Biog - introduction

I was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1961. When I was six, my family came to London and then, Dundee in Scotland. It was here that I grew up. In 1979 I began a degree in mathematics at Dundee University. I had been discouraged to do either architecture or ancient history - the latter being a lifelong passion. It was during the summer holidays of perhaps 1981 or 1982 that I conceived of what was to become eventually THE STONE DANCE OF THE CHAMELEON. I hammered out the first version of it on an old typewriter. The finished manuscript was around 600 pages and total rubbish.

In 1983, I moved to London without a job. Hearing that someone was looking for programmers to write a computer game, I pretended to more knowledge than I had and was accepted. Learning machine code programming as I worked, with three others, we produced GYRON for the ZX Spectrum. This became the first of several computer games that I was to write which explored a developing interest in virtual worlds. Though successful, Gyron did not make us much money. We agreed to convert the blockbuster ELITE over to the Spectrum. During this process we moved to Edinburgh.

Elite completed, our team lost two of its members. We two remaining then wrote HIVE. This game broke us apart. I ended up back in London working for Rainbird, my publisher, as a development manager. During this time I supplied the initial design for CARRIER COMMAND. I left Rainbird to return to Edinburgh where I developed some ideas of my own and worked with another team on EPT. These projects came to nothing. However, they led to my joining the EPT team in Bristol the result of which was CYBERCON III, which I designed, but did not program, and which I believe to be the best work I ever did in this field. Like so many earlier projects, the extreme demands it imposed on the development team, broke it apart and I returned to Edinburgh.

A friend of mine had set up a company called Fantasy Forge producing tabletop wargames and asked me if I would design a world for him. This culminated in the publication - admittedly by ourselves - of my first book, KRYOMEK. I wrote this and the sequel, HIVESTONE because someone had to. These books were intended merely to support the game rules and the resin and metal models with which the game was played. However, it was this experience which re-energized my will to write. My artistic excesses contributed to the collapse of this company. There was an interlude during which I fell back into computer games. A crazy year and half where I designed NIGHTMARE CIRCUS. This was a doomed project for Sega in the US, programmed by a team in Oslo, Norway who I ended up project managing on site. When, unexpectedly, Sega removed from the market the machine the game was designed for, the game ended up being solely released on cable in California, and in cartridge format in Brazil.

Thoroughly disillusioned, I turned to writing in a serious way. The Stone Dance had been maturing all that time and, over the years, every so often, I had dabbled in its world. It seemed the obvious thing to do. I had no idea how long it was going to take to write. If I had had, I do not imagine I would have had the courage to attempt it. The first couple of years were spent writing it and rewriting it until I felt that I actually knew, to some extent, what it was that I was doing. I presented an early version to my agent Victoria Hobbs. She helped me rework it and at last we submitted it to a number publishers. Bantam Press took it and THE CHOSEN was published in 1999. Before this happened I had already secured publication deals in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. More recently, the books have been translated into Portuguese. It is on the basis of these deals that I have managed to make a living as a writer.

I have completed the second part of The Stone Dance, THE STANDING DEAD and am currently working on the third and closing part of the trilogy.