T.R. Napper's Blog

I did an interview with the British Fantasy Society podcast in December last year which I had completely forgotten about until a few days ago, when it was published.

But you get it: December is a blur. You’re tired, you want the break to come, that magical period between Christmas and New Year, when time loses all meaning and no-one expects anything of you, and you can read on the couch and eat unwisely. That sweet spot, between watching Die Hard on Christmas Eve, and beginning the year anew on ...

 Ditmar Awards Voting is open. For the uninitiated, the Ditmars are the annual Australian peer-voted awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

What does peer-voted mean? Well, that you are either attending the National Convention (or have in recent years) or that you are ‘active in[image error] fandom’. What does the latter mean?

As I understand it: if you’ve been to a convention in Australia, or are in a discussion group (online or live), or interact regularly on social media, or are simply a fan of ...

Hit my target of 52 books read for the year. You know what? I love reading. Completely trite to say so, but there it is. Several times throughout 2025, while I was lying on my couch (a battered yet fiendishly comfortable decades-old from my student years) I would rest the book on my chest and think: this is the life.

I treat reading as part of my job as a writer – and financial penury aside – I’m truly fortunate to be a part of this profession.

Over the past few years I’ve ...

This year, Ghost of the Neon God won both Best Science Fiction Novella at the Aurealis Awards, and Best Novella at the Ditmars. The Aurealis is a juried award, and genuinely features the best of Australian SF. The Ditmars is by popular vote – and while these types of awards can be flawed – nonetheless reflects the acclaim of the local fan community.[image error]

Here’s the thing: it’s super rare to win both (I looked back over the last twenty 20 years and found perhaps four other examples). To do so means yo...

Art is not a luxury, it is a necessity. Let me show you why.

I write full time, which is another way of saying I’m broke. As such, I work several extra jobs (three, currently) to feed my writing habit. I’m lucky, insofar as most of those jobs are as a creative writing mentor, and I’ve always enjoyed teaching. I’m particularly fortunate to have one of those mentor positions with a program called ARRTS (Art for Recovery, Resilience, Teamwork and Skills).

I recently watched a thoughtful, interesting YouTube on ‘Writing Characters Who Are Weapons,’ by Tim Hickson. He’s a New Zealander who runs the channel HelloFutureMe, which deals with both writing as a craft and analysing pop culture. He’s got some great content, so I recommend you go and check it out. I’ve embedded the video in this article because he includes as one of his examples Lin Thi Vu from 36 Streets (2022), and The Escher Man (2024), which in turn compels my ego to share it with you.[image error]

Ditmar Awards Voting is open. For the uninitiated, the Ditmars are the annual Australian peer-voted awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

What does peer-voted mean? Well, that you are either attending the National Convention (or have in recent years) or that you are ‘active in fandom’. What does the latter mean?[image error]

As I understand it: if you’ve been to a convention in Australia, or are in a discussion group (online or live), or interact regularly on social media, or are simply a fan of A...

I recently did an interview with Jonathan, an Australian BookTuber who runs a channel called Words in Time. He’s got some great content, so I recommend you go and check it out. I’ve embedded the interview in this article, and below it have added the notes I made before we talked (re-written into article form). The notes expand somewhat on the discussion in some cases, and in others make observations we didn’t have time for. Though they obviously don’t capture the back-and-forth and digressions (...

Australia’s premier award for speculative fiction is the Aurealis. It is a juried award, and genuinely features the best of Australian SF. I get anxious every year in the lead up to the short list announcement, elated if I make the cut, and more anxious still in the days before the ceremony.

So it was a huge honour for me to win the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novella this year, for Ghost of the Neon God. The book was a fix up of sorts, taking several years on and off (I discuss the ...

Introduction

Discussion of Artificial Intelligence by the tech industry is equal parts dishonest and stupid. It is a discussion founded on the invidious lies of the snake oil salesman conjoined with the religious-like fervour of the fundamentalist.

Indeed, the cult of the techbro sees the singularity as god, the uploaded consciousness as the gift of eternal life, and the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence as ushering in heaven on earth: a post-scarcity era where every being gets everythi...