The Science of Fiction

The Gondolier in Italian

2010-02-06T21:13:00.000+07:00

The Gondolier has been published on Italian webzine Intercom SF. This is the 19th language I've been published in, and the 10th for The Gondolier.

Six Story Sales

2010-02-05T20:30:00.003+07:00

As you may have noticed, I like writing flash fiction. In fact I've written 54 stories of less than 1000 words each. When I saw a call for submissions to Daily Flash - 365 Days of Flash Fiction, to be published by Pill Hill Press, I thought it looked like a great anthology.

I submitted the maximum 6 stories, all of which have previously appeared on this blog, and all 6 have been accepted:

Another Year
Blue Men
Grammar
Gone with the Window
Never Talk to Strangers
Prequel

The anthology is due to be published in December, ready for next year.

Magazine Review: Interzone #226

2010-02-03T21:08:00.000+07:00

Issue #226 of Interzone presents the opportunity to vote for the favourite stories of last year. As if to remind you, three of last year’s well-know contributors are back for this issue.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Magazine Review: Albedo One #37

2010-02-03T19:05:00.000+07:00

I like Albedo One – they send the friendliest rejections. It’s a nice looking magazine too with a colour cover and clear interior layout. The majority of space is given over to the fiction with just a few book reviews at the end and an interview at the beginning. It’s an interesting interview with Greg Egan, an author whose work I always enjoy. A generous seven stories pack out the rest of the pages.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Breaking Point by John Macken

2010-02-02T19:02:00.001+07:00

The blurb for Breaking Point by John Macken talks about forensics scientists developing a system to identify future psychopaths from their DNA. This led me to expect something akin to Philip K Dick’s Minority Report, especially as it was received through SF Crowsnest as usual. Before you make the same assumptions, let me point out that this book is not in any way a science fiction novel.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

New Bengali Translation

2010-02-01T18:57:00.003+07:00

The Bengali translation of my Roadmaker story Dog's Best Friend appears on the literary webzine Sonajhuri today. It's a bit tricky to find what you're looking for if you can't read the script. My story is here. I am the first non-Indian writer to appear in the magazine.

This is the 18th language I've been published in - and the first new langauge of the year.

The Gondolier in Galician

2010-01-29T18:34:00.002+07:00

The Gondolier has been published in Galician on Nova Fantasia, the site that last year published Travel by Numbers.

Galician is the 27th langauge for The Gondolier and the 9th language it has been published in.

Reading List

2010-01-26T19:13:00.003+07:00

The BSFA Award shortlist has been anounced, and unfortunately I've not read any of the 4 short-listed novels. I don't see how I'll have tome to read them before April either.

I've read Albedo One #37 and Interzone #226 in the past couple of weeks, as well as At All Costs, the latest Honor Harrington book from David Weber. I say latest, but it seems to be 4 years old. It's taken me that long to get round to it. I've now started Colin Harvey's Winter Song and my contributor copy of Galactika finaly arrived today. That won't take long as I can't read Hungarian.

Lined up I have:

Cherie Priests two books Boneshaker and Clementine, which will be my first steampunk novels
The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, one of my favourite authors
Journeys: Stories by Ian R. Macleod, his forthcoming new collection

Spanish Bibliography

2010-01-22T19:15:00.000+07:00

The Spanish website Tercera Fundacion keeps track of speculative fiction published in Spanish and provides comprehensive magazine and author listings. I have my own bibliography page there.

It only mentions Spain-based publications, not the Spanish stories published in Argentina, but it's a nice reference.

Roadmaker in Spanish

2010-01-20T19:11:00.004+07:00

The Spanish translation of the original Roadmaker story appears in this month's edition of Aurora Bitzine.

This is my second story in Aurora Bitzine and my tenth story in Spanish.

Roadmaker has already been translated into Catalan for Catarsi and accepted by Hebrew webzine Bli Panika.

Just a Novella

2010-01-18T19:12:00.003+07:00

The story I've been writing with Jonathan C Gillespie, Quivira, reached the conclusion this weekend. It totals just over 17,500 words, making it just qualify as a novella. It will shrink below this marker by the time we've edited it, which will be an advantage when we come to look for a home for it.

First New Language of the Year

2010-01-11T20:34:00.000+07:00

A work colleague translated my short Roadmaker story Dog's Best Friend into Bengali, or Bangla, for me last year. The translation has just been accepted by Bangla webzine Sonajhuri and will appear in their February issue. The editor says I will be the first non-Indian writer to appear on the site.

A Fourth Gareth

2010-01-09T18:35:00.001+07:00

Issue #37 of Albedo One contains a story by Gareth Stack - his first published story in fact. This takes the total numner of SF authors called Gareth to 4, as far as I am aware.

- Gareth D Jones
- Gareth Owens
- Gareth L Powell
- Gareth Stack

Of course there may be more. Drop me a line if you're an SF author called Gareth.

Surprisingly there aren't that many authors called Jones, considering it's a pretty common surname.

One More Mention for Roadmaker

2010-01-08T22:40:00.001+07:00

Prolific reader and reviewer Richard Horton provides his annual summary of reading over at The Elephant Forgets. In his round-up of Jupiter magazine he mentions two stories that were also on my list of favourites and gives a mention to my Roadmaker story Dog's Best Friend.

SFF Meta Review Site

2010-01-07T20:21:00.000+07:00

I've discovered a rather fabulous new review webite called SFF Meta. It collates reviews from a growing number of different review sites and gives an average score. Each reviewer has their own page, and it's actually a better summary page than I have here,though only for my more recent reviews that have appeared at SF Crowsnest.

Comparing my reviews with the averages, I seem to be a bit more generous than most. Of course we don't give scores on SF Crowsnest so the SFF Meta people have assigned a score based on the tone of the review. A couple of these are a bit optimistic, but overall I found it a great site.

Magazine Review: Interzone #225

2010-01-06T20:44:00.000+07:00

Adam Tredowski’s run of cover art comes to an end with issue #225 of Interzone. Once again he portrays a scene of fabulous technology imbued with an aura of mystic grandeur. It’s a picture of intricate detail and complexity that bears lengthy scrutiny. Inside the glossy covers the fiction continues to live up to the high standard set in recent issues, with such perennial favourites as Jason Sanford and Lavie Tidhar making welcome appearances.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: The Prisoner by Carlos J Cortes

2010-01-06T19:36:00.000+07:00

Having spent time working on various effluent treatment plants I know something about waste water, drains and even sewers. Not nearly as much as Carlos Cortez has discovered in his research for The Prisoner though. About a third of the book is spent in the sewers beneath Washington DC, where the author’s first-hand experiences shine through in wonderfully varied and graphic descriptions of life beneath the streets.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

2010-01-05T20:34:00.000+07:00

Little did I know twenty years ago when I first became enthralled by The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy that twenty years later I would be completing a review of the entire series to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first book. That sentence may seem rather long and unnecessarily complicated, but its typical of the rambling ideas that Douglas Adams weaves throughout his work. His sentences are usually funnier and more clever than that though.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Magazine Review: Midnight Street #13

2010-01-05T19:31:00.000+07:00

As is the case with many a small press magazine, the editor of Midnight Street has announced that issue #13 is to be the final print edition. Future issues will be in PDF format, but there will also be an annual anthology of original stories not seen in the electronic version. Good news for lovers of the kind of dark speculative fiction that is the speciality of this magazine. It’s a publication with a definite feel to it: a very British, often pessimistic air that experiments with the edges of reality in a subtle but effective way.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Three AM

2010-01-04T21:20:00.002+07:00

The new issue of Golden Visions magazine is now out and contains my story Three AM. The story is set aboard the orbital habitat Astropolis, the setting for my previous stories The Blind Collaborators, Travel by Numbers and Up To My Neck In It.

It's a bit of an experimental story - the same incident told from three different viewpoints. It's a bit of a mundane story that is barely SF except for the setting. I enjoyed working on it though.

A Year of Publications

2009-12-31T18:04:00.001+07:00

The final tally is in – a total of 38 publications this year. I am amazed. Last year was my previous best at 16 publications. This year’s total includes:

7 flash ficiton stories
2 twitter ficton stories
21 translations
15 languages – 11 of them new this year
My 1st anthology appearance
4 reprints
2 reprinted translations
1 non-fiction article

I suspect I won’t be outdoing that next year!

A Year of Writing

2009-12-30T17:53:00.001+07:00

The biggest milestone in my writing this year – in fact the biggest of my writing carrer so far – was the completion of my first novel Roadmaker. I wrote ‘The End’ in March, then after much editing and revising sent it to its first agent in September. After that I started work on my second novel Gap Years and I’m over 10,000 words in so far.

The next biggest project has been Quivira, the story I’m writing in collaboration with Jonathan C Gillespie. It’s just about novella length and almost finished.

Aside from that I’ve written one flash fiction story, two microfiction stories for Twitter and my first three comic scripts. That’s a lot less wordage than usual on shorts, but it’s more than compensated for by the novel-length work.

I still have 5 short story ideas awaiting , so one of them will be starting off once Quivira is wrapped up. Plenty more to do next year then.

Favourite Stories of 2009

2009-12-29T20:49:00.000+07:00

Yes, it's that time again already. By my count I've read 18 SF magazines and 8 anthologies this year. Most of the anthologised stories were from previous years though. I gave up trying to narrow this list down to a top ten a couple of yeas ago, and this year my list of favourites amounts to 13, presented here in chronological order:

Out Of Time by Jack Westlake – Murky Depths #8

Come-From-Aways by Tony Pi – On-Spec #76

Rescue Stories by Andrew West - Focus Fiction Special

Our Man in Herrje by Andrew Knighton – Jupiter #24

Ghosts in the Machine by Ian Whates – The Gift of Joy

Dusting Tycho by Vera Sepulveda – Jupiter #25

Silence and Roses by Suzanne Palmer – Interzone #223

Sublimation Angels by Jason Sanford – Interzone #224

The Festival of Tethselem by Chris Butler – Interzone #224

Palimpsest by Charles Stross – Wireless

White Wall by Tim Nickels – Midnight Street #13

Funny Pages by Lavie Tidhar – Interzone #225

Radio Man, Frequency Woman by Alex Kurnow – Murky Depths #10

International Writing

2009-12-23T20:24:00.003+07:00

I've just got the latest issues of Albedo 1 (OK, it's from October - I'm a little behind). The editorial talks about the lack of opportunities for international authors to be translated into English and outlines a brilliant plan to rectify this.

The editors have already been in contact with magazines from abroad to arrange an annul mutual story-swap. In the case of Albedo 1, the winner of their Aeon Award will be translated into 4 other langauges and published by the other participating magazines. Albedo 1 will be publishing translations from Dutch and French so far. The organisers are hoping to widen this by including other national awards, or where none exist, a story chosen by the editors of a country's 'national magazine'.

What a brilliant idea! You may have noticed that I'm really excited already about translations. I shall be offering all of my knowledge on the subject to the Albedo 1 team.

Pow!erful Tales Reviewed

2009-12-22T20:19:00.002+07:00

Superhero anthology Pow!erful Tales has been reviewed at the prestigious Tangent Online site. Of my story The Ironic Man, the reviewer says:

a cute microstory about market branding and how difficult it is to come up with a superhero name that really captures the essence of the hero.

It's only a brief mention, but then it's only a brief story.