Wednesday 2 October 2019

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

7 comments:

  1. Excellent stuff Al. I'm currently reading "Oceanworlds" ny JP Landau. Reminds me a bit of your work (grounded in real science and/or current theories on space travel) - especially Pushing Ice my personal favourite of yours.

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  2. Thanks Alastair for the update. I will look into ordering the collection "Made to Order" by Jonathan Strahan. His recent editing of stories for "Mission Critical" was amazing. I also read your story "Different Seas" in "The Best SF of the Year Volume 4" by Neil Clarke and thought it was one of the best stories in the collection. I am looking forward to "Salvation Lost" by Peter Hamilton and of course "Bone Silence". I realise you may not be able to tell us much but what is your next big project ? a stand-alone novel or something else? Thanks!

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  3. Glad you liked Different Seas; I was pleased with that one. I'd rather not say anything about the next project until it's quite a bit more developed.

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  4. Still haven't cracked Permafrost, but will most likely get it when Bone Silence comes out. Looking forward to it.

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  5. Just bought and devoured Permafrost. Excellent. Looking forward to acquiring more of your work! Thanks!

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  6. Is this a new standalone or perhaps a certain machine person's backstory? PS. I couldn't get your Revenger series to click for me but as always I'm looking forward to your new work. 👍

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  7. Looking forward to Bone Silence! I love the look of the cover.

    I'm about to dive into one of the only books of yours I haven't yet read (I've been rationing them), which is "Poseidon's Wake". I remember you saying that one was also a challenge for you (I suppose there might be something inherent to final books in any given sequence that makes them difficult to write). I am very eager to see how you round off that set of novels (which I've really enjoyed).

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