Recent things

I'm pleased to have sold a new story, "Polished Performance", to Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology of robot stories, Made to Order, which will appear in 2020.

Although it's a relatively short 7500 words, it remains the only piece of short fiction I've completed since Permafrost, itself a novella. Once I had Permafrost off my desk, I dived into the third Revenger book, Bone Silence, and that took care of all my writing for the rest of 2018 and a serious chunk of 2019 as well. The novel was delivered earlier in the summer and has now gone through the first
round of editorial revisions. Truth to tell, it was a much harder book to finish than I'd anticipated, especially so given that I thought I was nearly done with it at the end of last year.

My summer reading (other than science magazines) has been sporadic. I very much enjoyed Jonathan Coe's fine Brexit-themed novel Middle England, and I raced through heart surgeon Stephen Westaby's second book of medical essays, The Knife's Edge. In science fiction, I thoroughly recommend Peter Hamilton's forthcoming Salvation Lost, which builds on its predecessor Salvation very successfully, and is properly thrilling and scary in all the right places,  as well as playing on a very expansive and ambitious future canvas.

That's it for now; I'll aim to have more to say about Bone Silence later in the year, but in the meantime I thought a brief status update was better than none at all.

best,

Al R