Mention of a couple of online interviews I've done in the last few weeks:

Heres one for Yatterings.com

And there's another at the Sci-fi for women website for which you'll need to register to access.

 I can't find a way to insert those URLs as active links, incidentally - the "insert link" tool button is greyed out in the popup window which opens for me when I update this site. I may be doing something wrong (more than likely), but for now it'll go on the list of minor annoyances which may count against me using Tripod's blogging software in the long run. (Update: I found out how to get into the raw HTML and attempted to insert the links properly, so we'll see if that works or not).

There's also - supposedly - an interview with me in issue two of the new SF glossy Death Ray, but I haven't yet managed to track down a copy in the Netherlands, which tends to be a bit hit and miss when it comes to UK magazine distribution.

 At the moment I am sitting at my laptop soaked to the skin, incidentally, as I just got caught in a rainstorm while attempting to photograph a coot and her chicks on a nearby nest. I think I feel a sneeze coming on...

 

 

Aberrant Dreams

More news: Aberrant Dreams, a magazine based in Atlanta, is running a special issue which will contain an original story of mine, "The Manastodon Broadcasts". This is a very unusual story, since it was written in response to a competition run by the magazine, whereby readers were invited to submit a story synopsis based around one of several SF and fantasy images supplied by the magazine. The special issue, entitled The Awakening, will be available in several formats, and features original fiction from myself, Ian Watson, Mary Rosenblum, among others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As soon as I can get my addled brain around it, I will load the ad for The Awakening onto the main site. You can find out more about it by visiting Aberrant Dream's website:

http://www.hd-image.com/main.htm

Other news: I finished a novella, "The Six Directions of Space" (about the starfaring descendants of Genghis Khan), for Gardner Dozois's forthcoming Galactic Empires anthology. 

It's a bit late to mention it, but the "Sledge-Maker's Daughter" appeared in Interzone 209 a couple of months ago, and my Merlin novella, "Minla's Flowers", is now available in Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's The New Space Opera, at least in the Australian edition. On his blog, Jonathan also reports that the young adult SF anthology "The Starry Rift" should be out next February, which will contain "The Star-Surgeon's Apprentice". And I spotted the David Hartwell Year's Best SF in Amsterdam last week, which contains "Tiger, Burning" from last year's Forbidden Planets anthology.

 

 

This summer Revelation Space will appear in the UK with a new cover, running alongside the existing one. This is part of a promotion Orion are running for "future masterworks". The new cover will not feature the name of the book or the author, although the information will be on the spine.

Next year there is talk of reissuing all of my books with a revised cover design, the feeling being that the stark layout of RS has been imitated to the point where it no longer stands out as well as it did.

 

 

 

 

 

Into the great wide open

This is my first blog entry. I've created this blog adjunct to my mine site - using Tripod's existing blogging software, which I'm sure isn't the best out there, but will do fine for me - because I wanted to keep my web presence more up to date than has been the case recently, and using a blog tool seemed the obvious way to go. Once upon a time it was very easy to mess around with HTML and upload changes, but now that I do all my web surfing from home, I've found it an increasingly tedious chore, something that involves messing around with two computers, memory sticks, FTP etc - time which could be profitably spent (and usually is) doing something else instead.

Hence this experiment. We'll see how it goes. If I can seamlessly integrate all the existing content of the website into this area, I will - otherwise, the two will happily coexist.  I'm in two minds about the whole "comments" thing - is it a good idea, or a bad one? For now I've left comments enabled but moderated, and (again) I'll see how it goes.

I suppose I should actually post some news, so I'll mention that I'm about half way through the new book, HOUSE OF SUNS, and that while this could not be called a sequel, it shares some of the background and characters with my novella Thousandth Night, which appeared in Gardner Dozois's One Million AD. HOS is set in about 6 million AD, and does not attempt slavish consistency with the novella.