something buried beneath Magenta's pole and someone who knows more about Keon than anyone alive has any right to.

  The first book in the series dealt quite heavily with loss, and to a certain degree we still have elements of this message here. While I've mentioned above that Keon has come to terms with his wife's death, it does still feature. From Distant Stars describes and makes use of future technology well, the author having a real flair for describing such technology in an easy to read style. This combines well with a police procedural theme and elements of a thriller lurking in the background.

  The story is imaginative with plenty of twists, turns and red herrings set against the planet Magenta. Magenta isn't the easiest of places to live. The heavy gravity, constant rain and fierce wind storms that can last for days. The planet is named after the colour that the dust that coats land and water. We get more background to Keon, his past life and a great deal more about his wife. Then there is the relationship between Magenta and Earth - which seems somewhat contentious. I love the backdrop of an alien race having restructured our solar system before abruptly disappearing, leaving behind their avanced technology.

  Sam Peters writes well, combining a crime / thriller novel with some imaginative future tech that has real uses - not to mention an examination of advanced artificial intelligence. The plot is clever and immersive, as is the world building.

  From Distant Stars is a fascinating, rewarding novel that merges the best of science fiction and crime - highly recommended.

  Written on Friday 1st June 2018 by Antony Jones.

• British Fantasy Society
  http://www.britishfantasysociety.org/reviews/from-distant-stars-by-sam-peters-book-review/
  Word count: 521

  From Distant Stars by Sam Peters. Book Review
  Posted on June 29, 2018 in Reviews

  From Distant Stars by Sam Peters
  Gollancz, ebook, 449pp, £8.99
  Reviewed by martin willoughby

  I’d read the previous book to this one, From Darkest Skies, and was looking forward to this.

  I wasn’t disappointed, but neither was I thrilled.

  Magenta is an Earth colony, created by kidnapping humans and dumping them on the planet with very little to help them survive. The kidnappers were an alien race who disappeared as quickly as they came, but left behind ships that would connect all the colonies and Earth.

  It’s an intriguing, and well thought out, background which underwrites both novels and plays a major part in this one.

  On Magenta they’ve found an alien spaceship, buried deep in the ice at the north pole. The race is on to find out what kind it is and how it got there.

  While that ticks away in the background, people are being killed, seemingly at random. Keon and his team want to find out who’s doing the killing, why, and what connects them.

  Rolling along beside this is the mystery of Keon’s dead wife, Alysha, and why she seems to be popping up in the net that connects the people of the planet.

  The pace of the book doesn’t let up and you’ll find yourself reading it long past the time you promised to stop, even though it can be irritating at times.

  While this is not a rehash of the previous book, it comes close, but my biggest bugbear with it is the characters. Both in this book and the previous one, not a single person is anything less than highly strung or permanently angry, and it does make it difficult to read, even though it’s well written. Frankly, it’s exhausting.

  Even when they are having downtime, there is a sense that none of them know how to relax. That may be deliberate, but if so I hope the author turns it down a notch for the next book, which I am still looking forward to by the way.

  The other problem I have is with their speech patterns. Because they are always angry or stressed, it is very difficult to tell who is speaking at any one time. The typeface is different when they communicate via their internal feeds, but it doesn’t stand out enough, and even then it’s difficult to tell who’s who.

  Overall, this is a book that’s well worth reading. The unfolding story of the aliens is an interesting backdrop to it all, as is Keon’s unravelling of the circumstances behind his wife’s death.

  The only thing it needs for the next one is a little bit of calmness now and then, especially when they go surfing or sit in a bar getting drunk.

  Lighten it up.

• Frightfest
  http://www.frightfest.co.uk/Goreinthestorehomepage/from-distant-stars--gore-in-the-store-book-review.html
  Word count: 547

  QUOTED: "Peters has created an excellent entry. ... While still suffering from a glut of exposition within its opening section, when the novel gets going it gets going."

  FROM DISTANT STARS ***

  Written by Sam Peters. RRP £16.99. Out 19th April 2018 from Gollancz

  FROM DISTANT STARS is the latest novel from author Sam Peters and the sequel to his earlier book FROM DARKEST SKIES. It picks up as Agent Keon Rause is still mourning the death of his wife Alysha and concerned over the fact that an AI copy of her called Liss is still out there. After a shooting in a police-guarded room in a high-security hospital, he finds himself with another mystery to solve.

  Agent Keon is a man in constant mourning over the woman he loved. The sections in which he describes his feelings (and confliction) over his long-lost wife are some of the book's highlights. The plot manages to tell what is an engaging detective story with a structure more in the vein of classic crime fiction, with some high concept science fiction ideas. The idea of ‘The Masters’ I found particularly fascinating, and it’s a concept that was well explored.

  Of course, no book is without its problems. Towards the start, I found Peters style a little off-putting. He attempts to cram as much backstory as he can into the opening few chapters. Of course, it’s a necessary evil, when one is crafting a sequel. However, Peters chooses to do this while the opening sequences of this novel are occurring. What results is a somewhat convoluted section where random sentences reminding us of Keon’s backstory intermingle with his thoughts on current events.

  Of course, world building within Science-Fiction is always a hard thing to do. You need to give your audience relevant exposition, but at the same time, you don’t want to drown them in it. This first section suffers from the latter, but as the book goes on it dissipates. I also found that at points, certain characters dialogue was….grating. Particularly the character of Rangesh, who somewhat bizarrely speaks nineties-skater-teen, using phrases such as ‘Totally dude!’ This seems a particularly odd choice to me. The book is set in the distant future and to have a character talking in a sense that seems outdated, was rather jarring. Perhaps a reason was given for this in the earlier novel, though if it was, I'm not aware and the result is it appears bizarre.

  Peters has created an excellent entry within the Sci-Fi detective sub-genre. While still suffering from a glut of exposition within its opening section, when the novel gets going it gets going. Populated with believable human characters, with issues that no matter how far into the future we are they are, are still believable. It’s a genre that has a lot of solid entries and not an easy one to do, after all, you’re essentially telling a mystery in a world where you know the rules - you invented them, the readers didn't.

  FROM DISTANT STARS, is an entertaining piece of high-concept science fiction. Mr Peters is an author to keep an eye on.

  Callum McKelvie.