It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Category Archives: my fiction


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England 3 Scotland 0

Last month, Neil Williamson was bemoaning his lack of productivity in short fiction on his blog, so I proposed a friendly competition to motivate him and myself. For each story we completed and submitted we would score one point. (Resubmissions didn’t count.) And for each story we sold or placed, we would earn another point. The one with the least points at the end of the year would buy the winner a slap-up meal in Glasgow at the 2014 Eastercon.

At the moment, I’m in the lead. With three points. I finished and submitted a story, ‘The Incurable Irony of the Man who Rode the Rocket Sled’, to Rustblind and Silverbright, an anthology of railway-themed genre stories edited by David Rix and to be published by Eibonvale Press, but… Rocket sleds ran on rails, yes, but I knew the link to the theme was tenuous. And so it proved. Which proved a bit of a problem, as I didn’t think the story was really sellable. It’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, has no plot, is only really genre if seen in a certain light, and is far more literary than most genre venues are comfortable with. Happily, The Orphan has taken it for their next issue. And I see from the contents of previous issues that it’s in excellent company.

‘The Last Men in the Moon’, however, is more overtly science fiction, but it’s also quite literary. I really must get that t-shirt printed up: “too literary for genre fiction, too genre for literary fiction”. (Joke.) Happily, literary serial anthology The Fiction Desk has taken it – my second sale to them after ‘Faith’ in The Maginot Line last year. ‘The Last Men in the Moon’ is a bit of a piss-take of sf, and it’s a bit of a deconstruction of the hoary old alien invasion / conquest of the earth trope, and I also get to flatten Sheffield in it.

I describe myself as a science fiction writer, but I’m starting to wonder if what I write really qualifies as sf. But the Apollo Quartet!, you cry. Except, as someone said to me recently, “I’m just waiting for someone to twig that the Apollo Quartet is not hard SF”. And it’s sort of true. The novellas are set in the past, they’re about real space hardware, and the central tropes to date are handwavy things like the Bell and a FTL drive I don’t bother to explain. And then I look at my last few stories to see print and… ‘Faith’ features real named astronauts but inexplicable irrational woo-woo things happen to them (it’s available free here). ‘The Way The World Works’ is set in an alternate 1984 and the ending is in no way science fiction. ‘Wunderwaffe’ is a Nazi / Metropolis / alternate history / time travel mashup, and probably deserves a genre all its own. ‘Dancing the Skies’ is just pure fantasy, with flying monsters and Spitfires. On the other hand, ‘Words Beyond the Veil’ is heartland hard sf, even if it does quote from the lyrics of a death metal album (you can read it here).

I think I write with a sf sensibility, even if what I write isn’t always science fiction. What I read is reflected in my writing, and I read a mix of science fiction and literary fiction. But I admire the prose of the latter more, and so try to emulate that. However, when I try to write straight-down-the-middle sf, I find I can’t do it. It feels… too arbitrary, too ungrounded. It’s not anchored to the real world. Even my fantasies have to be grounded in the real world – Spitfires and Wellingtons and the ATA in ‘Dancing the Skies’, for example.

Or perhaps I write with a literary fiction sensibility, which is why my sf usually turns out to be weak sf. It has been mooted that some of the most interesting science fiction being written these days is being written outside the genre. There are certainly literary fiction novels which use genre tropes that I consider better than most genre novels, like The Road or Girl Reading or Never Let Me Go. I used to think such books felt old-fashioned because their writers didn’t know how to deploy their tropes, didn’t have the experience of practiced sf authors in doing so, but what those literary authors have actually done is make the tropes more accessible.

And that I think is a problem with a lot of modern sf – it’s too abstruse, too much the product of, and for, a private members’ club. I complained, for example, that Leviathan Wakes was regressive, a throwback to the hegemonic space operas of the 1970s, but how many people actually care about that, or know enough about sf and its history to realise it? A small group within the small group that is the readers and fans of science fiction. Which makes me wonder what a space opera written by a literary fiction writer would look like. Not one of Banks’ Culture novels, there’s far too much pure genre in them. Is such a story possible? It would be a wonderful experiment, I think.

I’ve a feeling science fiction as a genre is no longer as willing to experiment as it once was. It’s settled into a happy rut, a happy series of ruts, in which expectation plays a large part – as it does in so much of twenty-first century life. This is a century defined by the management of expectation. Yes, there is stuff that challenges those expectations, but it’s way out on the long tail. And we’re happy with that because it can’t destabilise the centre from there. And yet everything that has destabilised science fiction in the past has made it a stronger, better genre – the New Wave, Cyberpunk, New Space Opera. Even if it did eventually get co-opted by the establishment as it became a core fixture.

It is time, I think, to repudiate science fiction’s core values. We need a New New Wave.


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My trip into space

Well, into the National Space Centre, that is…

I may have been involved in science fiction for 25 years, but I’m relatively new to this “author” thing. I’ve done plenty of panels at conventions, but I’ve never given a reading, and I’ve certainly never spoken about something I’ve written to a bunch of complete strangers who may or may not have come to hear me talk or indeed have any clue who the hell I am.

But that’s what I did last Sunday.

The National Space Centre in Leicester had organised a two-week celebration of “Space Fiction”, beginning on 9 February and lasting until 24 February. I was asked if I’d like to contribute on one of those days as one of the clients of the John Jarrold Literary Agency. Since Adrift on the Sea of Rains and The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself are proper hardcore realistic space fiction books it struck me they’d be well-suited to a reading in the National Space Centre… And so it was arranged: Philip Palmer, Chris Beckett and myself would each give a 30-minute talk/reading on Sunday 17 February.

As you approach the National Space Centre, the first thing you see is a giant pupa pointing up into the sky above Leicester. That’s the Rocket Tower. The rest of the building looks more like something you’d find on a university campus or science park. I’m not sure what I was expecting – something like a museum, I suspect – but it’s far more resolutely modern than my dim memories of visits to museums as a child suggested. I was immediately taken with the Soyuz on display in the main foyer. And it really is a tiny spacecraft. I’d known that, of course – I’ve researched this stuff, after all. But you have to see it in the flesh, so to speak, to realise quite how small and makeshift and fragile it is. The Soyuz is apparently only one of two on permanent display in the West.

I was collected from the foyer by Charlie, who was wrangling the three of us that day. She did an excellent job of looking after us, so much thanks. The actual venue for the talk proved to be a small lecture area just off the main concourse, with rows of benches facing a small stage backed by a large screen. There was another screen above the stage. Most of the National Space Centre is one big open space, partitioned into display areas by walls no more than three metres high, so there was a lot of background noise. But we had microphones.

Phil Palmer’s talk began at 12:15. He talked about science fiction and extrapolation, and it was obviously something he had spoken about before. He then read from both Debatable Space and Hell Ship. The audience was mostly families with small children – about twelve to fifteen people in total. Chris Beckett arrived during Phil’s talk.

Afterwards, we had a thirty-minute gap before Chris’ session started at 13:15, so we went to get a bite to eat from Boosters Restaurant. It was sandwiches and soup, so my face fell when I saw it. I asked one of the staff if they had anything that was dairy-free. He told me they’d make me any sandwich I wanted in a dairy-free version. That level of service and helpfulness still impresses me – it shouldn’t do, not in the twenty-first century; but it’s still unusual enough in the UK to be a pleasant surprise.

Chris’s talk was not as well attended as Phil’s had been. He spoke about rogue planets and how they’d been scientifically proven about he’d written Dark Eden. He also described the inspiration for the novel, and then read one of the chapters.

There was then another thirty-minute gap until my talk at 14:15. Phil had booked a ticket for the planetarium show, so he shot off to that while Chris, his wife Maggie, and myself went for a wander round. We headed for the Rocket Tower, though I was a little worried about suffering from vertigo on the top deck. But I was fine as long as I didn’t get too close to the railing. The LM simulator looked more like a computer game than an actual copy, but the 1960s living-room was good. The three of us recognised several items in it from our own childhoods. There was a piece of moon rock in a globe of the Moon, and one wall gave an illustrated timeline of the Space Race. The next deck down celebrated Soviet achievements, though from what I could see the Soyuz simulator was just a little room with a plastic seat in it. I didn’t linger as I needed to get back to lecture area.

Then it was time for my talk. I’ve not done public speaking since I left school decades ago, and I knew this was going to be nothing like being on a panel at a convention. For one thing, my audience would be just walk-ins, who had likely wandered across to see what was going on. My name will have meant completely nothing to them. (In the event, beside Phil and Chris, at least two members of the audience knew me – Will Ellwood, who I know via Twitter, and Dave Caldwell, who was a member of an APA I was in back in the 1990s.)

As soon as I was ready to begin, I hit my first snag. I only had two hands. I was using a PowerPoint presentation, so I needed to hold the clicker to advance the slides. I also needed to hold a microphone. And then there was the script of my talk, which I hadn’t learned off by heart. Damn. I’d need three hands. Charlie happily lent me her hands-free mike. She then introduced me and I started babbling…

I thought it went quite well. I managed not to speak unintelligibly fast, and I clicked through the slides in mostly the right places. I spoke about realistic space travel and science fiction’s poor record in depicting it, using ocean liners as spaceships rather than actual real spacecraft (such as the Soyuz in the foyer), and how I came to write the Apollo Quartet. I cut down the excerpts from Adrift on the Sea of Rains and The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself I’d planned to read, and that proved to be a wise decision. I finished it pretty much exactly in thirty minutes. And the entire audience stayed throughout the entire talk. Afterwards, a couple of people came up and thanked me and said they had found it interesting.

Phil, Chris and myself then moved across to a table in the main concourse, where people could buy copies of our books and we would sign them. We were actually approached by more people asking for directions than we were people who wanted to purchase our books. But never mind.

It was a fun day. I’d liked to have taken the time to explore the National Space Centre more fully, and I certainly think it’s an interesting place to take children. Personally, perhaps, I’d have preferred more hardware and less science, but that’s what fascinates me. All the same, I could happily spend a day there.

Finally, the last two slides of my presentation were hints to the stories of the final two books of the Apollo Quartet. And here they are…

aq3

aq4


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Going into space

Well, the National Space Centre in Leicester. Which, for a fortnight in February, is putting on a “Space Fiction” special event. Between 9 February and 24 February, a number of authors will be giving talks at the National Space Centre. The full schedule is here.

I’ll be there on Sunday 17 February, with fellow John Jarrold Literary Agency clients Chris Beckett and Philip Palmer. Since Adrift on the Sea of Rains and The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself are your actual bona fide proper hardcore space fiction, I’ll be talking about, and reading from, them. There’ll also be copies available to buy.

I guess I’d better start making notes on what I’m going to say…


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2012 is dead, long live 2013

This happens every year at this time – you look back at the year just ended, remember the good bits and try to forget the bad bits; you look ahead to the year just begun, and try to convince yourself it will be better than even last year’s best bits, or that you have any control over how it will turn out… Shit happens, the road to hell, etc, etc.

Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort, of course. You may not, for example, be able to land yourself a book contract, no matter how wonderful your novel is, but if you don’t write the damn thing you stand even less chance. (Though debut novelists have been offered contracts before writing their novels.)

Likewise, the most reliable method of getting short fiction into print seems to be the Shotgun Method. Write as many stories as you can, submit them as many times as you can… Someone somewhere will usually buy them. Then you too can be ubiquitous, and subsequent sales will get easier.

In other words, Hard Work helps. But there are no guarantees. Certainly short cuts don’t always do the trick. There are stories of self-published authors selling phenomenally well, and subsequently being picked up by big publishing houses. They are in a very tiny minority. Most books published by anyone other than major publishing houses or long-established small presses are ignored. For instance, Rocket Science, published by Mutation Press, received plenty of positive reviews when it appeared back in April 2012. But it is also notably absent from lists of “best anthologies of the year”. I didn’t expect Adrift on the Sea of Rains to make it onto any lists – around 300 people, at a guess, have read it, and none of them were commentators with a large footprint within the genre. New small press… self-published… A not-unexpected result.

I worked quite hard during 2012 promoting those two books, but I suspect my message didn’t travel much beyond my own circle of friends, acquaintances and those I talk to within the genre. That’s as far as my “platform” reaches at present. It grew during 2012 – a little – but that sort of organic growth is too small and too slow to bounce my work to the next level. Because I made a tactical error in 2012: I spent so much time promoting Rocket Science and Adrift on the Sea of Rains, and writing The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, that I didn’t write any short fiction. And I need to do that in order to get my name out there…

So that’s one resolution for 2013. (I suspect it may have also been a resolution for each of the past few years.) I will write more short stories in 2013, I will submit more short stories in 2013. I have a bunch sort of started but far from finished, and I’ll  focus initially on them. Unfortunately, my desire to not write the sort of science fiction currently appearing in genre mags and on genre websites may somewhat limit my chances of success. Take my current work in progress: I was hoping to have it done for 31 December 2012, the deadline for Eibonvale Press’s new railway-themed genre anthology, Rustblind and Silverbright. Have yet to actually finish it. And it’s going to be a hard one to sell. ‘The Incurable Irony of the Man Who Rode the Rocket Sled’ is barely science fiction, and barely has a plot. It’s sort of “magical realism with astronauts” (as my story ‘Faith’ was once described), except it has no astronauts in it.

I do have other stories to work on. Sorry, no exploding spaceships. No spaceships at all, in fact. I have two novellas I’d like to complete – one of them is an expanded version of ‘The Contributors’. There’s also book three of the Apollo Quartet, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above; and possibly book four, All That Outer Space Allows. I have three novel ideas for which I need to write the first three chapters. I’d also like to see if I can do anything with my Nanowrimo effort from 2011.

And that’s just on the writing side. (You do realise, of course, that most of this will go undone, because… things.)

Oh, and I also experimented in 2012 with publishing a limited edition chapbook. It started out as a bit of a joke, but the twelve copies of Wunderwaffe I produced all sold. I then put it up on Kindle, where it has also sold (thought not in huge numbers). I’m planning to do something similar to another of my previously-published short stories, but I haven’t decided which one yet. I might do it to more than one…

On the reading side, I’ll be continuing to review books for SF Mistressworks. In the absence of other regular reviewers – I do have some irregular reviewers, however – I’ll have to read at least one suitable a book a week. That’s going to be a tough schedule to meet. I will need help. Please.

There’s also the TBR, which reached epic proportions several years ago. Over Christmas just gone, for example, I read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and realised afterwards with some embarrassment that I’d bought the book in November 2010. That’s actually not too bad – it’s taken me ten years to read some of the books I own. And that’s despite reading 153 books during 2012 – twelve down on the previous year’s total; in fact, the number has been steadily dropping since 2008. I suspect the number of books I’ve bought each year, however, has been steadily rising…

So, in 2013, I want to read more sf by women writers, more Malcolm Lowry, more Paul Scott, more recent genre books that interest me, more literary fiction… more good books. I also want to read much more genre short fiction. That’s going to be another resolution – to read genre short fiction regularly. But only if it interests me. I’ll happily bail on a story if it’s not working for me. But by the end of the year, I should at least be able to make some informed choices for the BSFA Award. I’ll also be including a top five of short fiction in my end of the year round-up post.

I’ll not bother with resolutions for films or music. Each year, I try to get to at least one gig a month. I don’t always make it, but by year’s end I’m usually not far off. For the record, it was 11 gigs in 2012, including Bloodstock. The best one should have been Anathema and Opeth in Leeds in November, but the venue was awful – over-packed and over-heated – and ruined the experience. Insomnium and Paradise Lost back in April might be the best, or perhaps it was local bands Setsudan and Northern Oak supporting Evil Scarecrow in October.

There’s no point in resolving to go to the cinema more often, because I only go if there are films I really want to see being shown. There were three in 2012, which is something of a record for me – at least since I left the UAE, where I lived just around the corner from an excellent cinema. There might be one or two movies I’d be willing to shell out £13 to see in IMAX 3D in 2013, but we’ll have to see. I will, however, continue to watch DVDs by my favourite directors, as well as trying new ones – mostly foreign-language, of course. And the really good films, I will write about here…

…Because I will continue to blog. I don’t think I could stop, to tell the truth. Posting once or twice a week is a good schedule to keep, but I suspect I won’t be able to maintain that level. I didn’t in 2012. This year, I’ll retire the Rocket Science News blog, since it’s served its purpose. It’ll stay up, but I won’t post to it anymore. Besides I have enough on with this blog, SF Mistressworks, the Whippleshield Books blog, and my Space Books blog (which I really must post to more often). I’ll remove the sf poetry blog – and perhaps work on some of the poems from it and start submitting them. I’ve only had two poems published to date, I really should start sending out more.

2012 was a bit of a convention-going year for me, although more by accident than design. Lavie Tidhar persuaded me to attend the SFX Weekender in February in Prestatyn. Much fun was had. Then there was the Eastercon in Heathrow, where I launched Rocket Science and Adrift on the Sea of Rains and nearly won the BSFA Non-Fiction Award for SF Mistressworks (it’s still eligible, by the way). Shortly after that, it was alt.fiction in Leicester, then Edge-Lit in Derby, and in November, Novacon in Nottingham. I’m not planning to attend as many cons in 2013.

Outside of genre and literature and music and cinema, 2012 was a bit meh. Some family issues were resolved. I spent Christmas in Denmark yet again, and saw some snow on the first day – but it rapidly disappeared and the weather remained wet and drizzly and dull. Santa brought me some books I want to read and some DVDs I want to watch. Oh, and some socks. The food was good, the visit to Louisiana, a modern art museum, was fascinating, and much as I hate Christmas it was a pleasant way to spend it…

And there you have it. 2012 is dead, long live 2013. I’m hoping it’ll be a good year, but it’ll be what it’ll be. That’s the way it works, you know. Life. Huh.


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Artistic license reviewed

I review books – for Interzone, for Vector, for SFF Chronicles (though not as often as I should), for SF Mistressworks, for Daughters of Prometheus, even here on my blog. I have been reviewing books since the late 1980s.(My first published review was of CJ Cherryh’s The Tree of Swords and Jewels in the BSFA’s review magazine, Paperback Inferno, in October 1988. I vaguely recall not liking the book.) I am not a critic, nor do I consider my writings about books to be criticism. I leave that kind of in-depth analysis to those who have the necessary tools to do it.

I have also been on the receiving end of reviews – more so this past year than in any other. In two capacities: as the writer of the text being reviewed, and as the editor of the book under review. On the whole, it’s been very informative. I knew when I wrote Adrift on the Sea of Rains that it was atypical and possibly difficult. I suspected its appeal was limited. Happily, it seems to have transcended that and the vast bulk of reviews have been positive and very complimentary. Many of them have also been quite insightful, pulling out things I’d hadn’t realised I’d consciously put in the story. But that’s what happens with good reviewers.

Which is not to say that good reviewers can sometimes get it wrong. Martin McGrath felt Dan Hartland’s review of his story in Rocket Science on Strange Horizons missed an important point, and so he responded to it in a blog post. Dan’s review is, in the main, a good, insightful review. I think it’s clear he and I differ on what science fiction is and needs to be – for one thing, I don’t feel Rocket Science is “weirdly old-fashioned”. If anything, the current fashion for hand-wavey sentimental sf harkens back to an older form of the genre, although the current form is generally far better written. Dan also comments on diversity in his review, pointing out that only five of the twenty-two contributors to the anthology are female. Rocket Science was open submission, so there wasn’t much I could do about that. But it’s bending the point a little to present the contents as being wholly male-centric, especially when the review fails to mention, for example, Deborah Walker’s ‘Sea of Maternity’, a story about a single mother and her unruly teenage daughter. In point of fact, as this post shows, 23.53% of the stories featured female protagonists.

But that’s a minor quibble, and I think Dan’s review of Rocket Science is a good and useful review.

Which is more than can be said for this review of Adrift on the Sea of Rains…

Yes, there is a typo on the first page of the book: “sussurus” should be “susurrus”. There’s nothing I can do about that in the paperback and hardback editions. I’ve not bothered fixing it in the ebook edition, but I will do when I publish the second book of the quartet, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself. Typos happen, and while I should have caught that one, it did slip by a lot of other people as well.

I can understand someone having trouble with the prose style of Adrift on the Sea of Rains – no quotation marks! – and as a result not liking it. And so bailing before finishing it. I can comprehend a reader finding the subject not to their taste and so choosing not to read to the end. But, come on, giving up after a page because there are three (far from wildly obscure) words you don’t understand? That’s no excuse.

And to further suggest that it’s bad craft is insulting.

I do not believe in dumbing down my prose. I am not writing for people with limited vocabularies. I am writing for intelligent adults, because that’s what I consider my peers to be. I will not insult the intelligence of my readers because, as a reader, I loathe writers (or film-makers) who insult my intelligence. I may not always be successful in communicating precisely what I intended to communicate, but recasting it in words of one syllable is not a solution. I like writing “difficult” fiction, just as much as I enjoy reading “difficult” fiction. That difficulty, to my mind, adds value. It’s not just some slick superficial entertainment, but also something that makes you think, makes you reconsider your views and knowledge. Science fiction is particularly well-suited to that task – though the bulk of it fails to do more that bolster existing prejudices. I write about things that interest me and try to shine a new light on them. I don’t do “idea”. In fact, I’m becomingly increasingly convinced that the focus on idea is what continues to cripple science fiction. As long as you privilege idea, your fiction will not be taken seriously outside genre circles. And success within the genre is a poisoned chalice…

Science fiction is a small field, struggling to survive within the shadow cast by its history. There is also a very large elephant in the room of science fiction. (And I’m mixing metaphors, but never mind.) Past masters continue to provide topics within the genre conversation, despite no longer being relevant, of generally poor quality, and less available than in the past. Media sf is so popular the entire genre is believed to be the same as it – but science fiction is far from homogeneous. The sf works which receive general acclaim these days are ones that are not published as sf. Far from breaking down the walls of the ghetto, the tools of sf have leaked out but most of the readers and writers have refused to leave. This is not a healthy state of affairs.

There have been attempts in the past to re-engineer science fiction. While each ultimately failed, they did shift the genre in its course a little. Myself, I’d like to see science fiction stripped back to its roots and rebuilt for the twenty-first century, but that’s never going to happen. People are too happy with their tropes, no matter how old they are or how little sense they make in the current day.

I wrote the first two books of the Apollo Quartet as science fiction, and I set up Whippleshield Books as a science fiction small press. I consider myself a writer who writes in a sf mode. I use science fiction in my writing, I don’t actually write science fiction.

Perhaps the difference exists only in my head, but it’s enough for me.

EDIT: the review of Adrift on the Sea of Rains was also posted on Amazon.com with the heading “Artistic licence revoked!”. Hence, er, the title of this post… But I see now that’s he’s changed it… And reduced it to one-star. Yay, my first one-star review!

EDIT 2: “JL Dobias” has removed the “review” of Adrift on the Sea of Rains from his blog, so the link now points at some random blog post on “Gee Wiz” and “Wiz Bang” sf. The review on Amazon has also been removed, and the Goodreads review has been rewritten and now gives the book three stars rather than the original one. Dobias has thoroughly covered his tracks, so now only his comments here on my blog – all of which were from an email address belonging to a “Luci” – are all that remain of the whole farce. Given my dealings with Jerry/Luci, I suggest they’re best avoided.


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Nazi super science!

For those of you who fancy something a little different to read, I’ve published my story Wunderwaffe on Amazon for the Kindle. It originally appeared in the anthology Vivisepulture, edited by Andy Remic and Wayne Simmons, and published by Anarchy Books in December 2011. Lavie Tidhar wrote a very nice review of Wunderwaffe on his blog here.

Oh, and it’s very cheap – a mere 77p from Amazon UK and only $1.25 from Amazon US.

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Did we get there?

Peter Tennant has reviewed Where Are We Going?, edited by Allen Ashley and published by Eibonvale Press, in Black Static #31. The anthology contains my bathypunk story, ‘The Way The World Works’, and Tennant says of it:

“… the story beguiling with its elaborate build up and the mythic resonances attendant upon its final revelation, but having arrived at his destination Sales doesn’t seem to know what to do and so the story fizzles out with the literary equivalent of an actor knowingly winking at the audience. It felt anti-climatic.”

It’s always fascinating to see what other people make of your fiction. To me, the last line was the story’s payload. Nor do I believe in neatly-tied up endings – see Adrift on the Sea of Rains, for example. But I can’t control how people read my fiction; and a story’s success lies as much in how people read it as it does in how well I’ve written it; if not more so.


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Another visit to the Red Planet

Jupiter XXXVIII: Pasithee is now out and features six excellent short stories, and a small poem by Yours Truly. The poem is titled ‘Rainbow Mars’ and is chock full o’references to the Red Planet of fact, fiction and myth.

It’s worth getting hold of Jupiter. It’s published some very good fiction over the years, and has maintained an enviably regular publishing schedule.


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99 shades of grey

Who needs BDSM when you can have CSM or LM? Who needs fifty shades of grey when you can have so many more shades? Just look at the photo below. That’s the Moon, that is.

And that’s where Adrift on the Sea of Rains, the first book of the Apollo Quartet, takes place. Copies are still available – in paperback, hardback, epub, mobi, or on Kindle in the UK and US. Go on and buy yourself a copy. It’s competitively-priced and it’s very good (see here).

This has been a blatantly commercial post brought to you by Whippleshield Books. Normal service will resume shortly.


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Whippleshield updates

Whippleshield Books continues in its mission to take over the world, although at its current rate this may take a millennium or two. At present, I could probably afford a couple of pebbles from the beach on the desert island where I plan to build my secret hideout in an inactive volcano…

Book two of the Apollo Quartet, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, is coming along. Back at the beginning of July, I posted a blurb on the Whippleshield Books blog here. And at the beginning of this month, I posted the first 500 words as a teaser – see here. This book is  turning out to be a bit more ambitious than Adrift on the Sea of Rains. I’ve yet to decide if that’s good or bad, but it’s certainly resulted in more research than I’d expected.

Book three might be titled Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep (Above My Head For Ever). It’s a bit unwieldy, even without the part in brackets, so it could change. For the record it’s from a Homeric Hymn to Apollo. And it does sort of fit the plot. I’ve not started writing it yet, but I like to have a title as a focus for when I do begin. Even if I decide on a different title later…

The title for book four, however, is definitely fixed. It will be All That Outer Space Allows. One of my favourite films is Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, which is why I chose it. At least it’s not a Lowryesque title like books two and three.

I have also published the first in what I hope will be a series of extremely limited chapbooks. The story Wunderwaffe was originally published in the e-anthology Vivisepulture published by Anarchy Books, and was described by Pornokitsch as “exceptional”. There are only a dozen copies available. Or rather, there were. I’ve sold some already. If you want one, get in there now.

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