Meanwhile, Back When There Were Fewer Tales of the City...

In coincidental but not exactly unrelated news, I can report that my original Faction Paradox novel featuring the City of the Saved, Of the City of the Saved, is now available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk, and as a Nook ebook from... well, currently Barnes and Noble, but presumably from other retailers (including some UK-based ones) later.

This is a revised Mad Norwegian Press edition of the 2004 novel, which corrects a number of errata in the first edition, and restores some passages which had to be cut due to the pressures of space. It also incorporates some extras first published on my website. I may post a definitive list of the changes here at some point, but in the meantime I'll let you discover them for yourselves.

Book: Burning

I seem somehow to have neglected to mention here that Burning with Optimism's Flames, the Faction Paradox anthology in which my short story "De Umbris Idearum" appears alongside the work of numerous exciting authors, is actually out in ebook format, and can be bought from Obverse Books, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com. The hardback is expected soon, although I believe there's some kind of delay at the printer's.

The redoubtable Andrew Hickey has already reviewed the book in glowing terms. I'm nearly halfway through, and while it's obviously not a disinterested opinion, I entirely agree with him.

I've had an absurdly unpleasant and stressful week, or I'd certainly have mentioned on Wednesday that the previous Faction Paradox collection, A Romance in Twelve Parts (including my short story "A Hundred Words from a Civil War"), was going free on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com that day. Even without my tireless self-promotion, though, it briefly reached the dizzying heights of number 4 in Amazon's SF and fantasy download charts.

In City of the Saved news, Tales of the City has had a moderately approving review from no less reputable a source than The British Fantasy Society. I've also put the Background Notes which I prepared some time ago for prospective authors of future City of the Saved stories up on my website. This is the generic City background material, not the stuff relating to any particular anthology, but still, you may find it of interest.

Incidentally, I'm doing some more editing, and so far I'm enjoying it as much as I did last time. I'm not mentioning the project in question publicly at the moment, so the connection between this paragraph and the preceding one is left as an exercise for the reader.

Burning Issue

I promised myself I'd add at least one ordinary, discursive, non-publicity post here before the next book came along that I needed to pimp. Obviously events overtook me there.

Julian "Jay" Eales, who way back in the twentieth century published me in the Doctor Who 'fanthologies' Perfect Timing 2 and Walking in Eternity, is editing a Faction Paradox anthology for Obverse Books, a follow-up to A Romance in Twelve Parts named Burning with Optimism's Flames.  He's been releasing teasers for the stories at his blog, Factor Fiction.  The final story in the collection -- and therefore the final teaser, posted today -- is 'De Umbris Idearum', written by me.

As a reader as well as a contributor (and indeed as a fellow editor), I'm enormously impressed with the talent Jay's assembled for the collection. Simon Bucher-Jones, Jonathan Dennis and Kelly Hale have all written fantastic stuff for Faction Paradox and elsewhere in the past, including The Book of the War and Kelly's fantastic Erasing Sherlock. Sarah Hadley is another relic of those ancient fanthologies, whose short stories I greatly enjoyed at the time. Stephen Marley wrote the astoundingly fine Doctor Who novel Managra, which has been a huge source of inspiration to me (it features numerous characters from different eras of history -- plus Popes, vampires and clones of fictional characters -- interacting in a huge second-millennium-Europe theme park, which may give you some idea). And, of course, I'm very pleased indeed to see the three new-to-Obverse writers who I recruited for Tales of the City -- Helen Angove, Elizabeth Evershed and Juliet Kemp -- returning for this volume. I'm not familiar with the work of the other five contributors, but if they're up to the same standard then Burning with Optimism's Flames will be a real treat for its readers.

My story's a grand historical epic of Popes, cults and heretics, ranging across twelve centuries. It's the first Faction Paradox story I've written which doesn't involve the City of the Saved in any way, although both Mother Imogen Tantry, later Pope Beatrix II (from The Vampire Curse and "A Hundred Words from a Civil War") and Father Self of Faction Paradox (seen in flashback in Of the City of the Saved...) appear. It looks as if it's appearing last in the volume, so I'm going to have a hard set of acts to follow.

I'll update you all when Burning with Optimism's Flames becomes available to pre-order. Meanwhile I've set up a page for the book at my website, which gives you very slightly more information about the story.

Hyde Bound

I've updated my website today, with the blurb for Tales of the City, which currently looks like this:

After the end – ours and the universe’s – there is the City of the Saved. A repository for the uploaded souls of all humanity, the City is a technological utopia, a secular heaven. Heroes and villains, angels and monsters may be found in the City, but many ordinary people live here, too.

Well, all of them in fact.

In these stories, the first by writers other than the City’s creator Philip Purser-Hallard, we meet six of them. A hitchhiker, a lecturer, a tourist, a socialite, a twin, a cop: ordinary men and women living an extraordinary afterlife.

These are their tales.

(Sadly it now looks as if 1 June was an optimistic publication date, and the actual release of  Tales of the City is likely to be closer to the end of the month.) 

The updates make liberal use of the new City of the Saved logo, as designed by Cody:

I've also uploaded a bunch of recent microfiction from my Twitter account, @trapphic, including some new additions to my sequence of Victorian literature mashups, which I'd thought were pretty much played out:

‘Miss Havisham was an amateur. Henry Higgins, a dilettante. To make someone a real lady,’ the Baron avers, ‘you must start with the basics.’

* * *

‘You!’ gasped Edward Hyde, cringing. ‘But – how?’ ‘We have our friend to thank for that,’ noted Henry Jekyll, nodding at the Time-Traveller.

I've been busy with multiple other things as well, including a brief introduction for Obverse Books' forthcoming Faction Paradox titles, a draft of a short story (slightly longer than 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', though not as long as 'Minions of the Moon'), an imminent change of day-job and a small child with chicken-pox. Some of these have been more enjoyable than others.

The Art of Faction

Incidentally, I wrote this about Faction Paradox on a mailing list this morning, and am reasonably pleased with it. Brief though it is, I thought I might as well post it here, to add a tiny bit of texture to the wall-to-wall plugging.

I think the steadily accreting continuity of Faction Paradox detracts from its core appeal. It upsets me when I see fans on Gallifrey Base replying to some newbie saying "Ooh, Faction Paradox -- what's that? Where should I start?" by handing out a reading list they have to work through before they understand it properly. The correct answer is, "Well, the best books are [give a couple of choices here] -- read those and see whether you like them."

In my view, the successful Faction Paradox stories have shared three things:

1. A interest in history, coupled with an understanding that it's ultimately negotiable; 
2. A subversive politics which sees all forms of authority (including that of the storyteller) as fundamentally questionable; 
3. A syncretic aesthetic based in anachronism, cult imagery and outsider art, which articulates points 1 and 2 above. 

It's doing --- on a wider historical and cultural canvas --the kinds of things steampunk did before it lost all interest in intelligent discourse and became a fashion statement.

Some of the best Faction Paradox stories have combined all this with an exhaustive knowledge of Faction continuity (Newtons Sleep being the obvious example), while others (Warlords of Utopia, Erasing Sherlock) have basically ignored it. Both approaches work fine.

In other words, if what you like about Faction Paradox is voodooesque cultists standing around posing in period dress and skull-masks -- it's OK. You get it. That's fine.

Peculiar Noises

So, another month's gone by. Hello.

Because I know you're sick of me plugging A Romance in Twelve Parts by now, I'm going to start by plugging something you won't have heard me mention since, ooh, last March: my novella Peculiar Lives. It's still available through all the following methods:

• from Telos Publishing;
  
• in paperback or hardback from Amazon.co.uk;
  
• in paperback or hardback from Amazon.com;
  
• as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

However, I'll soon be able to add to that list the audiobook, due to be released by Fantom Films in August. It's an unabridged four-CD reading of the story recorded by John Leeson, the voice artist best known as K-9, but who -- I'm reliably assured -- can do lots of other voices as well. Nobody's ever recorded one of my stories before, so I'm looking forward very much to hearing how he tackles my narrator, Erik Clevedon.

The audiobook's available via Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, or direct from Fantom Films.

And having eased you in gently... if I now tell you that I've now read all of A Romance in Twelve Parts, and that it's quite wonderful, you'll naturally (and correctly) conclude that I'm biased. So I'll have to refer you to these good people, all of whom have reviewed it on the internet:

• asmoranomardicodais at Gallifrey Base (a Doctor Who discussion forum where you'll need to register to read the post, unfortunately).
• War Arrow (aka cover artist Lawrence Burton, who admittedly can't be called entirely unbiased either) at the Faction Paradox forum (which you won't need to register for, although you will unfortunately be spammed with unwanted video ads).
• Andrew Hickey at his blog, which happily neither spams you nor demands your personal details.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also point you to:

• Emily Carter (scroll down to the bottom of the page), who mostly doesn't like it at all, but does make a grudging exception for my story.

An admiration for the stories by Matt Kimpton (Anglo-Saxon storyteller versus narrative-subverting witch), Blair Bidmead (the Faction does The Apprentice, with hilarious results), Ian Potter ("We are about to militarise the Peace") and Daniel O'Mahony (an unsettling and warped take on the myth of the American frontier) seems to be an emerging theme here, and quite deservedly so. People seem to like my story too, which is pleasing.

Live Romance

Well, A Romance in Twelve Parts arrived with me on Thursday, and (as we expect by now from Obverse Books) it's a gorgeous-looking volume. As well as the other contributors' copies, I gather the first batch of orders has been sent out too (although the official publication date's this coming Tuesday, 31 May).

I've only read the first two stories, partly because -- having finished Embassytown, on which more soon -- I've also been rereading The City and the City, but partly because I'm wanting to savour it slowly, picking at the stories piece by piece, rather like the large vegetarian mezze B., R. and I shared at The Windmill this afternoon.

Those first two stories are brilliant, though. (You, er, don't need a declaration of interest at this point, do you[1]?) The excellent Matt Kimpton's opening story in particular -- about the Faction's dealings with an Anglo-Saxon storyteller and wannabe hero, born from a deep immersion in the culture and poetry of the era -- is so extremely good I feel quite embarrassed to be sharing a volume with it. (At least my story's up the other end of the book.)

I'm looking forward to sampling the others with... well, eager restraint. I bet they're good too, though.

[1] If you've somehow avoided gathering this from your prior reading of this blog, or if you've arrived here for the first time since about August, the collection contains my official, 10,000-word sequel to Of the City of the Saved..., "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". There's 1,100 words of bonus material available on my website, as well as a story I wrote a while ago (2,897 words, in case you're wondering), which acts as a kind of three-way bridge between "A Hundred Words", OtCotS... and my novella in The Vampire Curse. You can buy the book from Obverse Books, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, so please do.

I Heart Surgery

That plan of reviewing the books I was reading hasn't gone well, has it? I accidentally keep reading more. I now have Moon over Soho to review when I get time, among other things.

Meanwhile... erm, sorry. I'll stop plugging A Romance in Twelve Parts, which incidentally you can buy here or here, once it's been out for a short while, I promise. I'm probably overemphasising it a bit because it's been a couple of years now (yes, I know) since the last thing I wrote was published.

Meanwhile, Stuart's released the blurb, and it's splendid. Here, see:

     ‘What’s that? Did I hear you ask what romance has to do with anything, little Cousin? You do surprise me. Why Romance is Story itself, nothing less than that. Romance is the tale with which a cunning man winkles out a widow’s secrets and an honest one breaks his beloved’s heart. Romance locks us away and sets us free, brings us great pleasure and also great pain, is the thread which binds all other stories together. Dear me, little Cousin, I expected better of you...’

     – Godfather Valentine, Dresden, 1928

I love the callback to Lawrence Miles' sort-of prequel to Faction Paradox, Dead Romance, and the way that context makes this title sound like a dismemberment or a dissection.

Twelfths and Quarters

I'm working on a book review post. Honestly I am.

In the meantime, on with the plugging. Here's the updated cover of A Romance in Twelve Parts, due from Obverse Books on 31 May:



















Note the rather lovely use of the blended-case font last used back in 2003-04 by Mad Norwegian for the titles of This Town Will Never Let Us Go and Of the City of the Saved....

You may also wish to speculate about what kind of animal that skull might belong to.

In other Obverse news, Stuart Douglas has recently announced a really exciting new venture -- periodical anthology series, the Obverse Quarterly, aimed at genre fans with eclectic tastes. Subscribers will receive four marvellously eclectic collections of short stories each year. (Individual titles can be bought separately, but as far as I can see the quirky mixture of styles and sources is part of the charm.)

The first four volumes are:

• a collection of original horror stories edited by up-and-coming author Johnny Mains;
• a volume of spin-off stories featuring Iris Wildthyme's Mexican wrestler pal Señor 105, edited by his creator Cody Quijano-Schell and featuring several of the same splendid contributors as A Romance in Twelve Parts;
• a reprint of the short stories of Fitz James O'Brien, an early author of proto science fiction who even I've never got round to reading;
• a collection of new stories featuring the classic pulp villain Monsieur Zenith the Albino, edited by Stuart and featuring stories from Paul Magrs, George Mann and -- deep breath -- Michael Moorcock.

All of which sound fantastic in their respective ways. The only one of those which doesn't immediately appeal to me is the horror anthology, but the pricing structure cleverly means it's £1.97 cheaper to subscribe to a year's worth of titles than to buy three individual ones.

I should clarify that I've no personal investment in any of these four volumes (although I've hopes of becoming involved in future years, naturally) -- I just think that this is a fascinating project for a contemporary small press to be embarking on, and want to publicise it as widely as I can. Which means telling all of you lovely people about it.

A Romantic Autopsy

It's taken a little while, but Obverse Books have made the first of their Faction Paradox short story collections, A Romance in Twelve Parts, available for preorder at their website. As I may possibly have mentioned before, this anthology contains my 10,000-word sequel to Of the City of the Saved..., "A Hundred Words from a Civil War".

(It's also on Amazon, although there "Twelve" appears to be spelt "Twleve".)

Obverse have also announced the ISBN -- a thrilling 9780956560544 -- and a provisional cover image (as yet without the title added), which looks like this:
















The list of stories is also included, to whit:

• Alchemy - James Milton
• Holding Pattern - Scott Harrison
• Storyteller - Matt Kimpton
• Gramps - Jon Dennis
• Mightier than the Sword - Jay Eales
• The Story of the Peace - Ian Potter
• Print the Legend - Daniel O'Mahony
• Nothing Lasts Forever - David N Smith and Violet Addison
• Library Pictures - Stuart Douglas
• Now or Thereabouts - Blair Bidmead
• Tonton Macoute - Dave Hoskin
• A Hundred Words from a Civil War - Philip Purser-Hallard

Daniel and Ian are among the best authors I know, and Matt, Jon, Blair, Dave -- actually, sod it, nearly all the other authors -- have contributed excellent stuff to previous collections including Obverse's Iris Wildthyme range. The book's going to be fab, and you should buy it.

As if you needed an extra inducement, I'm told that Iris herself features in Stuart's story, her first appearance in a Faction Paradox book since pp165-67 of Interference volume 2, very nearly twelve years ago.

Official word is now that A Romance in Twelve Parts will see publication on 31 May. When I have more information on that, I'll apprise you of it.

Degrees of Separation

My word, you have all been patient.

The latest word is that publication of Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts, initially scheduled for last month, is now expected in April. Final tweaks to my story are being made this week.

So, here's the last of my pre-prepared deleted scenes. In the alternative universe where ‘A Hundred Words from a Civil War’ was published without the guest contributions, this drabble would have acted as a bridge between a scene set in Paynesdown District and one set in the Romuline District:.

     The persistent rain of Paynesdown forms a case-study for the potential weaponisation of the City’s gigaclimate being undertaken by meteorologists from Rullish District University, one of the students in whose Physics Department is secretly accumulating nuclear material at the behest of a cult whose restrictive views on the nature, definition and exclusive right to continued existence of ‘Chromosomal Humanity’ have led to their investigation by a Civil Intelligence Agent, whose partner was recently murdered using contact poison supplied by a neuro-bokor who is practicing experimental zombification processes on a consignment of slaves purchased from mercenaries from the Romuline District, where:

...a bunch more stuff happens. To find out what, you'll have to read the story itself once the book's published.

I'm hoping to do more bloggery shortly -- I very much want to review Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London and Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream, and possibly the film version of Never Let Me Go, which I managed in an uncharacteristically toddler-free moment to see -- but for the moment toddlercare, work and the non-series novel I'm very, very, very slowly writing are pressing rather too insistently.

Cowboys and Indians

I'm beginning to suspect that Obverse Books' original plan to publish Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts this month may have been a tiny bit optimistic, and thus that my (no doubt annoyingly) persistent trailing of the book since October may have been premature. Obverse are a highly competent, not to mention lovely, small press, but the precedent for anyone managing to publish Faction Paradox books when they say they will hasn't been glorious, to say the least.

Nevertheless... here's the penultimate specimen of the eleven "Deleted Scenes" from my short story, "One Hundred Words from a Civil War":

     Once, the tribes of Mesara Plains Park sent their strongest, bravest young males to become bodyguards in the households of the rich. Now Mesara has been designated a Collateral Reservation, administered by a Sheriff from nearby Samraja District.
     The Mesarans are, to all intents and purposes, minotaurs, their human DNA ancestrally mingled with that of a proud species of bovinoid warriors. They do not accept subjugation willingly. Nor, now, is there any occupation for their restless youth.
     A troupe of them has surrounded the wagon-train bearing a gaggle of Samraji Civil servants. They brandish traditional axes and utter bloodcurdling bellows.

I'm not sure what I'll do after the next one. Possibly -- and I emphasise that this is contingent on my finding the time, energy and concentration span -- I'll make up some more, and carry on doing so until the book's published.

The Adventure of the Anagrammatic Algebraist

I'm beginning to suspect, if I'm to keep this blog going at all, that I need to learn the art of writing pithy but substantial posts, rather than great long screeds which lay out my every passing thought on a topic.

As a first stab at that, here are brief(ish) reviews of the most recent pair of books I've read:

* * *

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks: The latest of Banks' loosely-linked Culture sequence, this combines enjoyably labyrinthine politics with giant space-opera battle and some serious philosophising. The necessarily murky foreign relations of a utopian society are, as ever, highlighted even while the setting itself is evoked with confidence and style.

The new element here is a corollary to an idea I've used in my own writing, of a highly technological society building its own Heaven where its citizens can survive after death. In the Culture universe, we learn, many civilisations have also built Hells in which the uploaded souls of their dead can suffer eternal torment in retribution for perceived misdeeds in life. It's an effectively nasty -- and as far as I'm aware original -- idea, and Banks is just the author to deplore it whilst still having some sadistic fun. (Indeed, a couple of passages suggest that these Hells should themselves be considered artworks in just this vein, as if Dante or Bosch -- or the Banks of Complicity and its ilk -- had worked in the arena of actual experience, rather than in depictive media.)

I suspect most sincere believers in the Christian Hell would see this as an obscene usurpation of God's prerogatives, and the novel didn't work very hard to convince me otherwise. There's also almost no indication of what most of the souls in the Hells have done to be consigned there: although a few are political prisoners, one presumes that many must be guilty of crimes which Banks and the reader would join their parent societies in decrying. Still, Surface Detail's Hells are, fairly uncomplicatedly, a metaphor for fundamentalist religion in general, and going into fictional doctrinal detail would have detracted from that.

It's a highly entertaining novel, but doesn't quite face up to the challenge it sets itself. And some of the Culture material feels very much as if it's re-exploring familiar ground -- an impression which one continuity-based revelation (in literally the last two words of the novel) does little to dispel.

* * *

Zero History by William Gibson: The conclusion to the rather startlingly named "Bigend Trilogy", in which Gibson turns essentially the same sensibility as created his science fiction works on the unadulterated contemporary world. Shockingly, I see that I never properly reviewed either Pattern Recognition or Spook Country, though I did praise them in passing here and there. Both are outstanding, and if you've enjoyed Gibson's SF I'd urge you to seek them out.

Zero History is as gorgeously written as ever, the information-dense prose nonetheless elegantly inventive and enthralling, the characters -- most notably the genially appalling capitalist anti-hero Hubertus Bigend -- convincingly drawn and detailed. As with Pattern Recognition and (the suspiciously similarly-named) Count Zero, one plot strand concerns a typically Gibsonian quest to track down the creator of some mysterious anonymous art -- in this case a "secret brand" of designer clothing. Although I do find discussion of fashion rather wearying, I enjoyed the branding motif in Pattern Recognition, and there's an entire thesis to be written about the parallels between these three realistic novels and the Sprawl trilogy.

Although ostensibly far more closely connected to Spook Country, with which it shares its two point-of-view characters, than to Pattern Recognition, it does a very clever thing with the structure of the trilogy, which I'd better conceal with whitespace (highlight to read): When Hollis Henry, the retired rock-musician protagonist of Spook Country, eventually meets the designer in question, she turns out to be logo-averse Cayce Pollard, whom we last saw performing a parallel quest some seven years earlier in Pattern Recognition.

Unfortunately, the anonymous-designer plot strand is rather perfunctorily resolved, and insufficiently well-integrated with the main plotline (which relates to the commercial rivalry between Bigend and a rogue operator for, erm, the contract to design clothing for the U.S. military). There's also a McGuffin which may be the nearest equivalent to a deux ex machina in a modern mainstream novel, but which equally seems to come out of nowhere. The book's a fantastic read, but ultimately I felt not quite as satisfying a novel as its two predecessors.

* * *

I've a couple of short-story anthologies to read next (both in series I've previously contributed to), but the next novel on my list is Rivers of London, a fantasy-police-procedural by the magnificently talented, and heretofore hopelessly undervalued, Ben Aaronovitch. I mention this mostly because I'm amused by the coincidence -- his two full-length Doctor Who novels draw heavily on the works of Gibson and Banks respectively -- but I'm looking forward to it enormously.

Finally, in a similar spirit of brevity, and in keeping with the mention of the police... here's one more teaser (the ninth of eleven, if I'm not mistaken) for my forthcoming short story "A Hundred Words from a Civil War" in Obverse Books's Faction Paradox anthology, A Romance in Twelve Parts:

     ‘Who was he?’ The investigator wears a greatcoat and muffler. ‘Apart from being a Remake, an academic and a closet gay, obviously. And taking his phobia of Tube travel as read.’
     ‘Remake?’ Inspector Inshaller stammers. ‘No, he was a maths lecturer. Dr Roamers-Jay.’
     ‘Oh, typical,’ he sneers. Hologlyphs in various alphabets and number-systems orbit his camelish face. ‘Someone’s leaving me a trail of dead Moriartys, and none of them are mine.’
     ‘Erm,’ Inshaller says. ‘No offence, but when we hired the Great Detective Agency, we were expecting someone a bit more...’
     ‘Heritage? Yeah,’ he sighs. ‘I get that a lot.’

The book's due out in the spring. Ordering details will appear here as soon as I have them myself.

Twenty eleven, forty, twelve, one hundred

2011 will be the year I turn 40. That really doesn't seem feasible, somehow. I remember a time when I thought that any year with two nines in it sounded thrillingly futuristic.

Anyway, B. and I have spent the past week-and-a-half gadding about the country in the traditional manner, only this time with a toddler in tow to help keep things astonishingly overcomplicated. (One happy by-product of the necessary extensive disruption to said toddler's routine is that he now accepts sleeping in a cot that's across the other side of the room from our bed, rather than strapped to it, as being normal. This represents progress.)

Among the spoils of this Christmas's festive present exchange with our relatives are complete boxed sets of the incomparable and timeless Twin Peaks and the two best BBC sitcoms of the past decade, Outnumbered and The Thick of It. (OK, so that last one's technically B.'s.) Also Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream, which sounds rather akin to James Blish's earlier biographical-novel-about-a-scientific-revolutionary-with-SF-visionary-scenes, Doctor Mirabilis.

New Year's Eve was beset and blighted by various illness afflicting B and our proposed guests, meaning that we spent the evening alone and went to bed at 10:30ish. There were far fewer fireworks let off in our immediate neighbourhood this inter-year midnight than last, which I approve of from the point of view of the environment and my sleep, though it's probably economically telling.

2011 is also the year in which the first Faction Paradox short-story anthology, A Romance in Twelve Parts, is due to be published by Obverse Books, including "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", the official sequel to my novel Of the City of the Saved.... I'm certainly looking forward to it more than I am the longevitudinal milestone I mentioned earlier. You may be too, in which case you may like to see another teaser in the form of a deleted drabble:

     A dragon hisses and snaps at its handler, tail thrashing, hungry for flesh. The hobbits are going to war against the ogres.
     The diminutive Citizens of Erbor District’s island margins have always had troubled relations with the beetle-browed giants of the uplands. These thickset Homo antecessor Citizens were once a culture of cannibals, and have gazed hungrily at their tiny Homo floresiensis neighbours since long before the collapse of invulnerability. Now they grind the hobbits’ bones to make their bread.
     In retaliation, the floresians have been domesticating the marshlands’ vicious monitor lizards.
     The dragon-handlers’ charges trudge onwards towards the foothills.

There, I've even annotated it with hyperlinks for you. Happy New Year.

Nazis vs The Mummy

The inexorable imminence of the Midwinter festivities means I'm fairly unlikely now to have time for blogging of substance until 2011, with one exception: I do have a Christmas story, "Stella Maris", lined up to publish here and on the website for Midwinter Day.

This means that the following is the last time this year you'll be teased about my forthcoming drabblectic epic "A Hundred Words from a Civil War":

     ‘How long did this take to build?’ Gerhardt gazes into the dark maw the sappers have exposed.
     ‘It’s pre-Resurrection,’ Kurt replies. ‘The Pharaohs woke in replicas of the tombs they had built to house them in the afterlife.’
     Two of the stormtroopers jog ahead into the passageway.
     ‘So when this Sethnakht redied, they simply sealed him in?’
     Kurt shrugs.
     ‘And now the Deputy Mayor...’
     ‘Wants him dug up again, yes. She feels that he may represent –’
     An inhuman roar emerges from the broken stone. A bandaged figure lurches forward, brandishing a limp, uniformed body.
     ‘– a threat,’ Kurt concludes.

Sethnakht was real, as it happens. Where most pharaonic dynasties traced their ancestries back to Osiris and Horus, Sethnakht's twentieth dynasty claimed Set as their divine ancestor. This may or may not provide a clue as to the cause of Deputy Mayor Parallaxia's concerns.

Rastafarians vs Conquistadors

You may have noticed that this blog has a redesigned template. I'm not sure about it, to be honest, but at least it doesn't look as if it still thinks it's 2005.

I've finally completed my list of birthday presents by getting into town and picking up Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, his eighth (or possibly ninth) novel set in the Culture universe. It's about technological afterlives, which means I'm only four chapters in, and most of the characters seem to be dead already.

Ah well, I'm not really one to talk there. Speaking of which, I expect you'll be wanting another of these:

     The City is both Zion and Babylon.
     Zion, because it is a world in which every man can be himself, free from the chains of his first life. In the City, the Emperor Haile Selassie has ceased to deny his godhood and lives (like his contemporaries Hirohito and Philip Mountbatten) surrounded by his worshippers.
     Babylon, because of who’s in charge.
     The white man is coming for Ras Tafari. Mounted conquistadors trample the streets of Menelik District, towards the Grand Palace.
     The locals rally under the flag of the Lion of Judah, to defend the King of Kings from his oppressor.

I'm hoping it won't be too much longer before I can give you a link where you can buy Faciton Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts. In the meantime, here's Obverse Books again.

A Few Flapping, Shredded Ends of Creativity

I dreamt last night I was watching a '70s horror film with a premise I found fairly disturbing: A faith-healer who practiced laying-on of hands (it was clear that he was sincere about his gift, though not whether it actually worked) was kidnapped by satanists and turned into a carrier for the apocalyptic plagues mentioned in Revelation, so that everyone he touched, instead of being cured, became infected.

I don't remember any more of the plot, but the idea freaked me out. If anyone wants to use it for anything, feel free -- I want rid of it.

This latest deleted scene from "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", on the other hand, is © me 2010 and you can't have it.

     In every instant a million wounds, a thousand deaths, are inflicted on Oluseyi Hive. Oluseyi feels the agony of them all, absorbs and transcends them. Its enemy, Nishizawa Hive, is assuredly suffering as well.
     Each moment Oluseyi’s distributed intelligence implements a hundred strategies, considers and rejects ten thousand more. Subverted components among the enemy’s stratified, highly specialised military fight fervently for Nishizawa, transmitting their knowledge back to Oluseyi all the while.
     Meanwhile, Oluseyi’s builders and troglodytic burrowers delve ever further into the base-substrate, carving out fortified nurseries for the fertile castes. In some form, Oluseyi will survive any possible defeat.

I may also have finished this year's story for sending out with our Christmas cards -- previous ones are archived here. (Well, only from 2006, when I started writing them, to 2008 -- but 2009's "Stella Maris", which I was particularly pleased with, will be appearing both there and here at some point during Advent.)

Given the extreme difficulty I've been experiencing in finding the necessary coincidence of time, energy and concentration-span to write in the well-over-a-year since the birth of young R., this is a bigger achievement than it sounds.

Mokkameth and the Wight

Hmm. It would be fair to say that the three deleted drabbles I've posted so far to trail my forthcoming City of the Saved short story in Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts have been a bit abstract and static. This hasn't really been giving an accurate picture of what the story's like. So here's an action sequence:

     The wight stares at its severed arm. ‘You’ll pay for that, sonny,’ it promises.
     It grabs Mokkameth’s wrist, twisting his sword away, pressing his palm against the livid stump of its shoulder.
     Mokkameth’s fingertips sink into the wight’s flesh. His arm begins to lose sensation as its skin blanches, the pallor of the wight’s hide seeping quickly across his own brown pigment.
     The paleness reaches Mokkameth’s shoulder, a hold loosens within – and the wight withdraws new-built fingers, leaving behind a clean and puckered wound.
     ‘You’re so lucky that wasn’t my head, sunshine,’ it growls, shaking its stolen biceps into place.

These will all be going on the website eventually, naturally. In the meantime, I've updated the microfiction page.

'39

In the last week I've entered my fortieth year of life, which is... disconcerting. Well, terrifying, really, if I allowed it to be. Fortunately, for the next 358 days I'm still in my late 30s, so I can remain in denial regarding that particular milestone for now.

I did, however, get given lots of lovely things by my friends and family, mostly (though not exclusively) in Digital Versatile Disc format. Things which I now own which I didn't a week ago today include:

• True Blood seasons 1 and 2: Very fine work of post-Buffy vampire revisionism from the genius who brought us Six Feet Under, Alan Ball.
• Robin Hood (2010): The latest media version of the Sherwood legend, directed by Ridley Scott. No, I haven't seen it yet, and yes, it got some pretty bad reviews, but I'm collecting different interpretations.
• Forbidden Planet: Somehow I never owned this seminal SF film, a B-movie rewrite of The Tempest. Now I do.
• The Nightmare Man: Weird but impressive BBC occult-SF-whodunnit from 1981, from one of the best scriptwriters and one of the best directors of old-stye Doctor Who.
• The Flipside of Dominick Hide: Another slice of classic 80s BBC weirditude, which I've not yet managed to watch. It's supposed to be a time-travel romance.
• The Science of Battlestar Galactica by Patrick Di Justo and Kevin Grazier: probably not somehting I'd have bought for myself, so it's all the more gratifying to be given it by my goddaughter and family.
• Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Be Yourself Tonight, Revenge and Savage by Eurythmics: One of my favourite bands ever, whose work I've nonetheless never got round to collecting on CD. (No, really. I had tapes.)

I'm expecting the outstanding (in two senses) 2010 season of Doctor Who any day now, as well. I also have a Waterstones token, which I have every intention of spending on either this or this.

It's about time I blogged another of the deleted scenes from my forthcoming drabbleplex, "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". Here goes, then:

     Stormance and Limptrace Districts face one another across the River Runn, a medium-sized watercourse with a width similar to that of the Pacific Ocean. Long-term economic rivals, they have recently become deadly enemies.
     When one District (it hardly matters which) launches an atomic strike against the other, the devastation generates a ripple which gains power as it crosses the river, slamming into the opposite bank with much of the force of the original detonation.
     Those who survive the tsunami’s impact succumb afterwards to compromised cholera bacteria carried by a refugee from distant Keltoria District.
     In the City, everybody is connected.

Chaka George Edward

Even I would never have had the chutzpah to append 100 words of my own fiction to that previous entry. So here's the second of eleven teasers / deleted scenes / unused drabbles from my short story "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", to be published in Obverse Books's forthcoming Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts.

     The City’s Southwest fringes belong to the survivors of one brief skirmish between time-active powers back in the universe. Its tangential contact with European civilisation was short-lived but, for these people, defining.
     Thus:
     Once, the pilot smuggled Wessexite spies across the borders of the Northumbrian Workers’ Republic. Now she awaits an evacuation order. The erstwhile Tin Emirs of al-Kernow have employed Skræling berserkers from the Greenlander Realms to fight against His Majesty’s Third Assegais.
     Next to the pilot sits Chaka George Edward, formerly Emperor of Great Britain and Zululand. His parents, Cetawayo and Victoria, remember only their conventionally recorded lives.