Bio

Mike A. Lancaster is an award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer of YA science fiction novels, now venturing into Crime fiction with his novel "Temple to a Vanished God".

Early Days

I was born in Huntingdon, a couple of years after Oliver Cromwell.

Or maybe it just feels like that.

I live just outside Huntingdon now. Maybe I should have travelled more, but I'm very fond of the area. 

I was the middle child of three, which I guess carries its own particular set of problems, but the siblings I got were awesome enough for me not to blame them for my unfortunate chronological positioning.

My dad was in Personnel - which I fear is called 'HR' these days - and my mum worked in a cinema. I spent more time at my mum's work than at dad's - the company he worked for manufactured the channels that car windows wound up and down through, and that was never going to compete with the entire world of cinema.

Seeing 'Jaws' for the first (and second and third &c) time(s) was one of the most significant moments of my earliest years, and the stories I was asked to write in Junior School became hack tributes to Spielberg's masterpiece. I wrote a LOT of shark stories. "Fin of Death" was a particular favourite. Sure, I ventured out into killer whale stories, and giant squid stories, but sharks were quite key to my development as a teller of stories.

Weirdly I have never written a shark story since.

I tried once - "Hammerhead" - but the story barely made it past the title. Maybe I grew out of them. Or maybe I'm still waiting for the perfect take. Enough about sharks, though.

I think I was a weird kid, if I'm being honest. Shy and lacking confidence, and obsessed with the written word. Fictional worlds gave me a place to hide, to live spectacular lives, to face unspeakable horrors, to generally be a little more exciting than I actually was, what with all that reading books and little else.

I was about 12 years old when I realised that what I wanted from life was to write books. It was right about that time that I met the girl who would one day become my wife.

 

This (unpublished) Writing Life

Mum and dad split up, acrimoniously. I gained a step father. I moved from rural idyll into urban modernity.

And punk rock happened.

Its primal cry of anger resonated with the ones that echoed inside me, and I embraced the anger. Bad haircut followed bad haircut; red Crazy Color followed pink Crazy Color followed green Crazy Color. Destroy t-shirts and bondage trousers, and odd-coloured (one lime green, one vibrant pink) DM boots. I stopped eating meat. 

I was still writing, but now it was lyrics, poems, naive political polemic. I moved to a peace camp outside a US airbase protesting against the deployment of Cruise missiles. I had a gun pointed at me by a USAF security policeman. 

I retired from protest and started writing stories. Horror stories. Not gore fests, but tales that were meant to unsettle. I honed my craft on them. I learned to write stories based on a title I'd type pretty much at random. 

My first story was called 'Gravedigger's Vice'; my first published story was called 'Foetal Attraction' (a few years before Kathy Lette discovered the same pun and made much better use of it). 

I learned that I REALLY liked telling stories. Learned that I wasn't really happy when I WASN'T telling stories. My first novel was called 'Killsketch' and was an utter mess.

I realised that I needed some formal education. Went to Uni. Studied literature. And theatre. And art. Wrote a mess of a novel called 'myth'. More stories. Started publishing stories in magazines and on the new-fangled thing they called the Internet. Appeared in anthologies. Published a slim volume of short stories. Almost sold 'myth' to a publisher. 

I tried a young adult science fiction novel about a genetically-enhanced battle cat fighting in a never-ending war.

And then I wrote 0.4.

Young Adult Science Fiction

I was waiting for my Mac to upgrade to the latest operating system. I watched the process as it went. I realised that the new operating system was using bits of the old operating system. Suddenly I had a story idea.

Not JUST a story idea, though. I get too many of those, and they usually get scrawled in notebooks and forgotten.

Not this one, though.

This one stuck. 

So I started writing it. And when it was done, I realised that I really had something. 

I sent the manuscript out to agents, and managed to interest Becky Bagnell of the Lindsay Literary Agency, and before I knew it we were approaching publishers. I had a few bites, but Egmont really seemed to GET the book, and I signed a contract.

 

 

"grabs you by the throat from the first page and won’t let

go even once you’ve finished reading."

 

Reader Review