On the Clarkes and Sci Fi London

Richard Morgan is the worthy winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2008, for his blistering and complex thriller Black Man. I found it gripping and evocative, with a dangerously bad hero who at the start of the story makes a living hunting down mutants known as variant 13s...even though he himself is a variant 13.

But what happened to variants 1 through 12 I wonder? Is there a sequel about them?

Richard gave a very honest and sweet and funny acceptance speech, and walks away with a cheque for £2008, and much kudos.

The award ceremonies were held as part of the Sci Fi London season, and we were greeted by a host of Star Wars characters including a scary Darth Vader and a scantily attired Princess Leia.  I got a chance to meet all the people I only just left behind at the Alt Fiction Festival (oh Lord, it's not Palmer again), and I also had time for a longer chat with the very likeable fantasy writer Stephen Hunt.  As many of you know, he's a real multi-tasker - he writes epic fantasy novels, founded and still presides over the sf crowsnest website and has a demanding day job in the private equity sector.

I also had a chance to tell Ken Macleod how much I admire and love his Execution Channel.  For me, it's a 'stayer', one of those books that stays with you long after you've read it, as you think back on the ideas and the themes. 

After several hours of mingling and sipping (ha! sipping! who am I trying to fool?!) wine, I then rashly went on to watch one of the films in the Sci Fi Festival, Marc Caro's intriguing and allegorical Dante 01.  I found it beautifully shot, with amazing French actors, and full of great moments. But I have to confess that, after watching Battlestar Galactica with all its fabulous action scenes and varied alien planets, I do now find it hard to watch an SF yarn set on a spaceship which hardly ever gets out of the standing set. 

Still, there' s a great finale, and Caro has a magical way with the camera.

Before the big film, we had a sneak preview of the new Batman movie, with a trailer which has been scratched and defaced and mucked about with by the Joker.  This was just so cool....

On Alt Fiction

I've just returned from Alt Fiction in Derby, and I can't beat Brian Ruckley's hilarious and lyrical account of the goings-on there, and on the way there, and on the way back.

Brian and I both read excerpts from our respective works in a Mass Book Launch, with Stephen Hunt and Simon Spurrier.  This was a smorgasbord of fiction fare, ranging from heroic epic fantasy (Brian and Stephen) to neo-noir (Simon's novel about a hitman whose victims keep coming back to life) to whatever Debatable Space might be.

I also did a panel on screenwriting with Graham Joyce and Michael Marshall Smith which was wild and excitable and I hope informative. 

Darren Turpin and Sam Smith, Orbit honchos both, were in attendance, and I was delighted to share a dinner table with Mike Carey, who is currently writing the X Men and working for Sci Fi Channel, and is hence officially the Jammiest Beggar around. 

Alt Fiction is currently funded by Derby City Council and we're all hoping they continue to give their support to the event in future years - it's clearly a huge success and deserves to thrive.

I've come away with a pile of books by authors who I met and admire, and will be reading Brian's Winterbirth, Graham Joyce's Smoking Poppy, Simon Spurrier's Contract and Tony Ballantyne's Recursion as soon as possible.

Apart from the sheer joy of socialising with so many smart and entertaining people, this was a forum for ideas to be thrown around, and insights to be gleaned.  I came back with my head exploding with ideas for new stories, and a yearning to write some fantasy and horror as well pursuing my core passion, hard but quirky sf....

On Eagles That Fly

I found this hilarious and touching - it's Kate Elliott explaining where she got her 'Big Idea' for her Crossroads series, on John Scalzi's Whatever site.

Among the highlights of this piece is a wonderful evocation of a marriage which began with a  double kill.

I haven't read Kate's work yet - but after reading this delightful blog-essay from her, I really have to...

On the Raw Shark Texts

On the 30th April the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best SF novel published last year will be announced, at a ceremony held in tandem with the London Science Fiction Festival. 

This year's shortlist has attracted some controversy, since, as well as works by established masters like Ken McLeod and Richard Morgan, it includes a number of book which aren't obviously SF at all.  Some in the biz have argued that the judges have passed over some excellent candidates for the shortlist in favour of more 'literary' fare. (My own agent, John Jarrold, has argued this pithily, and with his usual authority - he's read every book on the shortlist, plus every single SF novel that he feels should have been on the shortlist.

I'm not so well read, so I'm attempting to educate myself by reading some of the novels on the shortlist that might otherwise have passed me by.  I have Sarah Hall's The Carullan Army on my shelf; and I've just finished reading Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts, which I thought was delightful and funny and often very moving.

But is it SF?  Hall himself argues, very sweetly, that he's happy for it to be called SF, because it's not for him to tell the reader how to read it.  That's a devastatingly good and wise argument. 

Being a genre nerd, however, I love to have things more firmly pigeonholed than that.   Dammit, Steven, stop being so fair-minded!

And for my money, though I loved it, I don't think of Hall's book as an SF novel.  Because I didn't, ultimately, believe a word of it, and I don't think I was meant to.

And what I mean by saying this is that for me SF is a genre that demands total suspension of disbelief. However silly the story elements may be (dilithium crystals, Barsoom, Stargazer aliens, variant 13s, um, flame beasts, etc) we, the SF readers, like to believe it might all be true.  We will forgive occasional science cheats, and plot cheats, and even moments of utter absurdity; we'll forgive almost anything really, if we're enjoying the read. But when I journey into outer space, or inner space, I want to believe I'm really going there...

Hall's novel, however, is much more postmodern than that.  It's a book which requires to believe its story; and also to disbelieve it.  It's overtly metatextual, as some literary theorists might say.  And it's very much in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges - the writer of wonderful metaphysical conceits - and Paul Auster, the postmodern crime novelists who is referenced several times, rather than the tradition of Heinlein and Asimov and Reynolds and Grimwood and Macleod and Hamilton and Macdonald, who all wrote about or write about worlds they believe in.

To explain what I mean, I have to talk about the plot of Hall's book so

BEWARE!!! PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!

The Raw Shark Texts is about a man called Eric Sanderson who wakes up and doesn't know who he is.  A psychologist explains he is suffering from amnesia, induced by pscyhic trauma after the tragic death of his girlfriend Clio. But then Eric gets a note from his former self (the First Eric Sanderson) explaining that he, Eric Two, is being stalked by an actual monster called a Ludovician Shark, which is a creature that exists in the n-dimensional realm of ideas. 

There's some science to justify this - on the basis that life is a hardy little bugger and can evolve in the strangest of places. So why can't it evolve in the realm of ideas????  As Eric 1 explains to his later self:

     The animal hunting you is a Ludovican. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause  and effect....The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on   human memories and the instrinsic sense of self.

 This is superb; but for me, it's also knowing, defiantly metaphorical, and not intended to be believed literally. And I like that aspect of the storytelling.  The hero travels through a tunnel made of books - well which of us hasn't, metaphorically?  And he is almost killed by a conceptual fish - as his personality is unpicked because of his deep grief at the tragic death of the woman he loved.  And again, the postmodern strings are showing, as the novel reveals itself to be 'really' about something other than what it seems to be about.

But, by contrast, a similiar but totally science fictional piece would be Eric Brown's masterful short story The Time-Lapsed Man.  I won't plot-spoil this one, but I would just say that, though the premise is utterly absurd, just as absurd as the notion of the Ludovician shark, the writer made me believe it was true for the duration of my reading.  And of course, because I believe the story is true, I care.

Having said all this, I have to quickly add that if anyone wants to argue that Hall's book genuinely is science fiction, I'd be happy to give that view credence, and shelf-room, and indeed to argue the point over a pint or two, since that's always a good way of enlivening a pint or two.  It's not for me to be the Ferryman on the River Charon, deciding who and who shouldn't get across. 

But my only anxiety is that any lover of SF who reads this book expecting to have a science fictional experience might be disappointed.  It doesn't, in my view, deliver as SF; but it does deliver as what it is, a tour de force piece of lunatic idea-spinning which is full of gags and has some of the most tender love scenes I've read in a long time.

I guess the judges' aim is to challenge our preconceptions about what is and isn't modern SF. I argued in another blog that Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods isn't, in fact, an SF novel, though some claim it is.  (On this score, I'm as one with Winterson, who witheringly refuses the SF label.)

But my point really is to passionately stress and affirm the common purpose of pretty much all the SF that I've ever enjoyed - namely, an underlying respect for rationality and of the ideas and sense of wonder which underly the scientific enterprise.

I may be wrong, however, in my opinions on this book. I may in fact be destined to become the next victim of a conceptual shark that swallows up all my ideas and memories and leaves me gibbering, and indeed, in much the state I was in on the morning after the last Eastercon.

But I would strongly recommend The Raw Shark Texts to anyone who wants a rollercoaster ride through the realm of ideas.  (And I hope my plot spoilers don't give away too much - it's no more than is explained on the back cover.)

On Eastercon

Bella Pagan has written a lovely piece about her experience at Eastercon...which include getting lost in those scarily winding corridors at the Renaissance Hotel.  I had a wonderful time also, and I'm left with a number of rich memories that will stay with me:

 - drinking too much wine with John Jarrold, Darren Nash and Bella Pagan, and hearing John sing a medley of songs from Guys and Dolls;

- marvelling at Charles Stross talking about the future, in his Guest of Honour Speech, with such effortless articulacy and attention to detail and casual charisma;

- listening spellbound to Neil Gaiman reading from his new novel, about a little orphan boy raised by ghosts;

- meeting the wonderful and very charming Tanith Lee, who is astonishingly young considering she's written nearly 100 books. Tanith admits that her writing method involves very little planning, and few revisions; her process is more like the 'channelling' experienced by a medium who is possessed by spirits than mere humdrum writing. 

It's rare to meet so many engaging people in such a short space of time; and (as an avid reader of SF who has never been to a convention before)  a pleasure to so quickly become part of that science fiction community.  I'm looking forward to the next Eastercon already.

Ariel in Orbit

Great news for Ariel, the webguy who is the mentor and designer of this site...He's now been hired by Orbit in a senior capacity as a Marketing Executive, in recognition of his book-selling experience and exceptional online expertise. 

And, over and above all else, Ariel aka Darren Turpin is a man who knows and loves his science fiction.

It's nice to see the good guys doing so well...

Meet the Author?

I'm thrilled to say that today (Sunday March 23rd) Debatable Space is Book of the Day on the Meet the Author site. 

And after today, if you google me you'll see a clip of my interview in which I say various things.

Festivals Galore

I'm off to Eastercon this weekend, for what promises to be a fabulous convention.  Two of my favourite writers - Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee - are Guests of Honour - and I notice that the magnificent and prolific Charles Stross will also be attending.  My agent John Jarrold, a veteran of Worldcons and Eastercons, will also be there.  I'm new to the SF convention experience, but I expect to be a duck impacting water. 

And in fact, from now on my year appears to be cluttered with festivals and conventions - I'm on a panel at Alt. Fiction in Derby, with the gifted Stephen Gallagher, and then in May I spend a week in Cannes, for the Film Festival.

And between those two events comes another great festival, which I would like to shamelessly pimp - the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film.    If you can get to London do check it out.

Now I need to find some time to actually write novels.  

Don’t Give up the Day Job, Phil

There's a great site called Meet the Author in which you can watch clips of your favourite writers talking about their books.  It features Gregory Maguire singing the title of his new book, Son of  a Witch; and among the SF writers, my favourite clip features a barnstorming performance from Iain M. Banks.

I went along on Friday of last week to do my own 'piece to camera'.   Strangely, I wasn't too nervous, largely because these days I never have time to get nervous (I used to spend days, nay weeks, getting nervous about things! Ah, happy times.) 

And, though I'd mentally prepared a few things to say, I hadn't managed to write anything down. I thought, what the hell, I'll busk it. And, to my own considerable surprise, I began calmly, and spoke fluently, and didn't forget anything I wanted to say when suddenly

 Nothing.

My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried'.

The very nice camera guy then explained I was way over length anyway - the ideal time for these things is 2 minutes, and I'd already passed the 6 minute mark, with footnotes and a prose poem sketch of my experiences running in Crystal Palace Park. So I gulped, resolved to be less verbose, and started again.

This time, I'm glad to say, I was far more economical. I got through about a minute and half's worth of chat effortlessly and then

Nothing.

My brain emptied. My throat wouldn't work. I totally 'dried', for the second time.

This, have to say, is the moment when I realised when I could never be an actor.  It's not just that I don't look right, and I can't act, and I get embarrassed in public, though those are major handicaps. It's my brain. It doesn't remember the end of things. 

     To be or not to be, that is the

Um? What comes next?

That would be me.

Interestingly, the art of classical rhetoric was very much concerned with the art of memory. Greek orators used to memorise their speeches by associating each section with their living room, as part of a visual mnemonic system. You start with the door, move across to the sofa; and when you reach the main part or 'focus' of your argument, you're at the fireplace. (The word 'focus' comes from the Greek word for 'hearth', for precisely this reason.)

I've never learned any such rhetorical tricks; I relied on luck to get my through, and luck failed me miserably.

By this point, furious and battle-scarred, I wanted to start the whole thing again; but the camera guy just got me to carry on from where I'd stopped.  His plan is to edit it together seamlessly, but I'm convinced you'll be able to see a few seconds of dead air, and a panic-stricken writer with a fish-eye stare who has clearly had his data banks wiped.

In the interests of my own public mortification, I'll post a blog to say when the interview has gone online. 

On Heroes

I recently attended the last in this year's SPARKS workshops up in Yorkshire.  It's been six months of intensive work with 3 bunches of writers.  My lot were developing TV series, and a damned good job they did too. And the other groups were working on feature projects, creating a wonderfully diverse range of projects.

I did a brief talk on one of my favourite shows, Heroes. Not everyone loves this show (Jeff Somers is agin it, and he's someone whose opinions I very much respect) but I find it exhilarating and fresh and, damn it all, wonderful.  But, as is always the way, when you have to teach a movie or a TV series,  you look at it with fresh eyes.

And what I discovered about Heroes, on a second viewing with notepad in hand, is how much of it is not great; and how little that matters. 

The stuff that's not great is, really, all the voiceover narration by the Mohinder character. On first hearing, it seems fine; but when you listen again, and focus in on the content - well, it's so much tripe really. It's all platitudes and generalisations, and doesn't advance the story. (And of course, almost all the of the 'science' that Mohinder spouts in his actual dialogue scenes is, um, pretty dodgy.)

And yet, this doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter because Mohinder's voiceover is there for a complex and subtle reason, and not because the narration is needed to move the story.  It was added, in fact, in post-production, always a sign of a panic last measure; and what it does is add style. 

There's a scene in Ep 3, which I screened, in which the Nikki character is burying some bodies in the desert.  (If you want to know why, you need to watch it.) It's classic thriller stuff, well shot admittedly, but very much the kind of scene you might get in any crime show.  So it could easily look, well, B movieish, or cheap tellyish.

But when the scene is played out with actor Sendhil Ramamurthy's beautifully spoken voiceover on top of it, it becomes special, and evocative, and stylised.  It's more than a woman burying bodies; it's a scene of sublimity and pathos.

This is one of the great tricks of the show; everything is stylised,  enhanced, 'more so.'  The colours are richer than life, with yellows and oranges and browns and fabulous set designs, and Indian streets stalls selling brightly coloured fruit, and shockingly bold shirts, and vividly rich lighting.  And the angles are cleverly chosen, bold and striking and disorienting, the shots develop swiftly and in a complex way, and every single shot has a three dimensional quality (something in the foreground, something in the background, something in the mid-ground, so the eye is constantly tantalised and entertained.) 

And the voiceover adds a whole level of stylisation on to this; it makes us aware that what we are watching is meant to be thought provoking and idea provoking and assumption provoking.  The voiceover teaches us how to 'read' what we are watching, in other words.

But Mohinder's prose, as I say, is painted on with a very broad brush; I have a feeling, really, that it was written in a hurry.  But I'm not carping, just observing; and the narration is spoken so beautifully that it's a pleasure to hear it, even if I often don't bother listening to it.

And I came away once more confirmed in my belief that American TV series are better than their British counterparts because they really really care about style, as much as they care about content.  Every great American show has its own visual aesthetic, its own style rules - from the jerky camera movements of NYPD Blue to the staccato explorations of urban New Jersey in The Sopranos, to the lush malice implicit in the cinematography of Desperate Housewives. Whereas British shows tend to be shot in one of two ways; cinematically (if it's high budget telly) and cheaply (if it's factory telly.)  But there's no real attempt to do what movie directors to - to create a unique visual look.  (Compare Spielberg's Minority Report, with Spielberg's ET, and compare them both to Spielberg's Schindler's List - they represent three totally different directorial 'looks'.)

After my brief talk to the SPARKS group,  we did a question and answer session, and it quickly emerged that Heroes  is a show which has really captured the imagination of almost all the writers present.  It's Marvel comics merged with prime-time US TV storytelling skills (Stan Lee even has a cameo as a coach driver.)  And it is, I would argue, one of the most visually beautiful TV shows ever made.

Later in the course of this residential weekend, we had a screening of the classic British film The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp, one of Powell and Pressburger's most outrageous, and funny, and satirical, and thought-provoking films. It features a very different type of hero - a moustachio'd Colonel Blimp who appears in the first scene as a figure of fun, and emerges after the film has told his story, as a man of romance, passion, and integrity, and heroism.  It's a homage to an old fashioned kind of British hero.

There are plans for another SPARKS workshop next year; I hope very much to be involved in it. 

On Jumper

Great film! See it.

Imagine if you could travel anywhere, whenever you wanted.

It's that simple really. A science fiction extrapolation of the back-packer's wanderlust.  You can travel to London, Rome, and Egypt - and still be home in time to watch your favourite show on telly.

There are villains, rather good ones, if dubiously motivated; and Samuel L. Jackson plays a bad guy with a scary haircut. But the real conflict is between two Jumpers, who bicker and end up having a fist fight that zaps exhilaratingly from location to location.

It's a film that has no resonance, and leaves no lasting insights or profundities in the mind. It's just - zap - zap - zap - great fun.

On Eating Elephants, and Ketos

A while ago, I quoted Karen Miller's wonderful Book Swede Quote of the Week about the eating of elephants - her way of describing the process of how to write vast, panoramic, multi-character novels, by eating the elephant a bite at a time. 

I love these wise words; and I've had reason to recall them while working on my own vast, panoramic, multi-character epic Ketos.  The process of writing it has been fantastic, I've had wonderful responses to early drafts I've sent out to friends, but I'm way behind schedule.

Munch, munch.

This means, unfortunately, that Ketos  is not going to ready for a 2008 slot as originally planned.  But I'm glad to have more time to work on it and let it grow.  And I reassure myself by reading the acknowledgements pages of other big books which were delivered late.  Richard Morgan admits that the writing of Black Man took him past several deadlines; Neil Gaiman admits the same about American Gods.  So I'm in good company.

I'm also aware of the terrific importance of editors in this whole writing process.  I've worked with great editors and producers in television (Zanna Beswick and Archie Tait to name but two) and at Orbit, I'm lucky enough to have, in Tim Holman, an editor of great wisdom and rigour and, dash it all, he's very nice too.  He loved Debatable Space and I always admired the fact that he never tried to tame it or make it more 'ordinary'. And he's been highly supportive of the various not-there-yet drafts of Ketos he's had to plough through (if you've never read a writer's rough draft, trust me, it can be a painful experience!)  What's more, his notes have been insightful and superb.  But I did take the hint when, in giving his notes on the last draft, he very kindly said, 'I'm confident this will be absolutely wonderful, Philip, when it's, um, finished.'

Oops.

So it's more work from Palmer on this one!  In order to get it to the point where it looks as if it was written with no effort whatsoever.  And, at Tim's savvy suggestion, I'm now multi-tasking, having started work on the book that was originally meant to come after Ketos. It's called Red Claw, it's a thriller, and an exploration of what it is to be a scientist, and I'm having the most wonderful time writing it. 

The reason for doing two books at once is that, to be honest, it keeps both novels fresh.  There usually comes a point in writing a novel or script when you get jaded, and have to put it aside for a week or two, or even a month or two, then go back to it when your brain is clear again and it all looks new and shiny, and the flaws are easy to spot. So this way, I can balance the downtimes of the two projects nicely; it's like being on a spaceship with two rockets.

Interesting, Lilith Saintcrow also uses this approach; her novels are published one at a time, but she admits that she wrote her first Dante Valentine stories almost simultaneously.

So next year, expect Red Claw and Ketos to start jostling for position in the bookshops. 

Ideally, I'd love Red Claw to come out first, giving me a bit more time to bite chunks of elephantine Ketos. 

And although, quite deliberately, I haven't attempted to write a trilogy, I do hope that together the three books will add up to more than the sum of their parts.  They show different visions of the Cheo's universe, they span a range of styles from tragedy to comedy, and for all the similarities and shared content that will exist between them, they represent three different ways of writing a science fiction novel.

As readers of this blog will know, I love variety in writing - and I hope all three books will give readers a similar buzz, but will also stimulate with their quality of difference. 

On Cloverfield

Was the hype worth it?  Is Cloverfield as scary as its trailer?  (I was blown away when I first saw those wild hand-held camera images  culminating in the head of the Statue of Liberty crashing to earth.)

Pretty much, I'd say. Cloverfield is great scary action, and has one nail-biting sequence that had my vertigo working overtime. I once walked up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and was appalled at how nauseous it made me feel - because of the lean, up and down didn't feel right and I was convinced I was falling.  The Rescue Scene in  Cloverfield had a similar effect on me.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie - it's brief, exciting, and exceptionally well shot.  But I found in the end I resisted the central conceit - the idea that the whole movie we're watching is actual footage from a DV camera held by one of the characters.  I'm not normally slow to withold my suspension of disbelief; but this was a step too far for me.  A monster (no plot spoiler here, we all know this is a monster movie) is approaching, and you're running for your life - and you take time to pan the camera around to take in the view? 

There was several points where only an utter lunatic would have carried on filming, and each of those moments kicked me out of the film.

I think the movie would have been stronger if it had just allowed us to imagine there really was a monster.  The Bourne Supremacy has a similar, jittery hand-held camera feel throughout - but we never query that.  It just feels natural, part of the movie's style.

And the restricted POV of the movie - we only see what our main characters see - was used to equally good effect in Spielberg's  War of the Worlds without any need for explanation.  The most chilling moment is when the Tom Cruise character sees bodies floating down the river; far more powerful visually than seeing the people being killed and becoming bodies...

But I did love the film's complete absence of exposition and narrative information.  There's a great big monster - that's all we know. Is it an alien? Did it have a spaceship? We don't know; and we don't care.

Because it's coming for us and it's time to run...

On the Columbus Lab

Finally, after numerous delays, the space shuttle Atlantis has launched, carrying its valuable cargo - a new space laboratory called, rather nicely, Columbus. 

This is another vital step forward in transforming the International Space Station into a genuine space city and research lab.  At the moment, it's a bit of a tin can in space; but the whole ethos is that the ISS can grow, and grow...

Take a look here for more details; and click on the video of the launch for a great shot of a bird flying in front of the shuttle's pillar of flame. 

On More is More

John Scalzi does an interesting feature in which he asks writers to talk about their 'Big Idea' - the guiding principle behind their writing.

I've had a stab at explaining my own Big Idea - which I call 'More is more'...if you want to check it out, click here.  

On the Origin of Debatable Space

One of the projects I'm proudest of is my free adaptation of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene for BBC Radio 4 (to read a script, click here.)

I was asked in an interview recently about how the idea of Debatable Space came about, and suddenly I remembered how much I had been influenced by the heightened, exaggerative style of this radio play.  The style came first, oddly enough, then the story followed.

For more on this, you can see an interview I did for Sci Fi Wire. 

On Magic and Science

For my thoughts on  Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote, check out The Book Swede's site.

On the Debatable Space Launch Coffee

Yesterday was the official UK publication date for Debatable Space...friends kept asking if I was having a launch party, but somehow that never came together. So instead my wife took me up the Hill and we had a launch coffee in the local Cafe Nero.

New on this site: Ariel has resdesigned the format of the two extracts on the Books page.  He's modelled it on the Orbit extract page but decided to create an even better skull & crossbones....

And if you want to win a free copy of Debatable Space, click here.

On Selling Out

It's one more day till the official UK Launch Date of Debatable Space, but I was delighted to find that the early editions at my local bookshop, The Bookseller Crow on the Hill, have all been sold. Some went to friends and neighbours, but the last book was sold to a reader of this blog based in Lancashire, who followed the link to Crow.

I'm a great believer in the value of local bookshops, and I love the fact that thanks to the wonders of the internet, my local bookshop can be your local bookshop too....

I've now signed a new batch of copies, so if you want a signed edition from the first print run,  click here to order.   

Lena and Flanagan, Elsewhere

I was wandering aimlessly in central London yesterday, as I'm prone to do, and found myself in the SF section of Blackwell's, Charing Cross Road...and discovered several more rogue early copies of Debatable Space on sale.  I was with my friend Emma who bought one (a loyal friend!) I also spent some time rearranging the shelves to make the Jennifer Rardin and Jeff Somers books more prominent, though apparently I'm not supposed to do that, so don't tell Blackwell's.

A better way to get the book early, and free, is to enter Fantasy Book Critic's giveaway competition, which you can do by clicking here and following his deucedly simple instructions.