Meet the Martians

In the event, only one reader entered the competition to identify the types of fictional Martian mentioned in my short story "Green Mars Blues", and that was in fact another of the contributors to Iris Wildthyme of Mars.

I said that I thought there were nineteen types of Martian in the story. I have to admit it depends heavily on how you count.

From the beginning...

1. The Green Man (first appearance p227): A Green Martian from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom sequence.
2. Jenah Pharis (p229): A Red Martian from Barsoom.
3. The Tripods (p232): Obviously, the war machines from H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
4. The Coy Stripper and Her "Snake" (p234): An adult and juvenile of the species described in Philip José Farmer's short story "My Sister's Brother".
5 & 6. The Fake Charlatan and the Incompetent Ghost  (p234): One of the telepathic Martians, and one of the slightly different shapeshifting telepathic Martians, from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.
7. The Locusts (p236): The evil insectile Martians from Quatermass and the Pit, with accompanying aerial psychic projection.
8. The Angels of Pavonis Mons (p238): The Eldila from C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet.
9, 10 & 11. The Spindly Men, the Otters and the Froggy Things (p238): The Sorns, Hrossa and Pfifltriggi from Out of the Silent Planet.
12. The Blue (or Possibly Green) Giants (p240): Either the Argzoon from Michael Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars sequence, or the Ice Warriors from Doctor Who.
13. Great Octopus Things (p240): From Men, Martians and Machines by Eric Frank Russell (though other answers would probably have been acceptable).
14. Merpeople (p240): From Doctor Omega by Arnould Galopin.
15. The Blue Lightning (p240): A Fire Balloon from The Martian Chronicles.
16. The Christmas Visitor (p240): Either Dropo from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, or the Alien Super-Being from Christmas on Mars.
17. The Flashing Eyes in the Dark (p241): The Man from Mars in the Blondie song "Rapture". (The biggest clue's in what he eats.)
18. The Laughers at Potatoes (p241): The robotic Martians from the 1970s Smash adverts. (I wouldn't have thought of including these Martians in the story without the input of Andrew Hickey, to whom thanks.)
19. The Armoured Reptile (p250): Definitely an Ice Warrior.

For bonus points, the title of Marcie's proposed talk "Grokking Vulthoom: The Role of Indigene Legends in Modern Cult Formation" (p242) references Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and "Vulthoom" by Clark Ashton Smith.

To his credit, our entrant Simon Bucher-Jones identified twelve of those (fourteen including the bonuses). He also pointed out several texts that identify Jesus (mentioned on p226) as a Martian, and made a valiant effort to name eighteen works which include Martian tripods (on the basis that Marcie has encountered eighteen variants of the story). Simon wins the signed copy of The Pendragon Protocol by default, but it's certainly deserved.

Competition Time

Right. I have a signed copy of my urban fantasy thriller The Pendragon Protocol to give away, to someone who can demonstrate their close reading abilities and knowledge of obscure science fiction.

To win this you'll need to find a copy of the anthology Iris Wildthyme of Mars. This may sound like a large investment, but a) the ebook version is currently only £5.99 in the Obverse sale, b) The Pendragon Protocol paperback costs £7.99 at Amazon, and c) you'll be getting to buy and keep an anthology I'm very proud of with stories by lots of talented authors that you'll really enjoy. And if you're lucky and win, you'll end up with £13.98 worth of book for £5.99.

The prize will go to anyone who can identify all the types of fictional Martian who are referred to in my story 'Green Mars Blues' in Iris Wildthyme of Mars. There are (I believe) nineteen to identify altogether.

Rules:

1. Email entries to me at martians@infinitarian.com. Please don't post identifications as comments here. 
2. If nobody identifies all nineteen types of Martian, whoever makes the most correct identifications wins. 
3. Some references are deliberately ambiguous, so I'll accept more than one answer. (Identifying both my intended answers will count as an extra point for the purposes of rule 2.) 
4. The closing date will be Sunday 15 February.

Feel free to post any queries here or on Twitter.

Encycled

I’m delighted and slightly stunned to discover that, with the publication of The Pendragon Protocol, I now merit my own entry in the science fiction readers’ Bible, John Clute et al’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  I owned the first edition from the age of twelve or thereabouts; I still have the 21-year-old second edition (see right) and its sister volume, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, on my shelves, and I’ve been avidly consulting the third edition since it went online in 2011. It’s difficult to express quite how proud I feel of finally warranting an appearance of my own in this arcane compendium.

Admittedly I don’t entirely agree with the details of my entry. (I’d argue, for instance, that while The Pendragon Protocol does indeed mention Christian values, it’s hardly uncritical of them, and that — while I’m delighted if the novel works for a Young Adult readership — that wasn’t actually the demographic I was primarily aiming for. Also, the Encyclopedia doesn't seem to be aware of Peculiar Lives, which I would have thought was pretty much up its street.)

This is scarcely the point, though. Among other things, John Clute (John Clute! The SF critic's SF critic!) thinks Of the City of the Saved is "ambitious". I'm unbelievably pleased about this.

* * *

...Well, anyway. In other, not-at-all anticlimactic news, Iris Wildthyme of Mars now exists in hard copy, and is available to order from Obverse Books:

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

As well as writing the third Devices book (the second having been submitted to Snowbooks at the end of September), I'm talking to Stuart at Obverse about possible future anthologies. Watch this space.

Oh, What a Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Pendragon Protocol

by Philip Purser-Hallard

Giveaway ends July 01, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Enter the Pendragon

It's a year to the day since I submitted my urban-fantasy thriller The Pendragon Protocol to Snowbooks. Today we finalised the cover design:

The image was created by the outrageously talented Emma Barnes, and I love it to pieces. The way it balances thriller and fantasy, modernity and antiquity is wonderful, and the endorsement from Simon Morden is the icing on the cake.  

Here's the blurb again:

The Circle are the modern-day successors of the Knights of the Round Table. Armed with the latest military hardware and operating from a hidden fortress on the South Bank of the Thames, they protect 21st-century Britain from certain very specific threats – criminals who, like the Circle’s own Knights, have characters from Arthurian legend living inside their heads.

Jory Taylor, the Knight bearing the device of Sir Gawain, has grappled on the Circle’s behalf with mercenaries, serial killers and far-right terrorist cells. However, when he is captured by Gawain’s traditional enemy the Green Knight, he discovers a new side to the myths he lives by – one which, as he learns more about this clandestine world, becomes both threateningly personal and terrifyingly political.

The legends of King Arthur are not the only stories with influence on the British psyche – and some of the others have their own, very different agendas.

A smart, contemporary political thriller and a new kind of urban fantasy, The Pendragon Protocol is the first volume in The Devices Trilogy.

The Pendragon Protocol is out on 1 July from Snowbooks. I'll post ordering details at some point over the next few weeks.  

Three Announcements

OK, pay attention. 2014's going to be a ludicrously productive-looking year on my CV, as in addition to Iris Wildthyme of Mars, I'll have three projects being published. I'm announcing them now, in order of overall excitingness.

* * *

First of all -- and least exciting in that you could probably have guessed it was going to happen, but still I think pretty cool -- I'm editing a third City of the Saved anthology for Obverse Books, for publication next Spring.

This one has a more focussed theme than the others -- it's called Tales of the Great Detectives, and it deals with the adventures of the City's Sherlock Holmes remakes. I'm delighted with the authors I've lined up for it, including one returning contributor from each of the first two City volumes, and a couple of rather higher-profile names. I'm really pleased with how this is looking, and will add further details here as they firm up.

* * *

The second thing is eerily similar in one respect, but distinctly more unexpected. I've contributed a short story to George Mann's Further Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, the follow-up to his 2013 anthology Encounters of Sherlock Holmes, which will be published by Titan Books in February. This is a straight Victorian adventure (more or less), without the SF trappings of the City stories.

I've adored Sherlock Holmes since I was at school, and the fact that I've somehow ended up nearly simultaneously writing a story about the original and editing a book about his various media incarnations, is odd and thrilling. Writing for Holmes, in Watson's voice, was a real buzz -- so much so that I went slightly mental and wrote the last 5,000 words of the story in an afternoon, completely shattering my previous words-per-day record of a little over 3,000.

I'm really pleased with my story for Further Encounters, which is called "The Adventure of the Professor's Bequest", and is a sequel of sorts to two of the canonical Holmes stories.

* * *

And, best of all... For a while now, I've been being mysterious on Twitter and Facebook about a secret longer project I've been working on. For various reasons, it's taken a while to finalise, but I can finally announce it.

In May next year, Snowbooks will be publishing my novel The Pendragon Protocol[*], the first volume of a trilogy named The Devices. It's a slipstream urban fantasy thriller, and the blurb I've suggested to them (still subject to change, obviously) goes like this:

     The Circle are the modern-day successors of the Knights of the Round Table.

     Armed with the latest military hardware and operating from a hidden fortress on the South Bank of the Thames, they protect 21st-century Britain from certain very specific threats – criminals who, like the Circle’s own Knights, have characters from Arthurian legend living inside their heads.

     Jory Taylor, the Knight bearing the device of Sir Gawain, has grappled on the Circle’s behalf with mercenaries, serial killers and far-right terrorist cells. However, when he is captured by Gawain’s traditional enemy the Green Knight, he discovers a new side to the myths he lives by – one which, as he learns more about this clandestine world, becomes both threateningly personal and terrifyingly political.

     The legends of King Arthur are not the only stories with influence on the British psyche – and some of the others have their own, very different agendas.

     A smart, contemporary political thriller and a new kind of urban fantasy, The Pendragon Protocol is the first volume in the Devices trilogy.

The sequels will probably be published around the same time in 2015 and 2016 -- again, more details here as they emerge.

I am, as you might be able to imagine, so terrifically excited by this as to be nearly incoherent.


* * *

For all I know there'll be other things next year as well -- it's still only October 2013, after all. In the meantime, though, that's surely enough to be getting on with.

[*] Or possibly The Pendragon Protocols -- we're still deciding.