William Allerton
Bill Allerton lives, sleeps, drinks, writes and worries in his native Sheffield, a place he leaves occasionally on foreign travel to gather experience and photographic images. In his writing, as in Life, he claims the ability to walk through doors into emotional and unexpected situations with the same purposeful stride.
His latest achievements are the first two 'JOURNALS' in the MEKANISMO series relating to the discovery and use of The Antikythera Mechanism.
Beginning in rural France in the 1930's, this generational saga ranges across a Europe preparing itself for War. Political leaders are searching for any advantage to help them survive. Prediction of future events would be the most significant advantage they could find. In pursuit of that they turn to Astrology, soothsayers and the study of human nature. Meanwhile, an Ancient Device is re-discovered that could change history for the owner, providing they can find two other vital items. The first is the right key. The second is a Female Adept who has been genetically bred from a line of female Adepts since 86BC, carrying a cellular message that enables them to interpret the device when it is eventually re-awakened. These women can be identified by a visible genetic quirk passed through the mitochondrial line. They also inherit a disposition towards loneliness, isolation and tragedy. Pursued as avidly as they are, they have no escape except to find love, or die trying.
Foxes, Frogs & Rice Pudding is a series of stories and poems initially created in a class of school children and brought to the page by the author Bill Allerton. As well as the characters in the title there are Dragons, Magic, Unicorns, Dinosaurs, Giants, Lions, Tigers, Fish, Girls, Boys, Moths, Rockets, Dentists, Pirates, Vampires, Dogs, School, Trees, Birds, Cats, and Witches and Wizards,
78 years of age and at last finding a version of peace in an acerbic relationship with her neighbors, Maggie Gray is shaken awake by the arrival of a night-time opportunist thief.
Determined to expose them, whatever the danger, Maggie embarks on a vodka-fueled journey that takes her back through her work at Homeland Security to the very dangerous foundations of her lonely life.
Would you know what something was if you couldn't spell it? Trot along with Sir Tingly on Whinny the Horse and a horde of Very Clever Mice as Old Ned leads them astray in The Quest for The Dargon! Meet Wizards, Pigeons, Strange Big-footed Creatures that go Roooaar in the night! Open Maps with Corners torn off and find a whole host of Very Silly Jokes Share a Pink Cheese Slice with Old Ned and the Mice and get your blue milk-shake directly from the cow! And... hang on to your hat... It's going to get Windy! Enjoy yourself with this roll-a-long tale of a hopeless boy, a failed Magician and... The Brightest, Shiniest Knight you ever saw...
They’re all in here… Seasons, Life- Change, Wishes, Cookery, Love, Sex, Death and Obsession, Giving, Hope, Need, Guile, Motorcycles, Guns, Trees and Bananas… plus a smattering of old Japanese Brake Parts.
This collection of short fiction has been a long time coming… written over a period of years they have now been reworked and collated for the first time in this Edition.
If you wish to be surprised (and I hope delighted) by the change of direction presented in each story, then this is the book for you.
My dearest wish is that you open your mind to any eventuality, sit back, and travel with me along unfamiliar tracks of discovery…
Steeped in Absurdist Humour, this is a view of the World through the eyes of Julius McEarly.
Swimming away the near-disaster of his previous Life, and considering himself to be the philosophical equivalent of a Fish, he seeks to rejoin The Shoal.
Retreating to an amorphous corner of Ireland, where the border between Reality and his own Imagination may be no more than a line drawn in the earth with a sharp stick, he discovers there really is no hiding place. Beset from all sides by Lovers, Coffins, Friends and Tinkers, he is forced to confront the greatest enemy of them all… Himself…
…it’s 1955 and you’ve just moved house. You go to the local newspaper shop for your ‘Beano’ and find they have a rack filled with ‘Astounding Science Fiction’, ‘Weird Fantasy’, ‘Wonder Stories’, ‘Mandrake the Magician’, and ‘Green Lantern’. To top it all, they have ‘The Eagle’, with its sensational Frank Hampson illustrations of ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’.
These comics showed me that Life Has No Boundaries, and set my imagination free and on fire. To mention only the magazines is to deny the influence that ‘Flash Gordon’ had with its spectacular flashing, smoking, sparkling spaceships dodging Emperor Ming’s Death Beams to rescue Dale Arden, with the help of strange men in tights.
Sci-Fi, I Love You. There. I’ve said it.
And now there’s no going back.
In this book I have tried to recreate the sense of discovery that I felt when I first encountered it so if, like me, you are still seven at heart and also, like me, still in love with the Golden Age of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, I hope you find that heart again within these pages.