More Tales of the City: Trailer #1

Hullo. You may remember the trailers I blogged last year for Tales of the City? Yeah well, I'm doing it again for More Tales of the City, whether you like it or not.

Here, look:

     A second volunteer stands – another of the World’s regulars, a florid, grossly fat man in a tailored suit that could clothe a double bed. He is immediately joined by the floating mikedrone. Finding no other calls on his attention, Akroates leans forward on his bar, eager to hear what story this new teller has to tell.
     ‘People used to say there were just seven stories, didn’t they? Well, they did in my day. When you tried to pin down what the seven actually were they’d usually get a bit vaguer.
     ‘As a matter of fact there’s just the one story. You just have to choose how you slice it.’

Ian Potter is an author I've had my eye on for some time.

(That's not him in the description above, by the way. That's the narrator of his story, Lewis Greaves. And it's not Ian's description, either, it's mine -- though Lewis's words are Ian's own. This may make more sense later.)

Ian's an accomplished writer of radio comedy, drama and documentaries, as well as a historian of television, but I know him from his splendid short fiction: five short stories in Doctor Who anthologies and two in previous Obverse Books collections, including the excellent Faction Paradox story "The Story of the Peace" in A Romance in Twelve Parts. All his stories are well worth reading, but my favourite is probably "Erato: Confabula" in Short Trips: The Muses, an extended misdirection which just happens also to be a sustained piece of deft and convincing worldbuilding. As it turns out, the story's true interests lie altogether elsewhere.

Ian was one of the first authors I asked to write a City of the Saved story (after he'd contributed one of the guest drabbles to my own "A Hundred Words from a Civil War"), and although for various reasons his submission then didn't quite fit with the others in Tales of the City, I intended all along to resurrect it for More Tales.

It has the marvellous title 'The Long-Distance Somnambulist', and it's midway between bildungsroman and detective story. It's about how people -- in this instance, a historian, a murder victim and one other -- adapt to eternal life.

(Ian himself disagrees with me about his merits, or so it seems. Here's his author biog:

Ian Potter is a loathsome human being whose Wikipedia entry contains Qliphothic snares for the unwary. You have vowed to destroy him should the chance arise. I will be believed to have had no part in it. When he was alive he was mainly older than he seems now and wrote jokes, plays, short stories and factual things no one much cared about. He’s most famous for that really bad thing that kicked off after he died that he’d no idea he set in motion. It was definitely his fault though. He hides in darkness underwater now. When you find him, understanding these words means you’ll know what to do.

No, I don't know what "Qliphothic" means either.)

Telling More Tales

It's currently in the limbo state between being mentioned publicly and being formally announced, but I have a second anthology out later this year. It's called More Tales of the City and is, unsurprisingly, a follow-up to Tales of the City, set in the City of the Saved. I sent out editorial comments on all six stories earlier this evening, and I'm hugely impressed by their quality: I believe readers who enjoyed Tales of the City won't be disappointed.

I'm not going to reveal the author and story lineup just yet, except to say that four of these authors haven't written anything set in the City of the Saved before, while the other two have written exactly 100 words set there.

Meanwhile, here's the draft blurb:

‘Once upon a time, the universe ended. And they all lived happily ever after.’



In a pub on a hill by a bay in the technological utopia beyond the end of the universe, customers gather to tell the stories of their afterlives.

An older woman steals intangibly from her boyfriends, while a naive student learns more about her world. A historian and a detective made in a king’s image seek answers to long-standing mysteries. A man-about-town makes a living finding people’s doppelgangers. Another may be not a storyteller, but a story.

These are their tales.

Recycling, mostly

Recently, when not serving the needs of either the Government or my two-year-old, I've mostly been working on the editing of Tales of the City, which is coming out very nicely indeed. I'm impressed by the quality, scope and variety of the stories the six authors and I have managed to assemble together, and I'm confident it's going to be a really strong anthology. The other author who I vaguely mentioned might be joining the party now definitely isn't, so that link now gives the official list (although the order of the stories may well change).

I have a long list of other creative projects which are either ongoing or which exist in embryo and I'd like to work on properly at some point, including:

• The sort-of-slipstream-fantasy novel I've mentioned writing at various points over the past year (due a rewrite and polish once Tales is out of the way);
• An illustrated anthology of @trapphic stories (which I'm trying to think of a less awful name for than The Volume of Trapphic);
• A collection of my Christmas stories (which ideally needs 24 pieces in Advent calendar format, so either I'm going to have to write more than one a year or it'll have to wait until I'm 60ish;
• Some ideas for other anthologies I'd like to edit if this one comes off, both in the City of the Saved and outside it;
• Speculative story ideas for potential future Faction Paradox, Iris Wildthyme or Señor 105 anthologies from Obverse Books;
• A quartet of more or less SFish novels which I had planned out in detail and was working on before I decided to write the other novel instead, and which at present go by the working titles A Giant in the Earth, The Air of Utopia, The Knowledge of Fire and By the Waters of Albion;
• A non-genre novel I wrote a chapter of years ago called Fragile Monsters, which I'd kind of like to spend more time on at some point.

The "fire" book in the elements quartet is based on an idea I originally submitted for a Doctor Who novel in the late 1990s, which gives you some idea of how long, and how productively, this stuff has been hanging around[1].

In fact, the Doctor Who proposal (then called A Memory of Fire) had a somewhat epic history: conceived as a seventh Doctor story unreliably narrated by the eighth Doctor (who would have been doing his best to conceal a piece of treacherous duplicity by his past self), it went through a number of permutations at BBC Books' behest, including an eighth Doctor novel in which the original narrative appeared as a flashback, a fifth Doctor novel narrated by the sixth Doctor[2] and the original idea presented as a short story (this was shortly before the BBC stopped publishing Doctor Who short story collections), before they finally rejected it[3]. Since I hadn't at this point been published professionally at all, their interest was encouraging as well as frustrating.

Eventually, at BBC Books' recommendation, I submitted it to Telos Publishing instead (this was shortly before they stopped publishing Doctor Who novellas) and on the back of it was commissioned to write Peculiar Lives, with which it shares nothing whatsoever except a narrator who ends up somewhat regretting his past actions.

I still have these variorum proposals, including three variant plots, two variant prose samples, the complete 4,000-word short story ("Faith Healer"), and an explanatory note outlining the relevance of the theories of Carl Jung and Rupert Sheldrake. The only thing that's stopping me putting the whole lot on the web is a) the hope that one day I'll use some of the most striking concepts (specifically, two posthuman species called the Orpheids and the Dhebeth) in The Knowledge of Fire, and b) the same lack-of-time issue which has prevented me putting online the outline of my abandoned Prisoner novel Island in the Ashes and my proposal for a pulp-steampunk novel, The Curse of Odin-Hotep, whose sample chapter I did once post to this blog.

By contrast, everything on the list is stuff I'd like to get around to doing some day, when time and energy allow. So possibly when the two-year-old has turned eighteen.

[1] The "air" novel is also based on a rejected Who proposal (Unearthing the Princess), as are elements of Of the City of the Saved... (Sabaoth) and Nobody's Children (Relativity, or Baby Rachel and the Sexually Dimorphic Punk Polecats from Outer Space). I submitted rather a lot of these.

[2] Who I passionately dislike, so I was rather relieved when they didn't want to use that one.

[3] It's actually slightly more complicated than this. The original novel proposal, the short story and the novella proposal -- though not the other variants nor my still-intended The Knowledge of Fire -- incorporate elements which I developed for my earliest Doctor Who novel proposal, Word Perfect, submitted to Virgin Books circa 1995, and which derived ultimately from The Space Monastery, a script I sent in to the Doctor Who production office in 1987 when I was 15. None of this is stuff I still intend to use, though. Especially The Space Monastery.

Secret Architects

It occurs to me that, given my usual enthusiasm for plugging things here, I've done relatively little banging on about Tales of the City, the short story anthology I'm editing as part of Obverse Books' Obverse Quarterly series. At first this was because there wasn't much to say about it that could be considered definite, but since the publishers informally announced the author lineup that hasn't been the case, and it's remiss of me not to have posted it here before now.

The stories and contributors to the anthology are, then:

‘Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy’ by Blair Bidmead
‘The Socratic Problem’ by Elizabeth Evershed
‘Lost Ships and Lost Lands’ by Juliet Kemp
‘Highbury’ by Helen Angove
‘Bruises’ by Dave Hoskin
‘About a Girl’ by Dale Smith

I'm really pleased with this lineup -- all of these are authors who I know will turn in some very fine writing, and who submitted excellent storylines to boot.

There'll also be a prelude and a postlude by me (whose substance will depend to some extent on how much space is left after everybody else's final drafts). There's an unconfirmed possibility of an eighth contributor, but we're not going public with their identity just yet.

A web page for the book is now up at my site. It's currently rather minimalist, but I hope to expand it with some extras in the coming months. I've also added an index to the City material generally.

[Edit to add: That's a placeholder cover, in case it's not obvious. It's clipped from the cover of Of the City of the Saved..., after vacillating over whether to use the only other picture I've got of the Cityscape.]

Tales of the City

The "side-project" I've occasionally mentioned here as running alongside my current attempts to write a novel, do a paid job, look after a two-year-old and find the time to eat and sleep occasionally, has now been announced.

We present Tales of the City, the first short-story anthology dedicated to my creation, the galaxy-sized secular afterlife known as the City of the Saved, as seen in The Book of the War, Of the City of the Saved... and A Romance in Twelve Parts[*].

Tales of the City will be volume 2 in next year's Obverse Quarterly, a periodical fiction miscellany from the same publishers as A Romance in Twelve Parts. It's my first editing assignment, and I'm hoping it will be a bit of a contrast with the previous City stories, with their CLASHING CIVILISATIONS AND EXPLODING GODS, and concentrate on the smaller-scale stories of some of the Citizens themselves.

Although I'll be providing some fictional linking material, Tales mostly consists of six stories by other authors, all set in the City. I'm very pleased with the lineup I've arranged -- I was lucky to be able to commission six splendid story pitches from six excellent authors which show every sign of blossoming into six brilliant pieces of City-based fiction.

(In fact, I was even luckier than that: the pitches I had to reject were also of an excellent standard -- these six are just the ones I think will fit together into the anthology with the most satisfying shape.)

I'll be posting more information here as it's announced: although I've been referring to this as a side-project (and I'm still pushing ahead with the novel as best I can), I really am very excited at how this is taking shape.

[*] Also, if you're counting, the Preview to Of the City of the Saved..., Lance Parkin's Preview to Warlords of Utopia (printed in Of the City of the Saved...) and my online short story "Unification Theory".

* * *

I've now had the five-CD audiobook of Peculiar Lives through the post, and listened to the first 45 minutes or so.

I never wrote the story to be read aloud: it's a literary pastiche. Nevertheless, I'm incredibly impressed by the deftness with which John Leeson tackles the difficult language, and the conviction he brings the sometimes creepy character of my narrator, Erik Clevedon. Even if you're already sickeningly familiar with Peculiar Lives (which, let's face it, I am), it's well worth hearing. It's a fantastic performance, and he keeps surprising me. It's available here, among other places.

* * *

On a more mundane note, you may be vaguely interested to know I've done a major structural revamp on my website. The content (and indeed the increasingly old-school look) are virtually unchanged, but there are now separate indexing pages for, for instance, my Christmas stories, or the individual themes and series of my microfiction. Presumably Tales of the City is going to need its own page pretty soon, but I'll hold off on that one for the moment.