Alison Morton | Alison Morton Author

Alternate history and the butterfly of doom

A butterfly in the Amazon jungle makes that little extra flutter of its wings and a few weeks later there’s a storm or even a hurricane in the Caribbean that wrecks cities. That’s a little crudely put, but this is the idea behind Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory. In reality, the butterfly’s flapping wing is just […]

In defence of round-robins

Oh, the sneering! Oh, the superiority! Even Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots and Leaves) is on BBC Radio4 broadcasting a series of witty ripostes to round-robins (RRs).

Now some RRs are painful: long-winded, which goes hand-in-hand with boring; poorly composed and/or typed; with scattered blurry photos; and produced with tight margins in tiny, coloured or […]

Grammar Nazi or dilettante?

I’m reading a book at the moment full of “prithee, varlet” language. It’s as irritating as Hades, but maybe that’s just me. The atmosphere of fear is building, the characters are forming and the plot slowly emerging.

But despite the over-elaborate language, the author’s grammar is spot on. And that’s what saves it.

Writing is […]

It's raining, it's pouring!

One of the first things we notice in the mornings is the weather. How many of those first tweets go something like this: ‘Brrr – cold as I crawl out of bed – not LOL’ ‘The sun. At last. Damn, I have to go to work.’ ‘DH now in garden shed building an ark. Blasted […]

Drivers of the metal fish

Not steampunk, but creative imagination expanding our ideas of exploration…

Lagos, in the Algarve, was the harbour from which Prince Henry the Navigator’s maritime explorers set off in the early 1400s to discover the unknown world. Portuguese sailors were at the vanguard of this European Age of Discoveries during the 15th and 16th centuries, finding […]