While I continue work on the new novel, just time to mention a couple of new fiction items that are available online for free.
Back in June, I was pleased to be given the chance to write a piece of short fiction for something a bit out of the ordinary. The piece was slated to be part of a scientific press release, centred around the announcement of some exciting work done by astronomers at Queen Mary (University of London). Guillem Anglada-Escude and his team were reporting on a striking discovery in the field of exoplanet studies - the detection of a planet orbiting a relatively nearby star which may be older than most of the stars in the rest of our galaxy. I'd been following this still-young area of astronomy with quite some amazement since my own research days, and the opportunity to build a piece of fiction around this new discovery was a total delight. You can read more about the work, and check out my (very short) story, entitled, "Sad Kapteyn", here:
http://ph.qmul.ac.uk/news/ancient-worlds-around-kapteyns-star
Again, thanks to Guillem and the team for this wonderful opportunity.
Elsewhere, you can, if so inclined, also read a much longer piece. "The Last Log of the Lachrimosa" is a completely new story in the Revelation Space universe, and the first such piece since 2009's "Monkey Suit". I'll say no more other than that I enjoyed the challenge of rebooting the RS universe in my head, and judging by the notes on my PC, there should be one or two more stories along before too long. "Last Log" is online at Subterranean magazine, in their final issue.
Many thanks to the good people at Sub Press for finding room for my piece amid such good company.
http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2014
Incidentally, I'm still undecided about how to move forward with the splitting of content between my two active blogs. So for now, I'll be doing a certain amount of cross-posting.