About

 

Biography

Brian was born in 1972 in Hull, East Yorkshire, UK. In 1992 he went to study Applied Chemistry at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, but left the course to return to Hull in 1994 to pursue a writing career.

Over the following year he took part in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D) role-playing games with Gary Wake which would provide the inspiration for his Chronicles of Empire series.

In 2001 he decided to build a website to showcase not just his own writing, but also that of friends. Lack of interest in his Chronicles of Empire series by agents and publishers led to him shelving that writing project for ten years. In the meantime, an online community he’d developed for his writing was spun off to run by itself as SFFChronicles, and continues to this day as the world’s largest general science fiction and fantasy forum.

However, the process of setting up online had led to the development of commercially useful web development and promotion skills. As he’d been unemployed since leaving university, he used these skills to found his own internet business consultancy, and later was a speaker at Search Engine Strategies (SES) London and Search Marketing Expo (SMX) London.

In 2005 he moved with his wife and three children to Scotland, renting for a year near Stirling. This made it easy for him to attend and set up a stall promoting the chronicles community at Worldcon – the international science fiction and fantasy convention – in Glasgow the following year, at which he met with bestselling authors such as Terry Pratchett and George R R Martin. The Scotsman newspaper coverage of the event featured a photo of Brian, dressed like a character from The Matrix movies, posing with a small robot.

In 2006 he moved with his family to Nairn in the Highlands of Scotland, where he continues to live. For a short while he blogged about local events, during which time he discovered that Ordinance Survey had left Nairn’s famous beaches off one of their maps, and successfully had them reinstated. He also saw his chronicles forum gain a feature piece on the BBC News website.

In 2008, local actress Tilda Swinton set up a film festival named Cinema of Dreams, and Brian worked with her to provide an online community to support it, until one of Tilda Swinton’s colleagues demanded it was taken down for being too focused on commercial film releases and not enough on independent film-making.

The economic recession from the banking crisis of 2008 reversed his initial business success, as did a couple of bad business deals, including his biggest one where his business was subcontracted to work for a national brand, only for the main contractor to run up a year’s worth of debts and then run off without paying.

To prevent his business failing, Brian attempted to diversify by expanding into online news publication under the banner of Brite Media, which saw him interviewed a number of times for BBC Radio. He also opened an alternative clothing shop known as Alternative X, which ran alongside rock nights he organized and DJ’ed at in Inverness. However, it soon became clear that the small businesses that had originally helped grow the internet were being muscled out by multinational corporations.

Brian therefore looked to return to his writing roots, and in 2011 began the process of rewriting Chronicles of Empire, 1: Gathering, working with US author Teresa Edgerton, who he had met on the SFFchronicles forum, as his development editor. In 2016 1: Gathering was published on the same day that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States of America.

Brian stopped providing business services in 2015. The following year necessity saw him working at the local supermarket stacking shelves to make ends meet. In 2019 fellow writer and good friend, Darren Allan, recruited him as a freelance editor and writer for Future Publishing, specifically on the title TechRadarPro, where Brian continues to work.

Brian began work on the Destroyer series of books in 2017. However, at the start of June 2020, just as they were being prepared for publishing, he had a serious reaction to a steroid inhaler an asthma nurse had prescribed him, even though one taken the previous week had put him into mild shock. He turned up at the local Nairn and County Hospital, but they refused to admit him, or even to examine him. Instead he was told to just go home and ring the duty doctor, who told him it couldn’t be anything serious. As it was a Saturday, he was told if symptoms persisted, to seek a doctor’s appointment on the following Monday. When he did, he tried to explain that it felt like his adrenal system had gone into overdrive and was burning out.

Although he was subjected a wide array of tests, it was another 3 months before his adrenaline levels were checked, by which time it was too late to do anything – he had developed a severe form of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This left him having to rest in bed for most of the day, and difficulties with mobility means he needed to be pushed in a wheelchair outside of the home.

The illness affected him mentally as well as physically, leaving him unable to concentrate for any period of time. However, after 4 years he found he was able to concentrate a little longer in the very early morning, between 5am – 7am, and pushed himself to use this time to write The Living Universe, an idea he’d been inspired to write in 1995, but had never seemed like the right moment. The book had a soft launch on August 30th 2025, with a full promotion officially launching it on September 16th after the audiobook, narrated by Mike Drew, was approved for release by Audible.