Fiction by Clive K. Semmens

If you’re happy to read them on screen, you can read any of these six books for free – although if you like my work, a payment of a pound or two would be much appreciated if you can afford it!

Click in any image for more information about the book, and links to the book itself.

(If you prefer to read printed books, four of them are available as paperbacks – see the books’ individual pages.)

A resourceful young dissident flees England’s murderous, authoritarian regime – and finds himself in a strange country where he doesn’t know the local language or culture, and where no-one speaks his language. Many of the people he meets are friendly and helpful, but (to put it mildly) it’s not all plain sailing...

This is a post-apocalyptic world, but so far in the future that the apocalypse is the subject of speculation and myth rather than history, on the rare occasions that it enters anyone’s consciousness at all. (2017)

To Birgom’s people, the Known World is bounded by treacherous ice to the North and South, by the endless ocean to the West, and by impenetrable jungles and merciless deserts in the East.

Birgom leaves this world behind.

Sometimes joyful, sometimes desperately sad, sometimes written in excruciating detail or forgotten for years, Birgom’s Diary charts his long and eventful life in a world that’s recognizably ours, yet very different. (2019)

(Exile and Birgom’s Diary are set in the same world and overlap in time and space. In the last few weeks of his life, Birgom is a significant figure in the Exile story, and Birgom’s Diary provides a bit of background to the stories of several important characters in Exile.)

It’s 1990, but not the 1990 you might remember. Not exactly. A slightly different leg of the trousers of time.

See the world through the eyes of Pete and his friends – ordinary people in ordinary circumstances – as the world changes in terrible, unanticipated but plausible ways in that parallel universe.

Pawns is about life, and love, and death, and surviving, and the randomness of who gets dealt what hand in the game of life. Above all, it’s about seeing life from the point of view of the pawns in the game. A pawn’s eye view.

Pawns are never told what the players are doing... (2015)

Going Forth is a sequel to Pawns. In Pawns, Pete was in his mid-twenties. He’s now about sixty. Little Mikey is one of his grandchildren. Life is very different now almost everyone in the world is gone, but for Mikey (who is six), it’s just how life is – until the family decides that as a matter of survival it has to undertake a huge expedition. Thousands of miles in a post-apocalyptic world… (2015)

Penny was born in India, although her ancestors were of English and Irish origin. In 1956, when she was seven years old, her immediate family moved to London, leaving her grandparents and her uncle in India. She started a very different kind of life in England – where her father became a bus driver to support his family and educate his children.

Twenty-two years later Penny visited India again and immediately got involved... in the real India, in a small provincial town and the remote tribal villages in the hills beyond it. Including many authentic photographs. (2010)

A very varied collection of short (or very short) stories, a recount, a bit of polemic, and one poem. Exploring environmental issues, the human mind, relationships, politics and more...

Some are set in the recent past, some in the present, some in the near future, and many in the distant future; two are set in space, but most are firmly on the ground – two in India, two in Antarctica, two at sea; most could be almost anywhere on Earth. Many but not all have a post-apocalyptic flavour – sometimes so far post-apocalyptic that the apocalypse is forgotten. Only three involve highly advanced technology, and that scientifically reasonably credible; none involve any magic or anything fantastical. Most but not all of the protagonists are human. (2020)