Rick Brindle

  Sister Alex , my post-apocalyptic novel about a trans-woman surviving the Berkshire wilderness, is free to download from Amazon for a limited time. 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 w...

  Potentially. Rhodesia’s military was hampered by a serious lack of resource and manpower. They were the camouflaged epitome of make do and mend, and Fireforce was a direct manifestation of the need to use what they had to create an absolutely badass solution to the tactical realities facing them. After Portugal pulled out of Mozambique in 1974, and with the exception of the short border with South Africa, Rhodesia was literally surrounded on all sides by hostile countries, with insurgents crossing the border almost at will. Outside of any natural obstacles, there simply wasn’t the manpower or money to create an impenetrable barrier. The closest modern parallel would be Israel and maybe, but not quite the same, Ukraine. Insurgent attacks and ambushes could happen across a very wide area, and Fireforce was designed to meet that threat. It was essentially an airborne rapid response unit, tailored to be delivered with the air assets available to Rhodesia, and honed to an exact degree...

Okay, so I’m going to include all of the singers who recorded and released songs with Black Sabbath. Dave Donato, Dave Walker, Ron Keel, Ray Gillen and Rob Halford…well, they’re all excluded, if for no other reason than I never heard what they sounded like as Black Sabbath singers. The first thing I’d like to say before trying to put them into some kind of weird, and actually pretty meaningless scale, is that I’m a huge Black Sabbath fan, and I love all of their line-ups. In number five, it’s Ian Gillan. I loved the Born Again Album, but it was the only one Ian Gillan ever made with Sabbath, and I think that was always his plan, but not necessarily the band’s plan, or at least not Tony Iommi’s plan. Let’s face it, by this point, and probably even earlier, Tony was definitely the boss. Gillan still had the scream, but it was a lot more grainy than it was with Deep Purple ten years earlier. I’d have liked a few more albums from the Gillan era, but I guess you can’t have everything. The f...