Rick Brindle

  Sister Alex , my post-apocalyptic novel about a trans survivor, is free to download from Amazon for a limited time. Get your free copy now! Berkshire, England, and it’s no longer the promised land. Ever since a species-wide illness wiped out nearly every human being, the home counties have become a gender-based battlefield. The women stick together as a single, cohesive community, but only as long as you’re a woman. And it’s the same for the men, although they haven’t quite got the same group thing going, choosing instead to range as lone threats, taking what they want. Sometimes they team up and run in pairs, but only as long as you’re a man. They’re separate tribes, and they hate each other on sight. Pick your gender, pick your side. And then there’s Alex, born as a man, identifies as a woman, and thanks to a stash of scavenged hormones, she’s stuck somewhere between the two, lost in the middle and hated by them all. But she’s survived, and if what’s left of the world won’t lea...

RAF aircraft in the seventies  looked gorgeous. And almost, but not quite as important as that, they were all badass. For sure, they were all in service in the seventies, but they were designed way back in the fifties. The Avro Vulcan entered service in 1956 and was retired in 1984. In about 2014 I saw the last flying Vulcan at an air show, and the roar of its engines was something to behold. The noise was like a physical thing hitting you. The Black Buck raids during the Falklands War immortalised it in British folklore. An absolute flying legend. The Handley Page Victor was an absolute beast and definitely looked like it belonged in Thunderbirds. It had the biggest payload of all of the V Force bombers, but it really excelled as a tanker. It entered service in 1958 and was on the books until 1993. I was lucky enough to see them on the pan at Akrotiri during my short Op Granby tour. The English Electric Lightning was the RAF’s nude-shot, centrefold pin-up for decades. It served in...

For me, Ronnie James Dio And it’s not even close. I grew up with Dio. My first truly heavy metal album was The Last in Line, and as I went through my teenage years and grew into an adult, so too did I discover Ronnie James Dio’s musical heritage. If something good happened in my life, I celebrated by listening to Dio. If something bad happened, turned to Dio for support. For me, his voice, his lyrics and his passion for the music are simply impossible to beat. And live, the man was utterly unbeatable. And sure, there are plenty, dozens, hundreds of other great rock vocalists out there, but if you’re asking someone who’s the best, then for each of us it’s more than just an empirical thing, it’s a personal thing. That’ll make everyone’s answer different, but it will always make my answer Ronnie James Dio. Cold Steel on the Rocks   We Are Cold Steel   Cold Steel and the Underground Boneyard   It's Not For Everyone   Sister Alex