Drew Bryenton

Find Drew’s books on sale at sci-fi-cafe.com on
table number 8
at the summer
Oxford Indie Book Fair
on 13-July 2025

See home page for details, map and more.

Writing fiction has been a compulsion and something of an addiction for me since I was a kid. First off, because it was something I was good at when I went to school. I could read at a young age and creating stories comes naturally to a lot of children; it was far easier and much more fun to indulge the strange scenarios and alternatives to Saturday morning cartoons in my imagination than to memorise dates and times tables; in writing, nothing is fundamentally ever wrong, it’s just a matter of aesthetics.

I grew up with fantasy and sci-fi games, both on the computer, on graph paper and with tons of shiny clacking dice, and on kitchen tables turned into 1/32 scale battlefields. I was also a kid during the lies, hype and idiocy of the so-called ‘satanic panic’, when Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal songs and horror movies were blamed by a bunch of pseudo-righteous grifters for every evil on earth. The fact that this outspewing of bile was unjust and untrue combined with the fact that the pearl-clutching shock and horror of certain fulminating prudes made fantasy, sci-fi, horror and metal cool. And so the foundation for what I liked to write about was already laid out in a rough sketch, even before my grandparents got me a regular source of the wonderful, demented 2000AD comics.

Most people will know these works about Judge Dredd, the dystopian antihero cop from a post-nuclear future. But there was plenty more inventive, wildly out-there high concept stuff in those pages, and the things referenced and lovingly paid homage to by those artists and writers (including the incomparable Simon Bisley) was a goldmine of ‘what if?’ mind-expanding stuff. My local library (this was New Zealand in the 80s) soon ran out of things for me to read, and I put in requests. At the same time, I serialised sci-fi stories for my mates at school and drew comics during boring classes.

That sort of explains the subject matter of a lot of my books; it’s based squarely in the darkly comical, satirical space which inspired fellow Kiwi Hugh Cook, and writing demigods Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I’m of the opinion that reading should be a fantastical, psychedelic and vivid experience; while I admire people who can write about crumbling marriages in rural isolation, or cops out of their depth solving a fraud case worth millions, these things are not the kind of dreams you remember. I want to craft books that can replace naughty mushrooms; after all, reading is, at the heart of it, staring at pulped timber with ink on it and hallucinating.

My process is effectively one of bashing myself out of procrastination, either by reading something amazing and feeling challenged to match the sense of fixx and inspiration it brought on with similar heights of lunacy, or by being uncommonly disciplined. By day I’m a mild mannered reporter, though I’m not allowed to get naked in a telephone box (there were fines and penalties), so I’m not able to turn into a superhero. That means I’m out there in the field writing at weird hours, often with a laptop or at least a pen and paper, or in one memorable case, a make-up pencil stub and some fish and chip wrappers. Whack the ideas as they come down the cosmic chute, and nail them to the page for later editing, that’s the key.

I wouldn’t say that writing has changed my life; it is my life, or at least the weird timeline which it’s running down, like some kind of graffiti’d-up trolley car on fire. Writing has knocked me into this phase space, where I can share literal dreams and nightmares with the world thanks to the miracle of Open Office, several billion chained electrons and a literate audience who are, hopefully, sick of formulaic stories.