Mad Max MMMMMMMYEAH

When Lisa Jenkins, publisher at Sinful Press, asked me what my ideal cover image for Lust in the Dust would be, I told her, "THIS:"

Mad Max: Fury Road

Post-apocalyptic grime? Check.
Conflict? Check.
Imperator Furiosa sitting on someone's face? Check.

That's my personal idea of sexy 😄😄😄 but hey, your experience may vary.

She's beautiful though...

And so's the eponymous Max, let's face it:

In fact if you are old enough to remember the original trilogy, and Mel Gibson before he officially outed himself as a dickhead, the entire Mad Max franchise is a rich seam of moody, post-apocalyptic hotness...

... and kink:

HELL YEAH AUNTIE ENTITY!

And if that's got your juices flowing, well, there's always this book... 😜

Amazon US (paperback) :: Kindle

Amazon UK (paperback) :: Kindle

Avon calling

I was very sorry to hear yesterday of the death of actor Paul Darrow, who played Kerr Avon in the TV series Blake's 7 many decades ago. He was one of the first characters I had a total crush on as a child...

Blake's 7 was a massively popular 1970s Brit SF series with a rather varied quality of script (and the occasional terrible set) which probably doesn't stand the test of time, but it goes down in history for having the most crushing ending ever to a series, as the Evil Federation comprehensively wins and our protagonists are betrayed to ignominious deaths. It traumatised a generation of kids - if you think the Red Wedding was grim then you are just a naive baby!

The other thing it did to a generation of kids was turn them on to some less-than-vanilla character relationships in the shape of Avon and arch-villain Supreme Commander Servalan...

Avon was a bad guy who accidentally found himself in company with the rebellious heroes and stuck around for the political struggle because he didn't have any better options. He dressed in black, was witheringly sarcastic and heartless, and is generally responsible for all my sexual interest in uber-intelligent emotionally-unavailable bastards.

Here's a lovingly-curated compilation of his bitchiest moments:



RIP Paul Darrow - you will be missed 😔

The HU

The HU are Mongolian folk rockers, and the best thing on Youtube right now 💖💖💖

Black Sails

While we on holiday in lovely sunny Dorset (Brrrrr!) last week, we watched a whole lot of Black Sails. It's the series you want if you like pirates but found Pirates of the Caribbean just too damn silly, and woefully deficient in lesbian sex:
 

There are boobs, bums and cocks in Black Sails, which is why it's here on my blog 😈 Also, two series in, we've seen two poly threesomes, which is pretty heartening ... even if there's no guarantee that the individuals won't have betrayed each other twice before tea.  Characters in Black Sails change their allegiances with dizzying frequency.

It's a giant, high-speed political soap opera really, with a background of sailing ships and mass murder. Every action has unforeseen (and usually terrible) consequences. The premise (if you are even further behind the curve than me and need to be told) is that it's set twenty years before Treasure Island, so there's a really clever mixture of fictional characters like Long John Silver and Captain Flint ...

... alongside historical characters such as 'Calico Jack' Rackham, Charles Vane and Anne Bonny:

Of course most of the main characters are SCARY HAWT, because this is television...

Even the ugly ones are hot, particularly Vane who sort of looks like an Uruk-hai with maxed-out charisma:

And who am I to complain? 😍

Black Sails also has gorgeous sea scenery, tons of violence, and THIS wonderful intro sequence:



What it doesn't have, despite the above, is any undead. Oh well ... back to Game of Thrones for that!

Feeling Justified

In my eternal quest to be 5 years behind everyone else watching TV, I'm keeping my eyecandy quotient up by watching Justified while reading subs for Lust in the Dust this week (GET WRITING btw, if you haven't subbed already!).

Timothy Olyphant has a pretty hot bod and is clearly the only good-looking guy in the whole of Kentucky...

but his eyebrows are the real stars. They deserve acting credits all of their own: Left Brow ... Right brow.  Quizzical, come-hither, or embodying barely-supressed rage (okay, mostly the latter), they are captivating 😀

Plus, it has great title music:

TV Ten

For those who don't follow me religiously on Facebook(!?!) ... I took part in the "10-Day TV challenge" this month. The task was, once a day for ten days, to post an iconic image from a TV production which influenced me. So here's my roundup, in no particular order...

1)  Blake's 7: 

SF rebels in a dystopian future.The series that taught me that happy endings aren't mandatory. Utterly devastating to watch as a child.

2) Sesame Street: 
 

I grew up with a lot of American TV because we lived in Hong Kong. Sesame Street was a window onto a world that seemed incredibly alien - yet also happy and hopeful and loving. If I'm a liberal now it's because of this early indoctrination 😉


3)  Sapphire and Steel:

 

Creepy, genre-bending, starkly original, and the heroes were *shockingly* ruthless in their determination to fix things (OMG poor Mr Tully!). Also I fancied Steel like crazy👿


4) Game of Thrones: 

 

What can I say? Ground-breaking. Reignited my interest in secondary world fantasy, which I'd nearly given up on since nothing to that point matched The Lord of the Rings. Marked my personal switch from terrestrial TV to those weird pay channels like Sky and Netflix.

5) The Adventure Game: 

The prototype for every Escape Room in existence. Also popularised cute dragon shifters before the Romance genre got there.


6) Arthur of the Britons: 

Aired 1972, and surely the most obscure show I could find for this list ... but it certainly "influenced" me 😉  Here's the blog post I wrote all about it

7) The Storyteller: 

Starring the incomparable John Hurt, this series made fairy tales cool for people other than small children 💖Along with Angela Carter's stories, this greatly influenced my writing.
 

8) Michel Strogoff:

This cheesey French tea-time treat taught me *everything* I know about Romance - to whit, that it needs to take place in the setting of a major war somewhere foreign, that the antagonist's sexier than the protagonist, and that the best bit is when the hero gets tortured. (No wonder I'm a mess.) Another one I wrote a blog-post about

9) Blackadder: 

I am exactly the right age, nationality and class to consider this century-spanning dynastic epic the funniest TV comedy ever written. Because (apologies to all you woke folk) that sneering, world-weary smartarse speaks to my heart.

And I still say "Bob" and "I have a cunning plan," occasionally.

10) I, Claudius: 

I was allowed at 10 yrs old to stay up and watch this witty but very NSFW series because it was Culture 😄  Still love it to bits - along with Rome, its obvious descendant, and Game of Thrones, its secret bastard child. My most influential scene - a famous prostitute and the Empress Messalina have a shagging competition. The prostitute demands to be paid. "For you it's a hobby; for me it's work," she says. "MY hobby is gardening."

I think I raised a wisdom point from that exchange.

The Sky is a Neighborhood

My fave track and video of the moment 😍

Q: Why's he called Aquaman?

A: Because he makes women wet 👿

In honour of the fact I watched Justice League yesterday, here are some pics of the sexiest man in all the Seven Seas:

And here's the haunting Leonard Cohen song the movie opens with, since this was my Facebook review:

"Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich"

Well WOW, if you want a metaphor for Trump's West, just try the death of Superman. JL opens with a montage, to Leonard Cohen's lyrics, of a world where hope has died; stuck in a spiral of hate and vicious self-interest, where white supremacists attack hijabied shopkeepers and nihilistic terrorists attempt to return us to a medieval age of "holy fear". The good guys hide in the shadows, firefighting but not daring to lead. To be clear: I never liked Superman as a character, but this really hits home with why he mattered.

And if "Batman vs Superman" was the turn of the wheel into darkness, "Justice League" is the very necessary counterpart - the turn toward the light again, the righting of past wrongs, the reaching out from isolation to others. The two movies make a whole. 

"The deepest darkness is not the absence of light, but the belief that the light can never return".

The Expanse

"My eyes are up here"

I just want to say how much I am LOVING the Netflix series The Expanse, which has got to be the best space-based SF since the Battlestar Galactica relaunch and is kicking Star Trek's flabby ass.

And I do not just love it for Amos as depicted above, who is sort of a pit-bull in human form (complete with puppy-dog eyes). It has whole diverse cast of sexy - ahem - I mean engaging characters, and a compelling three-strand plot that twines together to reveal an epic alien threat to all human life.

There's the self-described Shit Magnets who start off as miners in the asteroid belt, thoroughly oppressed by the ever-bickering governments of Earth and Mars, and stumble onto a nasty NASTY secret:

The Designated Adult, the Pitbull, the Wannabe Hero Who is a Bit of a Tosser, and the Nerdy One

There's the Earth-based political shenanigans in the UN;

She scares me more than the Alien

And the mystery thriller plot when a crooked cop tries to track down a missing woman:

By Season Two you also get some Martian Marine characters involved in their own related crisis:

Have you noticed that this SF future isn't predominantly White? Awesome! And they have a lot of fun with languages and accents.

The setting is gritty-to-grim, with every difficult decision having even more difficult consequences, and no shying away from the moral baggage.

THIS. THIS.

And yeah,  it's sexy, of course 💖 That never puts me off!

I can't wait for Series 3!