Iris and Sherlock (at last, but not together)

It's rather later than expected, I know, but it's now possible to pre-order the two anthologies I've edited this year, Iris Wildthyme of Mars and Tales of the Great Detectives, from Obverse Books. If you're not of a mind to wait for another couple of weeks, or would rather not pay for the print versions (hardback and paperback respectively), it's also possible to buy and download the ebooks for consumption this very instant.

I'm very proud of both anthologies: a total of seventeen thoroughly talented people have contributed to them, they deal with two of my favourite genre characters (albeit in unfamiliar contexts in both cases), the covers are excellent, and I think they've turned out as really lovely books through and through.

Here are the links to do that ordering you'll be so keen on:

• Iris Wilthyme of Mars hardback preorder
• Iris Wildthyme of Mars ebook
• Tales of the Great Detectives paperback preorder 
• Tales of the Great Detectives ebook

Enjoy.

* * *

I've no particular reason to suppose that these will be the last anthologies I'll be editing for Obverse Books, but I thought it might be interesting at this point to look at who I've published so far (since with the publication of these two books the number nearly doubles). Excluding myself, the list goes like this:

• Helen Angove (Tales of the City)
• Aditya Bidikar  (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Blair Bidmead (Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars -- also the cover artist for Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Simon Bucher-Jones (More Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Rachel Churcher (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Mark Clapham (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Jay Eales (More Tales of the City)
• Elizabeth Evershed (Tales of the City and Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Jess Faraday (Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Kelly Hale (More Tales of the City and Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Dave Hoskin (Tales of the City)
• Juliet Kemp (Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Selina Lock (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Stephen Marley (Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Chantelle Messier (Tales of the Great Detectives)
• Lance Parkin (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Ian Potter (More Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Dale Smith (Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Daniel Tessier (Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Susannah Tiller (More Tales of the City)
• Richard Wright (More Tales of the City and Iris Wildthyme of Mars)
• Andrew Hickey (Tales of the Great Detectives)

So...

1. That's 22 authors, eight of whom I've commissioned twice, two of whom co-wrote a single story, thus contributing a total of 29 stories (mine excluded). 
2. Of these authors, if I'm remembering correctly, nine hadn't previously been published by Obverse Books or their online wing Manleigh Books; six were making their debuts as professionally published writers. 
3. Of those 22 authors, 16 are British (and I believe in fact English), three American, two Australian and one Indian. However, two of the Brits are based in the USA, and one returned to the UK from India between their first and second commission. The book with the highest concentration of non-UK authors is Tales of the Great Detectives, half of whose contributors are American. 
4. Nine of the authors are women, 13 men; of the stories, 12 are by women and 17 by men. (Those aren't great statistics, admittedly, but they're better than many genre anthologies manage.)  Of the individual anthologies, Tales of the Great Detectives has a majority of female authors, and Tales of the City at least achieves parity (although only if you exclude my contributions).
5. To the best of my knowledge without having actually met them all (see 6), all but one of these people are white. 
6. Eight of the authors are people I've met in real life: five of them I'd never interacted with prior to commissioning them. The rest, predictably, I knew online. (Only three of them are people I went out with, went to university with or invited to my wedding.) 
7. Between us to date (counting co-author credits, and including my own titles this time), the contributors to these anthologies are responsible for 15 Doctor Who novels, four Bernice Summerfield novels, four Faction Paradox novels (with more in the works), four Señor 105 novellas, three Time Hunter novellas and something like 65 short stories for Obverse Books.

Those, then, are the facts. Suggestions as to what any of this might mean, or other ways in which I could (feasibly, and within the bounds of decency and good taste) break that list down, will be received with interest.

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.

I'll Be Bound

Paper copies of Tales of the City [NB: note new link to dedicated ordering page] are now available, and some of them are in my possession. The wonderful cover looks even better wrapped around a crisply-printed, well-laid-out book full of narrative goodness, without (as far as I can see so far, anyway) any of the accidental printing glitches I feared. (B. has however found a space missing after a full stop, which will be entirely my fault and for which I can only apologise.)

I'm delighted, obviously -- although the ebook's been out for a while, and has even garnered one highly positive review, my understanding of publishing was formed long enough ago that a book never feels published to me until its contents can be pinned down and contained between covers. It's never felt more appropriate to refer to paper books as "bound".

To celebrate, I've updated my website with the extras for the book, including the author biogs (previously posted here), a City of the Saved chronology and... what I'm nervous about calling, but has to be considered in purely chronological terms to be, the Last Ever City of the Saved story. It's called "God Encompasses", and it follows on directly from the events of "A Hundred Words from a Civil War" and "Apocalypse Day". (Both "God Encompasses" and the City chronology contain SPOILERS for Tales of the City, so caveat lector.)

It's not anyone's intention that this should be the last City of the Saved story published, however. I've massively enjoyed the editing process for Tales, and I hope it will be the first of, if not many then at least several, collaborations of the kind with Obverse Books. News of further City volumes should hopefully be posted here in due course.

Trailers of the City #6

Since the ebook of Tales of the City is due out today, with the physical codices to follow in a week or two, it's time for the last in my occasional series of trailers for the anthology.The sixth and final full-length story is by Mr Dave Hoskin:

Dave Hoskin is a writer living in Melbourne. His fiction has appeared in Doctor Who – Short Trips: Transmissions, Bernice Summerfield: Something Changed, Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts, Midnight Echo and World's Collider. His non-fiction has appeared in The Big Issue, Metro, Australian Book Review and Overland. His favourite colour is jam, his favourite band is world peace, and his favourite pastime is closed for renovations. Currently he has no bruises, but several scars. Some of them are visible to passersby.

I first encountered Dave's work in Something Changed, to which I thought his contribution was outstanding. His name didn't stick with me, though, until 'iNtRUsioNs', his splendidly disturbing piece in Transmissions -- again, one of the best stories in a far stronger collection. His Faction Paradox story 'Tonton Macoute' (the story of the Faction's cook, a pragmatic gourmet who takes on the qualities of the entities he eats, up to and including things like gods) -- and in particular the follow-up drabble Dave contributed to 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', in which the resurrected Macoute finishes his preparations for eating the City itself -- convinced me that he was an author I wanted to write a full-length City of the Saved story.

Dave's story in Tales of the City is a quieter, more personal affair: 'Bruises' is a police noir with a strange theological twist -- not an unfamiliar genre in City terms, but one which Dave accomplishes particularly effectively. It takes the City's cheerily utopian and pluralist ethos to some very dark places... which is just what's needed as the book approaches the epilogue, 'Apocalypse Day'.

It starts like this:

     She started by licking the bruise off my face.

To read the story, buy the Tales of the City ebook, or order the physical volume, from Obverse Books.

Urban design

I'm finally in a position to reveal the highly talented Cody Quijano-Schell's cover design for Tales of the City, and it's fantastic:

Click to see a larger version, in all its brilliant weirdness. (Also available at my website.)

The ebook is due out this Friday, 1 June, with the physical volume to follow a week or two later. Place your order here.

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.

Trailers of the City #5

Here's the fifth and penultimate trailer for Tales of the City, the anthology of short stories I've edited set in the City of the Saved and due to be published by Obverse Books on (at last estimate) 1 June.

Dale Smith's biog, rather unexpectedly, says this:  

Dale Smith: I need you to kill a man, they said. Two hundred, I said, and how do I find him? There was some website – www.dalesmithonline.com – but the only thing you got from that was that he had already died, sometime before the invention of the broadband modem. But I found him. ‘I know how to live forever,’ he whispered as I stabbed him. Nothing personal, just work. But his name wouldn’t die. Dale Smith, Dale Smith, Dale Smith: he was everywhere. He was dead, and he wouldn’t die. That’s why I’m here. I need you to kill a man.

Dale's modesty covers the fact that he's the most distinguished contributor to the book, with two Doctor Who novels, a number of plays, some short stories (for Obverse and others) and the single best novella published under the Time Hunter banner under his belt. I've always admired his writing, which is intelligent, emotionally engaging and unafraid to take risks, with an interesting predilection for biotechnology. 

I knew as soon as I saw Dale's pitch for Tales of the City that I had to publish it: the central character alone was so perfect for the City setting that I was cross at not having thought of her myself. It's called 'About a Girl' and if I had to classify it by genre, I'd call it a cyberpunk horror rockumentary.  Here's the first sentence:

     They called themselves The Twenty-Seven.

That might be enough information for some of you to guess the story's starting-point, but you're unlikely to guess the rest. To read the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #4

Update: Tales of the City has been moved up to form the first volume of year 2 of the Obverse Quarterly, ahead of the David-Bowie-themed Iris Wildthyme collection Lady Stardust. This means both that the expected publication date is early next month, and that I need to get a move on with these teasers.

  So:

Helen Angove began her working life as an electrical engineer on the south coast of England, took a brief detour as a pricing analyst for an electricity supply company (which was as much fun as it sounds) and then veered off in a different direction altogether by becoming a priest in the Church of England. Now, however, she is living with her husband and two children in Southern California, and is against all the dictates of common sense exploring the possibility of writing as a viable career choice. She has known Philip Purser-Hallard for longer than either of them might care to remember, and holds him responsible for inculcating in her a long-lasting love of science fiction. Her love of Jane Austen, on the other hand, she developed entirely on her own, and the blame for deciding to combine the two can be laid at the feet of no one else.

As that biog implies, I've known Helen longer than any of the other contributors -- since our teens, in fact, so that as she says we influenced each other's tastes in reading rather early.  Her writing is thoughtful and evocative and humane, and -- as she remains shockingly unpublished prior to now -- I'm delighted to be able to include a sample of it in Tales of the City. 

Helen's story, 'Highbury', is a comedy of manners, albeit with a nasty twist.  (I've actually thought for ages that the City of the Saved was a perfect setting for such a story, to the extent that my very first City proposal opened at a Jane Austen tea party with cyborgs and neanderthals in attendance.) Here's the first sentence:

     A gentleman should be allowed to consider a library a place of refuge: a room where he can have the reasonable expectation of temporary retreat from the distractions of domestic life and the interruptions of the fairer sex.

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #3

This is the third trailer for the forthcoming short-story anthology Tales of the City, set in the City of the Saved and available for pre-order from Obverse Books. Here's the biog of Juliet Kemp, the author of the third story in the book:

Juliet Kemp lives in London and writes things down a lot. She has had previous stories published in the anthology Hellebore and Rue and in Eclectic Flash. She has a website at http://julietkemp.com where she talks about plants, building things out of pallets, and anything else that catches her interest.

I've known Juliet for some years now, and have been impressed by the quality of the fiction of hers I've read. Two of her stories, 'Things Found on a Beach' and 'Falling after Icarus', are available to read online (you can even buy the latter for the Kindle), so you can judge for yourself as well. (Juliet also writes articles and technical manuals for computer programmers, which I admit I haven't attempted to read.)

Her Tales of the City story, 'Lost Ships and Lost Lands', is a traveller's tale, a shipboard adventure with a twist, taking place in a District of the City unlike any we've seen before. The first sentence goes like this:

     The train rattled away and back out of Cerulean District, leaving Brianna alone on the open platform.

(You may spot a minor continuity issue here with Of the City of the Saved..., which I've taken the bold editorial step of ignoring completely.) 

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

[NB: The splendid new City of the Saved logo is by Obverse's equally splendid in-house graphic designer, Cody Quijano-Schell, and will be appearing on my website shortly.]

Trailers of the City #2

Second in an occasional series publicising the forthcoming Tales of the City anthology -- although yes, I have to admit I haven't posted anything here since the last one.

Elizabeth Evershed is a freelance writer based in London. Since graduating from Durham University in 2009 with a PhD in late medieval and early Renaissance literature, she has worked in various capacities as a tutor and researcher, proofreader and copy-editor, and freelance consultant on plain English in the public sector. She is a regular contributor to Literature Online, where she has written critical biographies of a wide range of science fiction and fantasy authors from JRR Tolkien to China Miéville. The world of the City has provided her with a rare opportunity to combine science fiction, quasi-historical and campus fiction in ‘The Socratic Problem’, as well as have some fun sending up famous philosophers. Elizabeth writes comic literary fiction in her spare time and has just completed her first novel.

I've known Liz for a while: she was one of the founder members of a writers' group called Subway to which I belonged in the early noughties. (The group produced an anthology, Emerge, which included 'Scapegoat', my second published piece of fiction.)

Though Subway was a product of the internet era, we occasionally met in person for readings, workshops and social events, and I knew from these that Liz was a gifted, witty and highly intelligent writer. When pondering which authors I might bring in as contributors from outside Obverse Books' usual talent pool, Liz was one of those at the top of my list. I was delighted when she said yes, and I very much hope it won't be the last work she does for Obverse.

'The Socratic Problem' is, as I expected, a very clever and funny piece. It's a campus story, dealing with academic rivalries and clashes of ideas as the City's University of the Seven Ages appoints a historical celebrity as its Visiting Lecturer. Here's the first sentence:

     No doubt about it: Inigo Faber was having a dog of an afterlife, and, as dog days went, this was an uncommonly hairy one.

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Trailers of the City #1

Here's what Blair Bidmead, whose Happily Ever After is a High-Risk Strategy opens Tales of the City, has to say in his author biog:

Blair Bidmead, author of 'Happily Ever After Is a High-Risk Strategy', has had three short stories published previously – 'Party Kill Accelerator!' (in The Panda Book Of Horror), 'Now Or Thereabouts' (in Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts) and 'Are You Loathsome Tonight?' (in Señor 105 & the Elements of Danger). He has a novel on the go, another in mind and a webcomic in his not-too-distant future. A musician, an artist and a (semi-) retired hedonist, Blair lives in London with his wife and two young children and is tired, but sickeningly happy. He thinks that talking in the third person only feels right when the Rock does it.

Blair was an unpublished author a few years ago, but his three published stories have been excellent, and are getting better. I'm particularly fond of 'Are You Loathesome Tonight' -- a smackdown between a Mexican masked wrestler and a dinosaur version of Elvis, taking place in 1970 Las Vegas and with a narrator who may well be Hunter S. Thompson -- which manages to be even madder than that brief synopsis makes it sound.

What really sold me, though, on the idea of getting Blair to write a City of the Saved story was his guest drabble in 'A Hundred Words from a Civil War', which convinced me in the space of 100 words that he understood and loved the City as a setting. (It's drabble number XXX, on p209 of the print edition of A Romance in Twelve Parts.)

A mix of not-necessarily-obvious genres was one thing I was keen to see in Tales of the City, and Blair's is a road trip story, with a hitchhiker cadging a lift with a surprising pair of travelling companions. Here's the first sentence of 'Happily Ever After is a High-Risk Strategy':

     So there I was; dawn at the truck stop by the ziggurat at the mouth of the Mesopotamian Interstate.

To read the rest of the story, order Tales of the City from Obverse Books.

Ordering

If you've been keenly following the progress of Tales of the City, the City of the Saved anthology I'm editing, you may be pleased to know that the book is now available for pre-order as an individual title from the publishers, Obverse Books.

You can also subscribe to year 2 of the Obverse Quarterly at that link, of which Tales of the City is the second volume -- the others being a collection of Iris Wildthyme stories themed around David Bowie songs, the adventures of some time-travelling policemen and an anthology of unrelated detective stories. Individual titles are £9.99 while a year's sub comes in at £28... so, if only three of those sound worth buying to you, it's cheaper to get the subscription to all four books.

I'm going to be posting sporadic teasers for Tales of the City every month or so between now and when it's published. Since our rumoured eighth contributor sadly never materialised, the final lineup of stories is as follows:

Akroates by Philip Purser-Hallard
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
About a Girl by Dale Smith
Bruises by Dave Hoskin
Apocalypse Day by Philip Purser-Hallard

Leaving my own endpieces aside, each teaser will focus on one of these, taking them in the order they're presented in the book (which is also chronological order). The first one follows...

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.