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Martyn Winters Posts

Singleton Park: A Single Organism

Published by MartynWinters on March 20, 2026

A walk in Singleton Park, Swansea

The Swans of Singleton Park

Singleton Park breathes, sighs, and stirs with the seasons. On a quiet afternoon, its lungs fill with cool, salt-tinged air drifting in from Swansea Bay. The breeze seeps into every hollow and glade, moving to the slow, measured rhythm of a sleeping animal.

The great oaks are the legs of elephants, vast and wrinkled, shouldering the canopy with unhurried strength. Beneath them, clumps of daffodils become nervous flocks of geese, their yellow heads dipping and bobbing in the breeze. The weeping willows are octopuses, trailing their listless, silken arms until they dissolve into stillness.

On the island in the lake, the rhododendron bushes are sleeping bears, dense and impenetrable. Once spring arrives, vivid blooms blaze out from their dark mass of fur. But not today; they are still sleeping.

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The Heat Beneath the Promise

Published by MartynWinters on January 24, 2026

by Martyn Winters

On or shortly after February 6, 2026, four astronauts: mission commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, will entrust their lives to a decision that NASA hopes won’t haunt it.

The rocket is already standing. On the launch pad, the Space Launch System waits in patient silence, white and immaculate against the Florida sky. At its summit sits Orion, a capsule built to achieve something humanity has not done in more than half a century: carry people away from Earth, send them looping around the Moon, and bring them safely home again.

Artemis II is more than a test flight; it’s the hinge between ambition and reality. On this mission, NASA must prove that its new lunar architecture can safely carry human beings beyond low‑Earth orbit. Everything that follows: from the first lunar landing in half a century to building a sustained presence around the Moon, depends on Artemis II succeeding. The programme’s future, and much of its credibility, rests on this single loop through deep space.

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The MacbethinatorMACBETH POSTER

The Macbethinator

Published by MartynWinters on January 14, 2026

by Martyn R Winters

Will leaned back in his creaky wooden chair, steam from his green tea curling around his beard. With a theatrical groan, he tossed a stapled stack of A4 papers onto the table.

“They want a rewrite, Ben,” he sighed. “The script editor, a man with the soul of an old shoe, and the imagination of a month-old brassica, says the pacing is problematic.”

Ben Jonson took a sip of his espresso, suppressing a smirk. “Problematic, Will? What exactly did he say?”

“He says the witches are confusing for a modern test-audience demographic,” Will said, his voice steadily rising in pitch. “He asked if we could make them TikTok influencers. Influencers! Damnable man. Because apparently tragedy needs brand synergy now, whatever that infernal nonsense means. And the blood. He says there’s too much of it. Apparently, focus groups say the ‘out, damned spot’ scene tests poorly. They find Lady Macbeth’s mental health journey unrelatable without a redemption arc.”

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Time Travel by Algorithm: How AI Is Rewriting the History of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Published by MartynWinters on September 18, 2025

In a climate-controlled laboratory in the Netherlands, a machine-learning algorithm named Enoch is quietly redefining the intellectual landscape of ancient Judea.

Developed by researchers at the University of Groningen, this AI model, trained on the microscopic curves and strokes of ancient Hebrew script, has begun to challenge decades of scholarly consensus about the age and origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Discovered in 1947 in the caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea, the scrolls have long been hailed as one of the most significant archaeological finds of the 20th century. Comprising nearly a thousand manuscripts, including the earliest known copies of several Hebrew Bible texts, the scrolls offer a rare glimpse into the religious and cultural life of Second Temple Judaism. But for all their importance, their precise dating has remained elusive until now.

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The night Uncle Johnny died

Published by MartynWinters on July 4, 2025

by Martyn Winters

Laurence was just fourteen years old. Though tall enough for his dark, bushy curls to brush against the lintel across the worn, wooden swing doors of the Bird in Hand public house on Bromsgrove Street, and broad shouldered enough to pass for a man in the right company, he was not going to fool anyone in the Bird, not on a Friday night.

He felt a tightness in his chest he couldn’t quite name: neither fear nor shame, but a heavy awareness he didn’t belong here, not yet, and perhaps never would. He acted as a silent postboy, carrying messages between adults, yet no one ever asked how he felt about their contents.

Always seeing more than he revealed, he noticed the cracks in voices and how grown men stared into their drinks, as if fearful they might respond. He remembered smells, sounds, and silences, storing them like relics in the corners of his mind. He learned to read rooms long before mastering his multiplication tables. Being young didn’t equate to blindness, nor did it mean he was unaware of himself.

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Book Review: “The Triton Run” by Paul S. Edwards Book cover of the Triton Run by Paul S Edwards

Book Review: “The Triton Run” by Paul S. Edwards 

Published by MartynWinters on June 27, 2025

A sweeping sci-fi epic of survival, redemption, and first contact

In the vast expanse of space, where politics, memory, and morality collide, Paul S. Edwards’ “The Triton Run” presents a gripping, multi-layered science fiction saga that is both emotionally resonant and intellectually ambitious.

Set in a richly imagined future where humanity has colonised the solar system, the story follows a diverse cast of characters whose lives intersect after a mysterious collision between the scientific vessel Kuiper Scout and an alien spacecraft known as the Xenos. What begins as a routine salvage mission quickly spirals into a high-stakes rescue, a political reckoning, and a potential first contact with an ancient alien race.

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Where there’s muck. By Martyn WintersA middle aged man in tight jeans talks to an alien

Where there’s muck. By Martyn Winters

Published by MartynWinters on March 14, 2024

A free short story for you to read.

It has been said by wiser people than me there is nothing sadder than an old dog wearing young clothes. That may be true, but how many of them have met a sapient alien plant and solved global warming because of a pair of tight Levis? None right?

It happened early one evening as I was getting ready for a night of beer and voddy shots at McBangs, the second-best night spot in Agadir. The best club is Fountaine’s, but you must be under forty-five to get in, or filthy rich, and I was quack-quack-oops on both those counts.

Anyway, I’d just pulled on my kecks and I heard a snigger coming from near the balcony curtains, which I’d thrown wide to let the sea air waft in because it gave me that heady, by-the-sea ambience which brought me to Agadir. In fact, I’d chosen my hotel, the Biltong Founty, because of its proximity to the ocean. That, and the stellar Trip Advisor reviews, one of which describes the Founty as, “A remarkable hotel with a handcrafted entrance fountain evoking the Portuguese origin of the name, and lobby floors in the Amazigh style, representing the commitment to cultural authenticity.”

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Detective Inspector Camden Ironbell of the Gnome Office

Detective Inspector Camden Ironbell of the Gnome Office

Published by MartynWinters on February 22, 2024

I’m studying Science Fiction and Fantasy at Cardiff University. This week we were invited to write a short piece, or opening chapter to a longer piece in the style of another writer. I chose to use characters Tom Holt might employ and set it in the world created by Susanna Clarke in her wonderful novel, “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell”. It is set about half a century after the events of Clarke’s novel in 1870. England is still at war with France and the denizens of the netherworld have returned to London.

Detective Inspector Camden Ironbell of the Gnome Office

By Martyn Winters

In the normal course of events in 1870, a person of gentle upbringing would not expect to cross paths with a member of His Majesty’s Constabulary while they are conducting an investigation. As rare as such a circumstance might be, it pales somewhat vividly compared to the chances of meeting a constable, or an officer, whose countenance is not that of a solid, square jawed son of London’s East End, but the enlarged nose and unwieldy ears of a gnome. Yet such was the occasion on that strange night of August the 8th when Captain Johannes Millwright emerged from his club on the Mall. Still robed in his dress reds despite receiving his discharge papers that very evening, Millwright cut a fashionable figure as he strode nonchalantly down the steps to pavement level, only to be greeted by shouts of “Stop thief,” as two diminutive figures chased a ragged beggar of a man across the road.

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