With skilful storytelling, the authors of the Burn the Sky duology have crafted a captivating narrative that pulls readers into a vibrant world full of excitement and adventure, creating a compelling reading experience.
What do you get when you mix an expensive courier with Keanu Reeves in the 90s? Ninety minutes of cyberpunk ambition slowly losing a fistfight with its own budget. Johnny Mnemonic was meant to be William Gibson’s big screen moment, but it looks more like a dress rehearsal for The Matrix where someone forgot to pay the lighting bill.
Instead of sleek noir paranoia, we get polygon VR, a cyber-preacher assassin, and a dolphin that feels more like a punchline than tragedy. It’s not a cult classic because it nailed cyberpunk; it’s Almost a Cult Classic because you can see the good movie straining to get out from under the rubble.
When it came time to decide which of the two I would expand into a larger piece, the choice was unexpectedly difficult. Writing about my friend would have been meaningful, but the limitation of just 1,000 words felt like a disservice. Her life deserves more than a word count cap. Out of respect, I chose instead to expand on Wells’s character and write a fanfiction piece featuring the Time Traveller.
That gave me freedom: a freedom to invent, to experiment, and to engage with Wells’s world without worrying about compressing or oversimplifying a real person’s experiences.
The challenge then became stylistic. I had to keep close to Wells’s 19th-century voice while making it accessible to a modern reader. That tension shaped how I wrote dialogue, how I described scenes, and even how I played with etymology.
FB group, FB page, BlueSky
What do you get when you mix Stephen King’s name, Pierce Brosnan before Bond, and early-90s CGI? A techno-parable that wanted to be visionary but ended up looking like a rejected Doctor Who episode. The Lawnmower Man should have been the VR movie of its era; instead, it’s remembered for a monkey in a headset, a priest with a belt, and Jeff Fahey mowing down enemies in a fog machine haze.
The story leans on stereotypes, the pacing crawls, and the CGI buries Jobe’s transformation under neon polygons. And yet, with tighter focus and scarier visuals, this relic might have been a defining sci-fi of the 90s. Instead, it’s Almost a Cult Classic: one rewrite away from legendary.