More than any other type of influence, novels are the trickiest one to pick out. Every book I‘ve ever read sloshes around in my brain, influencing my own writing in subtle and undefinable ways.

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The truth is that everything I have ever experienced goes into my writing, whether I like it or not. Things I’ve done, places I’ve been, people I’ve met — as well as all the books, comics, movies, games and music I’ve enjoyed over the years.

This is part one in a short series of posts on the foundational texts that informed and inspired my writing of Tales from the Triverse. Today I’m thinking about core television influences.

There are four shows I’m going to be poking at: The Wire, Bablyon 5, The Expanse and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Those first three are probably quite obvious to anyone who has read Triverse, while the last might be raising a few eyebrows.

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As Tales from the Triverse reaches its final conclusion after four and a half years, I’ve been thinking about the influences that contributed to its early development and design. In this video I take a closer look at some of them, including:

* The Wire TV show

* Gotham Central comic

* Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels

* Kim Stanley Robinson’s work, especially the Mars trilogy and Galileo’s Dream

* The Expanse TV show and novels

* Crime fiction generally, and the Noirwich festival

* Babylon 5 TV show

* The 1980s UK Transformers comic, specifically Simon Furman’s work on it

* She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Netflix remake, showrunner ND Stevenson

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I started publishing Tales from the Triverse in September 2021. The weekly serial will likely wrap up in January 2026, or February at the latest. As I wrote last week’s instalment, I had a palpable sensation of coming to the end, of nearing the point at which I say goodbye to the characters and the world in which I’ve been playing these four and a bit years.

Unknown territory approaches: this newsletter has never existed without Tales from the Triverse. It’s the biggest, most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on, and I can’t really remember a time now when I wasn’t thinking about it.

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The chapter of Tales from the Triverse that went out a couple of weeks ago fell foul of the UK’s Online Safety Act. If someone in the UK tries to view the chapter on the web and isn’t yet ‘age verified’, they are greeted with this message:

Outside of the UK, you won’t be seeing it. And if you’re in the UK but already age verified, you won’t see it. If you’re a paid subscriber to any Substack-powered newsletter you’re automatically verified, apparently, due to having a credit card.

Money = freedom, as tends to be the case.

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There are many ways of publishing your work, and we’re living in something of a golden age for author choice.

My chosen route is to send out chapters in serial form, and I’m now fairly certain that for the last four years I’ve been doing it wrong.

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Earlier today I had a delightful chat with Tom Albrighton in which we both tried to not be grumpy about AI and mostly succeeded. I think?

Tom’s been a copywriter for a couple of decades, and is someone I found hugely helpful back when I was starting out doing a lot of copywriting myself back in the day. More recently, he’s been especially vocal about the impact of AI on his area of work, and in 2024 published AI Can’t Write But You Can.

Anyway, our chat ended up being about what it means to be a human creator, why we bother doing anything at all, and how it doesn’t really matter how good AI ends up becoming because that’s sort of missing the point.

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Last week The Guardian published comments from Nigel Newton, chief executive of publisher Bloomsbury.

“I think AI will probably help creativity, because it will enable the 8 billion people on the planet to get started on some creative area where they might have hesitated to take the first step…AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone.”

Hmm. I have thoughts.

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It’s increasingly hard to care about fiction on TV, with producers of the biggest shows doing everything they can to undermine their own stories. The seemingly inevitable push towards cultural irrelevance is driven by the insatiable hunger of streaming platforms, and all of the issues are entirely self-inflicted.

As creators of and audiences for serial fiction, I think it’s worth poking at what’s going on so that we can at least avoid the same traps.

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Heroic characters tend to provide diminishing returns. We are often drawn to origin stories because they provide a built-in character arc, where development is part of the package. Once they have reached that apotheosis, going from ordinary person to hero, what then? Often the response is to ramp up the action and spectacle to ever-more absurd levels — and dwindling audience engagement.

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