Re-Quired

An update to the website today, in the form of some behind-the-scenes material on Collected Works.

As those of you who've read the book will know, the Quire are a clan of posthuman scholars from the distant future who visit the Braxiatel Collection where the hero, Professor Bernice Summerfield, lives and works. They have to adjust to the ways of their distant ancestors even as the humans of the Collection are adjusting to them -- a relationship which ultimately goes sour in various unpleasant ways.

I created the Quire for the anthology, based on a brief from the editor, Nick Wallace, who believed based on my previous writing that I could do a decent job of posthuman worldbuilding. What's now up on my website is the original briefing document sent to contributors, to introduce the characters and their background. It comes with some scene-setting preamble from me and a lot of footnotes explaining the thinking which went into creating the characters and setup.

You should find it worth a read if you're interested in how short-story anthologies evolve, or if you found the hints of the Quire's background in Collected Works intriguing and want to learn more, or if for some unimaginable reason you're simply fascinated by the way my mind works. (That's why I like it, anyway. But then it is my mind.)

Speaking of the website... over Christmas I became thoroughly sick of Onetel's email service, which utterly fell over for me and many others on 22 December and wasn't fixed until the end of last week. A helpline (whose number was difficult enough to find in the first place) promised "hourly updates" on the problem on another line -- each of which, for weeks at a time , bore a startling similarity to the last.

As a result of this, I've arranged for a full web-hosting and email account with Black Cat Networks. Black Cat have been hosting the redirection for my infinitarian.com domain and email addresses for years now. They're a small company run by computer geeks, which means they're reliable, friendly and cheap, but do have a slight tendency to assume that all their customers know what SMTPs and DNSes are without being told.

Anyway. I'll be moving the website across to my shiny new webspace at some point, which will mean that the www.infinitarian.com address will actually hold its own material rather than redirecting to the webspace which came free with my TV, phone and broadband.

The move shouldn't make any practical difference to anyone approaching the site via its official address -- and I'll probably keep the Blueyonder version as a mirror -- but it may finally make the current mirror site at Thoughtplay redundant. I'll mention it if and when that happens, though.