SEA LION PRESS

By Alexander Rooksmoor. Quite often I have been inspired to write a short story or even a novel as a result of disliking how a story I have read or seen turns out. The Blood and The Ghost  was stimulated by me watching all 5 seasons of the TV series The Last Kingdom  (broadcast 2015-23). The series, based on the Saxon Stories  novels by Bernard Cornwell, is set in Wessex between 866-878 CE, the eponymous ‘Last Kingdom’ not under Danish rule. My main prompt for an alternative

By Charles Cartwright. On the Sea Lion Press Forums , we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly). The theme for the 91st contest was Cons . Question 14. Read the case study below then answer the subsequent questions in your answer booklet.​ ——— Case Study: Fake Campaign for Restoration of the French Monarchy During the political and economic crisis in France in late 2028 (which eventually led

In May and June 1970, viewers of the BBC’s Doctor Who  were treated to an apocalyptic vision of a fascist Britain as Jon Pertwee’s Doctor crossed over in a parallel world. One where Britain was a fascist state that was risking its own destruction with an ill-conceived project unleashing energies from deep within the Earth with the power to transform men into monsters. Inferno fascinated viewers for more than a half-century and inspired speculation about what led that world t

By Ryan Fleming. The man himself. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Since its 1912 sinking, the Titanic  has loomed large in popular culture, including multiple films. When Alfred Hitchcock, another titanic figure, left the United Kingdom for the United States in the late 1930s, it was common knowledge that his first project would be a drama based on the sinking of the Titanic . For several reasons, that project wound up never happening and Hitchcock’s first Ame

By Gary Oswald. One of the New Villages created by the British in Malaysia, where civilians were forcibly relocated to disrupt the communist insurgency. This was publicly known in 1950s Britain - how many civilians were treated by soldiers and police was known & recorded by the government. Photograph in public domain, courtesy wikimedia commons. If you spend any time at all online looking for people talking about the British Empire (and honestly if you're reading this, you pr

By Charles E.P. Murphy In 2002, the "rage virus" swept through Britain; everyone infected went rabid and turned on the people around them. The world quarantined the nation and abandoned all who hadn't managed to flee. Twenty eight years later, the ageing Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), builder of a vast memorial hewn from human bones, makes a tentative contact with the Alpha infected he's dubbed 'Samson' (Chi Lewis-Parry). The young Spike (Alfie Williams), however, has met som

By Paul Hynes. Lord Gort and General Gamelin pose for a British War Office photographer in October 1939. Both men may have felt France's strategy was all going to plan. Public domain photo courtesy wikimedia commons. On the 2nd of May, the Battle of Berlin finally came to an end. The surviving residents of the German capital emerged from the ruins of their homes and attempted to piece their lives back together in the shadow of the victors. The whereabouts of their own leaders

By Thomas Anderson. Well, not that sort of worldbuilding. (Logo from Alien franchise, copyright Disney; picture taken from Xenopedia.) The fantasy author Brandon Sanderson has become well-known for his advocacy of what he calls “Sanderson’s First Law (of Magic)”; that is, that an author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. In one sense, this is a manifesto against deus ex machina  and inventing new rule

By Gary Oswald. So AH you can see an alternate version of it! Picture courtesy Amazon. Being enthusiasts of alternate history, everyone reading this is probably able to name an iconic piece of AH fiction in most formats. A book, a comic, a tv show, a video game etc. But it's maybe a little harder when it comes to motion pictures. There have obviously been a bunch of AH feature films but none have really been advertised as the big new AH media in the way TV shows like The Man

By Matthew Kresal. “Where do your ideas come from?” That’s almost an inevitable question one receives after a stranger finds out you’re a published author. One that is almost always in the wake of, “What do you write?” It’s an understandable question and one that I’m sure in my younger (and unpublished) days I asked myself. Since being published, I’ve come to realize that like a magician revealing a trick, there’s a risk that answering takes some of the magic out of proceedin

This year's seen the release of two novels from Sea Lion Press: a Cold War spy thriller in a world with a Nazi detente, and a political history in a world where Obama's time in office is delayed by twenty years. Both are still available now and in Funny Money 's case, in paperback too! Funny Money David Brook, ex-RAF, now British intelligence, faces a conspiracy that could ruin Britain. A British intelligence officer looking for counterfeit money. A mysterious French-Algeria

By Charles EP Murphy. On the Sea Lion Press Forums , we run a monthly Vignette Challenge. Contributors are invited to write short stories on a specific theme (changed monthly). The theme for the 86th contest was Workers . Right. This was going to be the tricky bit. Gene Narvy was going to have to: A) Land his jumping dropkick on Paul Plunder perfectly B) Not  look to make sure his partner Tommy Frank had landed his one perfectly, by which he meant Tommy had "botched" the kick

The ebook retailer Smashwords is running a sale until New Year's Day, and Sea Lion Press is part of it! We have dozens of books on a 25% discount , from our newest releases to some of our venerable classics, so now's the time to purchase one you've always had your eye on - but only for a few more days...

By Gary Oswald. Secretly a AH film? The Woman King's bluray, courtesy Amazon. Inglourious Basterds  is a 2009 Quentin Tarantino war film about allied agents operating in occupied France during 1944. Those agents are planning an assassination of Adolf Hitler and, to spoil a 16-year-old film, they shockingly actually succeed. Hitler is killed by the French resistance in 1944 rather killing himself in 1945.   That obviously has huge political and military implications. But the f

By Matthew Kresal. Charles Dickens being bothered when he's trying to write, in the DVD cover for The Man Who Invented Christmas. Image courtesy Amazon marketplace. Christmas time. Presents. Turkey or a piece of poultry on the table for dinner. Stories of redemption and a new found chance of happiness (romantic or otherwise) amid the snows of the holiday season. All of these are hallmarks across the western world of that time up to and around the 25th of December every year.

Just in time for Christmas, we're back with our last release of the year. After a tumultuous year in US politics, SLP veteran Tom Anderson returns to spin a yarn that asks the question of what a much later Presidency of Barack Obama would look like. How might more experience and many more bruising defeats along the way to the White House affect the man who became the first African American President? And, of course, how are national and global politics changed by the absence

By Colin Salt. A Pan Am Boeing 707-121 hanging out at Worldport in 1961 - a terminal built by Pan Am themselves. Copyright the John Proctor Collection and provided to Wikimedia Commons. Pan Am Airlines is a cultural icon of an airline that nonetheless went out of business decades prior to this article. This naturally brings up the question people ask about any firm or organization remotely similar: could it have been saved? The answer is "almost certainly not."   I'm not goin

By Thomas Anderson. The subject of our article, when he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1863; photograph taken by Ernest Edwards, courtesy wikimedia commons via the State Library of New South Wales. I’m aware that on Youtube nowadays there is an irritating prevalence of using the word “forgotten” (or “that you’ve never heard of”) in video titles, which is frequently not true. Possibly the worst case I saw was a video describing Vichy France as “the forgotten Nazi

By Ryan Fleming. In no way mediocre! Special edition blu-ray, image courtesy Amazon. Mad Max: Fury Road was released in May 2015. It was the fourth film in the Mad Max  series, and the first without original leading man Mel Gibson. Though it saw disappointing returns as far as the studio was concerned, it received critical acclaim, received ten nominations at the Academy Awards and won six of them, was critically acclaimed, making multiple top ten films that year, and later

By Gary Oswald. "Oriental Warrior" by Pier Francesco Mola (1650), a painting of a contemporary Barbary pirate. Could they have dominated the Caribbean coasts? Art in public domain, provided by wikimedia commons. The European colonisation of the Americas was done by numerous countries. England, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, Belgium, Netherlands, Prussia, Tuscany, Spain, France, Portugal, Norway, Malta, and Courland in modern day Latvia all made attempts to settle in vario