I am a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Essex. I teach Writing and Understanding Science Fiction to third-year undergraduates and writing the novel for postgraduates on the MA.
Studying a Creative Writing degree at Essex. from University of Essex on Vimeo.
Paul Di Filippo has reviewed The Destructives for Asimov’s Science Fiction.
It’s a good review, insightful, from a critic who knows his stuff. A nice way to end the year.
“What we have here is J. G. Ballard does John Varley, or David Marusek by way of M. John Harrison, with frostings of Philip K. Dick and Peter Watts… If this ingenious and emotion-twanging book is not a strong contender for the PKD Award this year, I shall feel… dismayed.”
My short story ‘The University of the Sun’ is published in the New Scientist. I was tasked with writing something “wilfully seasonal yet completely nuts”. It is accompanied by alluringly strange illustrations by Dave McKean. The story takes place in the same fictional universe as my last novel The Destructives, and explores the working lives of the emergences.
“A CHIME in his office informed him that the third and final candidate had arrived for the test. He kept a physical office in the University of the Sun with a view of the curve of Istor College, and – as the university drifted between the sun and the perihelion of Mercury – a veined sunsky of roiling violet.
Ezekiel was a solar academic specialising in human studies, and he pressed the rituals of humanity – gender, the office, the interview and Christmas – on his fellow emergences at every opportunity…”
Read the rest of the story at the New Scientist
Andy Sawyer has reviewed my two science fiction novels IF THEN and The Destructives for the prestigious Strange Horizons. He writes, “together they make one of the most intriguing and disturbing near-future speculations published for some years.”
I responded to this review because it comes from an experienced and well-considered critic.
According to his Wikipedia entry, he is “the full-time Librarian/Administrator of the Science Fiction Foundation Collection in the Special Collections Department in the Sydney Jones Library at the University of Liverpool, as well as Course Director of the University’s M.A. in Science Fiction Studies program. He also serves as Reviews Editor for Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction.” So it’s no surprise that he begins with review with the influence of Olaf Stapledon upon the two novels, most explicitly in IF THEN, which synthesizes Stapledon’s First World War experience as an ambulance driver with his later superhuman novel Odd John.
Stapledon’s papers are held at the University of Liverpool, and I made liberal use of his war-time correspondence with his fiance Agnes as one of my sources for the war sections of IF THEN. I was particularly struck by his image of a star-shell of an augur for a new age – taking a weapon of destruction as a light for a new age. The paradox of this symbol animates both books. On Tuesday 26th July, at Waterstone’s in Liverpool One, there is going to be a public conversation and reading between myself and Andy Sawyer. Do come along if you are in the North-West.
My third novel The Destructives is out now, published by Angry Robot in the UK and US. The first review was at Strange Alliances, closely followed by positive in-depth coverage from Barnes & Noble. The reviewer Sam Reader writes “The Destructives doesn’t so much subvert expectations as shatter them utterly. It’s dense, but it also moves; it’s both a breakneck thriller and one of the year’s most thoughtful works of science fiction.” The review has the headline ‘Might Be the Most Mind-Boggling SF Novel You’ll Read this Year’. You have been warned.
Also, SFX magazine described The Destructives as “a marvellously written book, whose invention and surprises gain momentum until its boggler of an ending.” Here is a snap of the full review.
Here is RAID71’s cover for The Destructives. It shows Theodore Drown in his sensesuit, exploring the replica of early twenty first century house that is erected in a cavern beneath the university of the moon. The various obscurities of that sentence will become clear when the novel is published by Angry Robot in the UK and US on March 1st 2016.
I wrote a new science fiction short story for Christmas. It’s called Godforsaken and it’s available for free at Barnes & Noble. It takes place in the same world as my science fiction novels.
Of all the archive items the Institute has tagged for my inspection, the diaries and essays of Horace Emmons are the strongest candidate for entry into our shadow history of emergence. Particularly the entries covering the Christmas of 1921.
Emmons was – like myself – a librarian by trade. We share a certain loneliness too, as family men who have chosen to live apart from their families. My solitude, sequestered in the draughty rooms of the Institute, ought to be temporary. Emmons, after abandoning his wife and six children, was intent upon a permanent separation.
In the week before the Christmas of 1921, Emmons was struggling in the aftermath of an unspecified personal crisis. He had left the family home in October to undertake one of his habitual excursions into the Smoky Mountains then chosen not to return. In his diary, he avoids mention of his family. After spending Thanksgiving in the mountains, he notes only that the hunters arrived with leftover turkey in their sandwiches. Only in December does guilt encroach upon the margins of the diary. His day notes show resolve not to return to his family for Christmas Day. But the marginalia are shivering self-recriminations, scrawled and blotted under the dull glow of a campfire. I recognise the thought process, have felt it myself often enough.Nervous dyspepsia, as Emmons puts it. The towns and cities were dry with prohibition. Moonshine came from the stills hidden in the harsh country. The Mountain Dew. Emmons was a gentleman drunk and what he hymned as the call of the wild was, in my opinion, merely the holler of strong liquor.
To read on, click here.
Tor.com is running a brief interview I did with Niall Alexander on the back of the acquisition of my new novel IF THEN by Angry Robot. In it, I explain briefly why there is such a gap in time between first publication of The Red Men and the 2015 publication of IF THEN. I also discuss the image that inspired the novel, and why I wanted to imagine the First World War as science fiction:
Basically I wanted to re-experience the war as a science fiction event, as a monster of technology with an inhuman agency. And I wanted to write post-austerity SF about a disenfranchised and redundant middle class being maintained by an algorithm. Because that was my experience at the time. And wandering the South Downs I had a keen sense—almost a vision, among the sea fret—of a newly-dug trench appearing in the Downland. Science fiction combines the cognitive reasoning impulse with the irrational, dreaming, will-to-strangeness. So I went along with this vision of a long-lost war being recreated by a non-human agency. There comes a point where you just have to get on your hands and knees and crawl deeper into the rabbit hole.
Giddy with excitement, I can announce that publisher Angry Robot have acquired my next two SF novels: IF THEN, for publication in the UK and US in September 2015, and The Destructives in 2016. The full announcement is on the Angry Robot site.
IF THEN is finished and I’m keen to discover what readers make of it. For now, I’m just sharing the synopsis. As publication draws nearer, more cat will be allowed out of the bag.
IF THEN
James has a scar in the back of his head. It’s where he was wounded in the Battle of Suvla Bay in August 1915. Or is the scar the mark of his implant that allows the Process to fill his mind with its own reality?
In IF, the people of a small English town cling on after an economic collapse under the protection of the Process. But sometimes people must be evicted from the town. That’s the job of James, the bailiff. While on patrol, James discovers the replica of a soldier from the First World War wandering the South Downs. This strange meeting begins a new cycle of evictions in the town, while out on the rolling downland, the Process is methodically growing the soldiers and building the weapons required to relive a long lost battle.
In THEN, it is August 1915, at the Battle of Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles campaign. Compared to the thousands of allied soldiers landing on this foreign beach, the men of the 32nd Field Ambulance are misfits and cranks of every stripe: a Quaker pacifist, a freethinking padre, a meteorologist, and the private (once a bailiff) known simply as James. Exposed to constant shellfire and haunted by ghostly snipers, the stretcher-bearers work day and night on the long carry of wounded men. One night they stumble across an ancient necropolis, disturbed by an exploding shell. What they discover within this ancient site will make them question the reality of the war and shake their understanding of what it means to be human…