Furthest Tales of the City

You (Yes, you over there! Pay attention!) will be pleased to learn that the fourth anthology of City of the Saved short stories, Furthest Tales of the City, is due for release some time in late 2015.

The blurb goes like this:

Even the secular afterlife created for humanity by the Secret Architects has its limits – and there will always be those Citizens who chafe against those limits.  Environmentally, culturally, biologically, cosmologically, politically, experientially, some will always seek to go further. 

For instance…

A group mind facing the troubling truth of resurrection.  A comatose giant with human inhabitants of its own.  A civilisation re-enacting an impossible apocalypse.  A woman with negligible human ancestry out on the dating scene.  A cult who inhabit the deep infrastructure underlying the City.  A fictional adventurer starved of the risks his narrative craves.

These are their tales.

And here's the lineup of stories:

Salutation – Philip Purser-Hallard
Weighty Questions – Juliet Kemp
Sleeping Giants – Elizabeth Evershed
Driving Home for Atonatiuh – Lawrence Burton
The Smallest Spark – Paul Hiscock
The Places Above, Between and Below – Louise Sellers
We Only Live Twice (But the City Is Not Enough) – Helen Angove
God Encompasses – Philip Purser-Hallard

Juliet, Liz and Helen are all returning contributors to the City of the Saved, having written stories for the first Tales of the City in 2012. (Liz also wrote for Tales of the Great Detectives in 2014, meaning that she's written more City of the Saved fiction than anyone other than me.) Lawrence Burton is new to the City, but will be familiar to regular Obverse readers as the author of the Faction Paradox novel Against Nature and the Señor 105 novella The Grail, or Señor 105 y el Pueblo del Gobernador Demente, as well as being the regular cover artist for the Faction Paradox books. Paul Hiscock was a contributor to The Obverse Book of Detectives, while Louise Sellers's fiction is published here for the first time.

All of their stories are, in their different ways, marvellous -- variously exciting, weird, thought-provoking and hilarious.

Sharp-eyed readers may notice that a short story called 'God Encompasses' has been up on my website for a while now: this is indeed an updated version of that story. 'Salutation' is a new companion piece. Even more insightful readers may realise that both stories are, very approximately, named after pubs.

I'll update this blog, and my website, when further information -- cover, publication date, that sort of thing -- starts to make itself known.