Official site of author Dan Jones. Always writing.
I always have a little think about TS Eliot’s The Wasteland at some point in April. Them’s the breaks when you’re a bit of a literature nerd, I’m afraid.
For anyone else who fancies a wander through Eliot’s masterpiece as the flowers push themselves through the earth and try again for another year, here are my thoughts on the matter.
All civilisations have had people dedicated to learning, and the furtherment of human knowledge, effectiveness, efficiency and technology. But that isn’t necessarily science, and that doesn’t mean that every society can be, or has been, scientific.
One only has to look at the incredible advances in technology made since the advent of real, Cartesian scientific thought and reasoning, to see the difference between what a scientific society can achieve in contrast with the pre-scientific world up to around the early 1600s.
The Green Man is now available to pre-order at all good bookshops, including Amazon, Waterstones, Portbello, WHSmiths, and more!
The Green Man is a historical fiction novel with a supernatural edge. Imagine Agents Mulder and Scully as medieval monks and you’re on the right path. I’ve used old English mythology, Christian myth and symbolism, and I’ve explored the similarities between modern-day cancel culture and medieval heresy.
If you feel that the historical world, and the edge of the liminal, has things to teach us in the present day, then The Green Man will be for you.
The book will be on general sale on April 24th.
Following our last episode with Richard Sparks on The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, in which we must have mentioned The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at least, ooh, I don’t know, at least three times, and after which we lost radio contact with Brian Sexton after he was devoured by the Black Sinkhole of Sligo, we decided to plough on with the second half of the interview.
So, on a tight schedule (Richard had tickets for the opera, meladdo) we delved into his debut novel, New Rock, New Role, an epic fantasy derived from Richard’s own love of gaming. It’s a funny and touching tale of finding purpose, friendship and adventure later in life, when all the signs tell that life may have finished dishing out adventures.
This was pertinent to Richard as he wrote this novel, his first, in his seventies. So we talk about the convetions of gaming, the friendships you make, the conventions of fantasy and the comfort and community it brings.
Elsewhere, Captain Halfmilkcarton gets the shock of his life when he’s joined by an unexpected but remarkably familiar guest…
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In a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, the writer and self-confessed anarchist Michael Malice confessed that he could not for the life of him understand the rationale behind the wicked crimes that were perpetrated by the grooming-and-rape gangs in the UK, which has received so much media attention recently owing to Elon Musk’s re-exposure of it.
I’ve just finished reading The 120 Days of Sodom, and the principal takeaway is that the depravity shown by the criminals in Rotherham et al is neither new nor unique. If you’re looking at crimes such as those that took place and wondering how humans could arrive at those dark ends, De Sade lays it all out in grisly, fastidious detail.
To read the full article, click here.
But beware.
Chronscast Episode 26
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is one of those rare cult texts that someone, against all received wisdom, somehow transcends the limits of its nerdy little corner of the subculture and breaks free to permeate the culture at large, unfettered by things like common sense or style.
The Green Man is finally getting it’s publication date, on April 27th 2025. It’s taken a long long time to get to this milestone, since first starting the book in 2017, and then putting it down, picking it up back up during the pandemic lockdown, and finally selling it to Stephen Games and the team at Envelope Books in 2023.
Continue reading “Green Man Out April 27th”Sky Empire released our latest video last week, for “The Last Days of Planet Fantasy”. TLDOPF is one of the two instrumental tracks from our 2023 album The Shifting Tectonic Plates Of Power, and we recorded it in a lockdown-style performance. Remi is ensconsced away in France for the time being, so it’s hard to get together and play as one, but we manged to each record our sections live and Drazic was able to mix things down in the studio. What I do love about this video is that it is a “live” video, we are all playing live, just separately, which is why it’s a bit different than the record.
I think it’s a great example of what Sky Empire’s about musically – fierce but catchy riffs, heavy breakdowns, and of course a pyrotecnic solo by Drazic. Plus, I love this song because the coda is such a cool heavy groove led by the bass!
It’s hard to believe that Chronscast has been going for a year now – it seems only a few days ago that Christopher and I started a recording session with Stephen Palmer to talk about Northern Lights, when in actual fact it was November 2021. I’m very proud and grateful that our team – Bean, Brian Sexton and The Judge – have managed to keep creating new content throughout the year, and have kept us going and growing.
Continue reading “Chronscast 2022 Review”
As the nights draw in and we approach the midwinter, what better way to celebrate the season than dipping into that most macabre of festive traditions, the Christmas ghost story? While we’re all familiar with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, more modern traditions include the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas, adaptations of typically M.R James stories, and which themselves are continuations of ancient storytelling customs that stretches back several centuries, when midwinter and the winter solstice, rather than Hallowe’en, was the time of year where the veil between the lands of the living and the dead was at its thinnest.
Continue reading “Chronscast Episode 12 – A Ghost Story For Christmas, with Alison Littlewood”
Dan Jones - the Official Site