New book out: Butterfly Box and Other Stories

Butterfly Box and Other Stories is available now in ebook, paperback, and laminate hardback, and will, at least for the present moment,  be exclusive to Amazon in all formats.

Below are some photos I  took of the paperback and hardback. As you can see, they look really nice (ignore the banner with 'not for resale' on them - these are proof copies, to make sure they printed correctly, not final sales copies).

Here's a link to the Amazon page:  

And here's the contents: 

The Day the Time Travellers Came (first published in Parsec)

Butterfly Box (previously unpublished novella)

The President is Possessed (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

Warsuit (first published in Interzone)

Fit for a King (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

Our Lady of Holy Death (prequel novelette to Devil's Road)

The Light by Which a Dying Warrior is Welcomed into Heaven (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

Elijah of the Thousand Faces (first published in Night, Rain and Neon, ed. by Michael Cobley, Newcon Press)

You Can Call Me Al (first published in Shoreline of Infinity)

The Moon Man (previously unpublished novella)

Most of these stories first appeared in various sf magazines: Parsec, Shoreline of Infinity, and Interzone. One other started life as a freebie, and another, adapted from a couple of chapters of another novel of mine called Proxy, appeared in Night, Rain and Neon, an anthology of new cyberpunk fiction (published by Newcon Press) edited by Mike Cobley.

My new collection also contains two novellas, although in truth, they're closer to short novels. Each is around thirty-five thousand words long. I'd originally meant to release them separately, but an informal Twitter poll (back when Twitter was still Twitter) revealed people mostly much preferred to have shorter works bundled together. 

The cover art is by Ben Baldwin, who previously designed the covers for Doomsday Game, Ghost Frequencies, and Proxy. The collection contains ten stories, with a total word count of 98,000. I think that's pretty good value for three quid/four US dollars. 

It's been a while since I last had a book out - that was Europa Deep in August 2023, and it's done rather well since then. Somehow, I've created what to all appearances is a sustainable writing career sans regular publisher. Sustainable so long as people keep buying my books, anyway.

OTHER STUFF I'VE BEEN WORKING ON

I've been pretty busy over the last year or so planning and writing the first drafts of two sequels to Echogenesis, a book I released a couple of years prior to Europa Deep. I had originally thought of Echogenesis as a standalone, but then I realised there was an opportunity to expand on that story in interesting ways, and so it's becoming a trilogy. The working title for book 2 is Aranyani, and the working title for book 3 is Echoterminus.

I'm about a third of the way through the first draft of Echoterminus, which means most of 2025 is going to be spent editing both books, then releasing them, most likely three or six months apart. Right now, I'm hoping book 2 will be released in late 2025, but that might be pushed back, depending on how much work is involved. Or, it might not. We'll see.

WHY BUTTERFLY BOX IS EXCLUSIVE TO AMAZON

Now and then I get an email asking if the ebook, for example, could be made wide outside of Amazon, because, usually for moral reasons, they don't want to buy from Amazon but would still like to buy my books.

Previously, I'd point them to a non-Amazon edition of the paperback, say, as a way to avoid shopping with Amazon. But I'm not immediately putting out a non-Amazon version of the physical editions this time around because (a) it's a great deal of hassle, and (b) it can get rapidly expensive. The same process when applied to an Amazon-published book costs precisely zero.

That's not to say there won't be any non-Amazon printed editions, ever. I'm going to wait at least a couple of months, and then decide whether it's worth putting out a non-Amazon edition. Besides, approximately 98% (no exaggeration) of my sales are through Amazon, even if the in question book isn't exclusive to Amazon. 

Amazon recently began allowing small publishers like myself to print hardbacks as well as paperbacks, although these are specifically case laminate hardbacks, meaning no dust cover and the art printed directly onto the boards. A separate Twitter poll of readers revealed this was, apparently, the preferred option, and so it will be with the hardback edition. All that said - this hardback edition is really, really lovely. I'm very impressed by the print quality. 

Hope you all get a kick out of it.

Surviving as a formerly traditionally-published author: things I've learned about building a sustainable writing career.

This post is something I've been meaning to talk about for a while; how to survive without the support of a traditional publisher as a formerly traditionally-published author. I know there are quite a few sf and fantasy writers out there who are in the same boat, and there are a few things I can pass on that might help them.

I've been posting certain milestones recently on social media, such as hitting another 100 reviews and ratings for a book on Amazon, but over the years I've seen more than a few posts by other writers, mostly other formerly pro authors, talking about the difficulties of getting traction without the support of a publishing company.

And sometimes I feel like writing a bit about how this can be done. 

MY OWN SITUATION

I haven't been under contract to a major publisher since 2015, yet right now I'm probably doing as well, and arguably better, than I was back then.

Getting here required a lot of experimenting and a lot of head-scratching, but in the end, I learned a lot of things I wished I'd known when I was writing about a book a year for Tor. 

WHAT AUDIENCES WANT

One lesson I learned: what readers want often isn't the same thing that writers want. Most writers I know are fairly eclectic in their reading choices. They'll read just about anything and everything. Most of the ones I know may default to sf and fantasy, but it's by far not the *only* thing on their shelves. That's sometimes reflected in what they choose to write.

Your audience, however, aren't quite the same.

When you wander away from the style of books for which you built an audience while under contract, most of that audience isn't likely to follow you. I found this producing a couple of books I still consider to be among the best things I've ever written.

Their sales, however, were very low. The low sales weren't a measure of quality: they were a measure of how much the subject matter interested what audience I'd built up over the years. And only a relative few of them were interested.

THE PROS AND CONS OF RISK-TAKING

This isn't to say you're doomed if you produce anything new or different, but there's definitely an element of risk involved. I seem to recall a TV Interview with Paul Lynch, who won 2023's Booker Prize for Prophet Song, in which he mentioned not being sure whether he was risking his career by writing something which was quite so different from the rest of his work.

Obviously, in his case, the risk was worth it. A few years ago I was corresponding with another writer, Gus McAllister, who'd produced a few books over the years. I was sceptical of his chances at success when I discovered he was self-publishing a book about murder in a Glasgow tenement, but it went on to be very successful, proving me wrong.

At that time, I didn't know there was a vast market for 'cozy mysteries'. I'm not sure Gus did either: he was just writing the book he wanted to write, but he struck lucky. Also, the book had what they call local interest, and sold particularly well in Glasgow.

But if you want to build a sustainable writing career outside the world of traditional publishing, and with a minimum of risk, that likely means focusing on what audience you already have.

So far, this strategy has worked for me. Echogenesis came out in 2021, Proxy in 2022 and Europa Deep in 2023. The first and last of these have done well, but Proxy less so.

Why? Proxy is near-future sf that might broadly be categorised as cyberpunk, but it's not hard sf/space opera. I like to think it's good, but good, as I said, isn't part of the equation: it's whether it appeals to your existing audience. 

FIGURING THINGS OUT

I knew absolutely none of this when I started out in traditional publishing because nobody, least of all anyone at my publisher, told me. I might have made some very different writing choices if they had.

My first novel was fairly straightforward space opera, but my second was near-future body-horror sf set in the jungles of South America, and while it remained one of my favourites for a long time, the sales tanked.

I produced numerous proposals for third books, none of which registered with my publisher until I gave them one that was much more like my first published novel. Suddenly they were interested, and that third book went on to do very well indeed. By this time I'd figured some things out, but I'd had to do it on my own.

MARKETING AND BOOKBUB

Now: marketing. In the screengrab below, Europa Deep and Echogenesis are both ranking high on Amazon UK. This is not an accident: it's the result of careful strategy and experimentation. 

The only marketing tool I've found that really makes a difference is Bookbub. It's a newsletter and website that lists books on sale, typically for 99p/99c, or free. It has millions of followers. It gained all these followers by carefully vetting the books they select for promotion to be sure that their followers were getting books that were genuinely good. That meant books that already had good reviews, great cover art, and were well-written or, at least, up to a certain standard of expectation.

There are many newsletters of this type, but with most, it's first come/first served. They don't consider whether the books involved are any good or not, and hence, they don't have nearly the number of followers. Most of them aren't worth the investment.

Bookbub's strategy has paid off so well that many major publishers now list their books on sale with them. It's not cheap, but I've never failed to make my money back.

Because Europa Deep was already selling pretty decently, I got an offer from Amazon to put it into a Kindle Monthly Deal this month in the UK. I accepted, and that's why it's currently ranking high - it's just 99p until the end of the month.

Bookbub only let you promote the same book twice in a year. I'd already run a BB promotion for Europa Deep in January, so couldn't run another this soon. So I chose to promote Echogenesis instead, to see whether it had a knock-on effect to the sales of Europa Deep. That strategy appears to be paying off. People are seeing Echogenesis, buying it and reading it (or reading it through Kindle Unlimited), then seeing Europa Deep and moving on to that.

Of course, BB are under no obligation to select one of my books for promotion. When I last promoted Europa Deep, in January, I was offered a UK-only deal, probably because it still had only one or two reviews in the US - but many reviews and high ratings in the UK. For some reason, my stuff has always appealed to British readers more than the American ones.

PROMOTING ON YOUR OWN VS PROMOTING WITH A PUBLISHER

The advantage here is that were my books under contract to a publisher, I would be unable to promote them in this way. I'd have to just cross my fingers they'd be willing to put in the effort and the expense. Most often, they aren't.

I hear of traditionally-published writers being told they have to do a lot of promotion themselves, but the reality is, the promotion that matters, like Bookbub, is off-limits to them, leaving them hamstrung and unable to do much more than send out the occasional tweet. 

COVER ART: DON'T DO IT YOURSELF

One other point: for God's sake, don't design your own cover. I don't care how poor you are, borrow or steal the money from somewhere and get a trained cover artist with experience producing commercial cover art and who is familiar with your genre to produce it. If you're looking for recommendations that won't break the bank, email me.

Cover art is a HUGE part of the sales equation: it's literally an advert designed to catch the attention of a potential reader despite being the size of a postage stamp if viewed on a computer. If you're paying attention to your audience, and to your genre, you'll absolutely make your money back.

I've seen one or two exceptions. Greg Egan self-publishes his books and still does okay, despite them having absolutely terrible covers. But, his books are very much written for the exact same audience he already had, and that likely makes a big difference. It makes me wonder how much better they'd sell if the covers were more professionally designed.

The publishing scene is constantly evolving. What works now may not work tomorrow. You have to keep a close eye on things and be willing to move fast if necessary. 

AMAZON VS WIDE

Right now my books are mostly exclusive to Amazon: love them or hate them, the vast majority of books you sell are going to be sold on that platform, although this equation, to my knowledge, does vary depending on genre: if you're writing sf, it should be on Amazon.

It's the same with Audible and audiobooks: as a company, they have serious problems. But if you want to sell audiobooks, that's where you need to be. There's a few other things I could add, about, for instance, owning all the rights to your audio and how to promote it, but this post is long enough already.

I know I'm not the only one who's taken books out of Amazon exclusivity only to see their sales plummet as a result. So: focus on Amazon if you want to sell your books.

Yes, there are people out there who do very well selling wide, but I've no idea how they do it. Whatever they're doing, it didn't work for me, and it didn't work for most writers I know or follow on Facebook or elsewhere. So find them, and see what their advice is.

Kindle Unlimited is also a huge part of the equation and absolutely should not be avoided. It's a risk-free way for hard-core readers to try your stuff out and you still get paid. It's a win-win. A huge chunk of my writing income comes from KU.

Could all this change tomorrow? Yes. Do I trust companies like Amazon? No. If and when they screw me and other writers over, I'll deal with it when it comes. But tomorrow is tomorrow, and today is today. And right now, this is what works.

So get writing.

Europa Deep is out now in ebook, paperback and hardback.

EUROPA DEEP is out, now, in Kindle ebook, hardback, and paperback. Here’s a selection of links where you can read more about it or buy it. Note that the ebook is exclusive to Amazon, but the hardback and paperback are not. 

Amazon UK (ebook, paperback, hardback) 

Amazon US - (ebook, paperback, hardback)  

Barnes and Noble - (paperback, hardback)

The isbn's are  978-986-06770-4-1 (Paperback) and  978-986-06770-5-8 (Hardback) in case you want to visit other sites.
 The best prices and shipping, however, are almost always with the big online companies.


If you read Europa Deep and you like it—or even if you don’t!—do consider leaving a written review if you have the opportunity. The more reviews I have, the more likely that readers new to my books will take a chance on them.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to write a few words about the book and how it came into existence.

In the past, I’ve sometimes written novels in just a few weeks. But EUROPA DEEP took far longer to complete than any other. 

The title of the first working draft was Europa Door, and it was intended to be hard sf, but with a touch of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Europa Deep, however, is not that book-not by a very, very long shot. 

Why? Well, sometimes, you start writing a book, then realise it isn’t working. This is not unusual: most working writers have books that started out one way, then either became something entirely different or got put to one side-usually forever. 

So I completely revised the outline, abandoning a two-thirds completed first draft, and started a mostly-new draft of Europa Door—now called Europa Deep—and got about two-thirds into that before it, too, was abandoned. Again, for reasons too complicated and perhaps too personal to really make any sense, it wasn’t working.

Then I started on a brand new third draft—even while some part of me wondered if I was better of just junking the whole thing. 

By now, any hint of horror, cosmic or otherwise, was long gone. I put together another outline and felt much more satisfied with it.

As it turned out, the third version was the one: it felt right in a way the others hadn’t. What it also had was an idea I hadn’t seen before. 

I should stop here and say just because I haven’t seen a particular idea done before doesn’t mean it hasn’t, in fact, been done before. Probably, it has. But if it feels new to me, then that’s the impetus I need to complete a novel. 

SF of the type I write is often defined by specific tropes—for example, interstellar civilisations linked by spaceships travelling at faster-than-light speeds. There are any number of writers who’ve brought, and continue to bring, something new and fresh to these tropes, but in Europa Deep, I wanted to subvert them and come at the idea of interstellar travel and communication from a completely different angle. Why should the focus always be on meatsacks in tin cans—living, embodied humans transported from interstellar point A to interstellar point B inside pressurised spaceships at faster than light speed?

In Europa Deep, I’ve tried to suggest an alternative approach. I can’t say any more than that without risking spoilers. But whether I’ve succeeded is something you, the reader, will have to tell me.

At the same time, I also wanted to write a story full of action and intrigue. The story is set almost a century from now, at a point where humanity is just beginning to expand into the outer solar system. Cassie White, the protagonist, is an ‘Opt’—meaning, her genetics have been optimised prior to her birth. It’s a gift that quickly becomes a burden. She, and the crew of the deep space exploration vessel, the Veles, must discover the fate of an expedition that went missing beneath the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa, where lies, or so it’s long been speculated, a vast ocean of liquid salt water. 

I started on the first draft in 2020 and only finished the final draft a few months ago. Despite all the time and trouble it took to get to the finished article, it feels completely worth it. 

I hope you enjoy the heck out of it. 

Researching Europa Deep

 As I mentioned last time, I have a new book coming out later this year: Europa Deep.

It's a brand-new story set in the early 22nd Century. An expedition is sent to Jupiter to discover the fate of a previous expedition that disappeared under mysterious circumstances while exploring the vast oceans under the ice of Europa. Or rather, the vast oceans that current scientific speculation suggests may exist under the ice of that moon.

It is, by far, one of the hardest books I've written, certainly in terms of the amount of research involved. While I consider myself a science fiction writer, I can't unfortunately claim any great scientific literacy—although, I should add, neither can a great many other writers. If I need to know or understand something in order to write a particular story, I need to spend time getting to know that subject as best I can.

In this case (obviously) I had to spend quite some time reading up on the subject of Europa and Jupiter, with particular attention to the intense radiation that bathes the entire Jovian system. I also had to bone up on deep sea diving, regarding which I knew precisely nothing. 

It doesn't matter how much research you do, though, because there will always be someone out there who judges you entirely by a single, minor incorrect detail. I was reminded of this recently when I came across the following exchange on Facebook between an author, posting about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and one of his followers. It's a friends-limited post, so I'll leave their names out of it. 

Follower: I just couldn't get over them having a Pennsylvania Railroad GG-1 locomotive operating on the Park Avenue Viaduct. The clearances and weight limitations make that impossible.

Author of post: …That was your problem?

In case you weren't aware, the film is about a battle between someone called Sky Captain and giant robots invading an alternate, retro-futuristic New York. Yet, at least one viewer considered this the least believable element of that film. 

This is partly because the film had intersected with that viewer's particular area of expertise and knowledge. And when they found that wanting, somehow, giant robots rampaging through New York became unbelievable.

It's not always the pernickety stuff that knocks people out of a story. I remember, years ago, seeing Kirsty Wark interview Iain Banks, and I almost certainly misremember the conversation. But, as I remember, Wark suggested that Banks must have spent time walking a particular area of coastline in order to write about it so vividly.

On the contrary, Banks replied, he made it up. He'd never been there. That, he said, is what writers do: make stuff up. 

Wark (or so I remember) seemed taken aback by this. Writers? Making stuff up? 

And Banks is a man who famously hated doing research. Of course he made up a description of a piece of coastline in one of his novels. 

Still: one of the standard things you can do to avoid too many acrimonious emails or reviews complaining that you got the precise gauge of ammunition wrong in a gunfight between two radioactive multidimensional lizards, and hence have no idea what you're doing, is to write a disclaimer. 

It might say something like any mistakes made in the science behind this story are entirely the author's own. And I'm probably, given the complexity of background detail in Europa Deep, going to have to put something very like that in. 

One of my favourite disclaimers is at the start of John Varley's Steel Beach. It's a sequel to other novels in his Eight Worlds series but, as he notes in the disclaimer, he wasn't willing to reread the previous volumes before he wrote this one: so don't bother him, he wrote, if you spot any inconsistencies. 

Such small slips of detail about train gauges and models or whatever—if you can even call them slip—mostly don't bother me in the least (with one exception: fictional novelists in movies writing shatteringly insightful prose without seeming effort. I mean, come on.) Fiction, after all, requires the suspension of disbelief, the very human ability to accept something clearly untrue for the purpose of enjoying a story. 

Star Trek often featured aliens who were nothing more than actors with knobbly-looking foreheads. This isn't because the people writing the episodes believe this is what aliens might actually look like: it's because portraying something truly alien week after week would be either impossible, deeply impractical, or incredibly expensive. Such shows, therefore, presumably so long as they have historically accurate trains, ask of the viewer that they suspend their disbelief and accept the actors as stand-ins for the truly alien.

In some science fiction, you can suggest that something might be true, one day. Or you can speculate that science might evolve to the level where a particular impossible thing becomes possible. That's my go-to disclaimer, too, for at least some of the stuff I write. 

Anyway, right here, right now, I absolutely guarantee you that I'll have fucked something up with the research in Europa Deep. And, actually, I don't mind hearing about it. Just so long as you don't expect me to apologise for it, because I won't.

Writing a sequel to Echogenesis

 These days, if you want to find out what I'm up to, you either have to sign up to my monthly newsletter, follow me on Twitter or sign up to my Patreon--all of which are perfectly good and valid things to do. But even though I don't keep this blog quite as regularly as I do, it does nonetheless serve a useful purpose, which is to give me a publicly and freely accessible platform to communicate with whomever might be interested in hearing what I'm up to. 

A lot has changed over the past couple of years. Independent publishing is, slowly, becoming a viable career. An at times unpredictable one, as is any freelance career, but a career nonetheless. 

The highlight of my writing, since my last book for Tor UK, has been Echogenesis. It's easily the most successful book I've yet written. The follow-up, Proxy, didn't do quite so well, but even that's been useful since the success or failure of a particular story helps you figure out what it is audiences actually respond to. 

I didn't intend to write any sequels to Echogenesis. I rarely read series myself, mostly preferring standalone stories. In that respect, I've slowly come to realise, I'm something of an outlier. A lot of people prefer series. Or at least, claim to. 

A few weeks back I finished a more-or-less final draft of a novel called Europa Deep. That'll probably come out around September. I'll talk more about it in a later post. More recently, I started taking notes for what I'm hoping will be two sequels to Echogenesis. The second volume is tentatively titled Aranyani. No title for the third yet. 

My hope is to write these relatively quickly, and be able to release the first sequel some time next year. I'm not a fast writer, though, so no guarantees on that front. 

Audiobook of Echogenesis coming soon

 This is not an attempt to restart the blog. Nor is it not an attempt to restart the blog. 

But the absolute shitshow over at Twitter shows how hard it can be to control your own voice when mediated through the commercialised portal of a lunatic billionaire with a fortune built on dodgy money. 

And I am still blogging, just primarily, indeed, just now, entirely, through my rather excellent newsletter. Both my blog and newsletter are, again, mediated through large, commercial concerns, MailChimp in the case of one, Google/Alphabet in the case of the other.  

That said, no reason I can't start posting the occasional piece of news up here, where I at least feel like I have some modicum of control: so. 

After a long series of delays, I recently signed a contract with Tantor Media to publish an audiobook of Echogenesis. 

Unlike the ebook, which is currently only on Amazon (once again, lunatic billionaire, inability to control own voice, etc, etc), the audiobook of Echogenesis will be wide. You'll be able to buy it on Audible, but all other audiobook platforms as well. And it'll be available, I understand, through library services. 

Right now, the only information I have about the release date is on Tantor's own page. But the date of release is January 17, 2023. The narrator is Andrew Dickson. 

New book coming soon: PROXY

Proxy, my new novel, will become available for download and purchase on August 1 2022 in ebook, paperback and hardback. Set in mid-21st Century London, it tells the story of a struggle for control of a wildly popular – and mostly illegal – body-swapping technology called 'proxy'.

While not strictly 'cyberpunk', the focus, nonetheless, is on a technology for which the street has found its own uses, so it's broadly applicable. It's just as much a crime novel set a few decades from now, and a novel about corporate conspiracy. And some other things I won't say for fear of giving too much away. But those who like my stuff because of the focus on outrageous technological speculation are likely to find plenty here to satisfy them. 

Here's the blurb:

When Ray Thomas is hired to find the daughter of his sworn enemy, the private detective soon learns there's more to the illegal bio-implant technology known as proxy than body-swapping.

Proxy dealer Elijah wants to know who's trying to kill him, and how it's connected to a new kind of proxy that's hit the streets.

What they each discover on the streets of a near-future London crippled by multiple pandemics has the potential to change the course of civilisation...so long as they can stop the wrong people getting their hands on it first.

Some background:

I originally submitted an outline of Proxy to my old publishers way back in 2015, along with an outline for another book then called Field of Bones, only to find myself dropped by my publisher shortly before the publication of what would be my last book for them, Survival Game.

I spent the next several years looking for a publisher for both Proxy and Field of Bones - by now renamed Echogenesis - to no avail. In the meantime, the publishing industry continued to shift and warp in the face of continuous and seismic shifts in the market, and vast swathes of talented editors and midlist writers found themselves navigating unfamiliar waters as publishers underwent yet more corporate mergers. 

Being not unfamiliar with independent publishing, having spent a chunk of the early 90s editing and co-editing a range of micro-press science fiction magazines and comics, I took the plunge in 2021 and published Echogenesis through my own Brain in a Jar Books imprint.

And what do you know? It sold -- and continues to sell -- like gangbusters. So the decision to follow up with Proxy was an easy decision.

Will it do as well? You decide. I think it's easily as good as Echogenesis, while being an entirely different kind of story. I hope you like it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

FORMATS: the book will be available in paperback, hardback and ebook. The ebook is exclusive to Amazon, the other formats are not. They can be pre-ordered here.

The hardback edition features the same art as the dustcover printed directly onto the boards, but without the text. And believe me when I say it feels and looks very nice. The first photo on the left shows it with the dustcover loose so you can see the art printed on the boards inside. The second photo shows it with the dustcover entirely removed. 

A reminder: although I update this blog only occasionally these days--blogs are so 2000s--I do maintain a regular monthly newsletter with news about whatever I'm working on and anything else I think you might find interesting, along with book reviews. Join me. 

Echogenesis on sale and my favourite books of 2021

These are the slightly modified contents of my regular monthly newsletter where I talk about writing, what I'm working on, and what I've been reading. And anything else that pops into my mind. 

This has, by far, been my best year in writing since 2015, given the continued success of Echogenesis. It means going it alone rather than working with a publishing company has proved to be a successful strategy: successful enough that it's taken me a little by surprise. 

Once January arrives though, I'll be busy getting the ground ready for Proxy, which I now anticipate releasing at the start of August 2022. I still have some very final edits and checks to carry out, and I need to chase up possible cover artists and work on the layout for the print and e-book editions. 

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ECHOGENESIS ON SALE

I scored a Bookbub deal starting on the 17th of December. The book is already just 99p in the UK and 99c in the US, where I'm running a separate promotions deal through another newsletter company. The promotion will run for about a week until just before Christmas.

If you're not familiar with it, BookBub is a newsletter service with about ten million subscribers worldwide. It lists currently discounted e-books, many from major publishers, with the rest made up of a smattering of small-press and independently published titles. 

I used to use BookBub a lot as a reader, but not so much now I almost entirely listen to audiobooks, for which it doesn't cater outside the US. But if you read a lot of ebooks it's absolutely worth signing up for.

And the good thing, from the perspective of a writer, is that a BookBub deal can get you in front of a lot of potential readers who otherwise might not be familiar with your work.

Now I'm going to talk about other people's books.

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BOOKS OF THE YEAR

So far in 2021 I've read — or rather, listened to — forty-one audiobooks, of which twenty-eight are fiction and the rest non-fiction. From these, I've picked five favourites. These are:

FAVOURITE NON-FICTION OF 2021:

ENTANGLED LIFE: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE by Daniel Ellsberg

FAVOURITE FICTION OF 2021 

NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl

WYLDING HALL by Elizabeth Hand

A HISTORY OF WHAT COMES NEXT by Sylvain Neuvel

To pick just five books out of some of the amazing works I've read in the last year proved to be challenging. 

Wylding Hall is a late arrival, since I only just read/listened to it the other day. I read another Elizabeth Hand book some years ago, although the title escapes me, and I don't remember thinking much of it at the time. 

But sometimes you read a good book at a bad time, since if Wylding Hall is anything to go by I really should be reading a lot more of Hand's stuff. Check out the review at the end of the newsletter.

A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel was a difficult choice, given it just barely edges out some of the excellent books I read this year, most particularly Sarah Pinscher’s A Song for a New Day and Laura Lam's Goldilocks. In truth, I can recommend all of them wholeheartedly. 

Marissa Pessl's Night Film, by contrast, was an easy choice, being to my mind a towering achievement and one to which I look forward to returning one day. 

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is one of those books that hits you with jaw-dropping fact after jaw-dropping fact in between casual mentions of holidaying at Terence McKenna's home in the jungle with his parents when he was eight or so years old. But this is no woolly-eyed mysticism: rather, this is cutting-edge science where biology blends into the quantum realm, mathematics and computing as well as  revealing how our understanding of the natural world and how it operates is undergoing a radical evolution of its own.

The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg, by contrast, is terrifying in how close it reveals we came to nuclear Armageddon again and again and how little equipped we are as a species to handle such an enormously destructive weapon.

The author should know: he was closely involved in the cold war planning for the dispersal and possible operation of nuclear weapons, and what he learnt and saw there led in part to his decision to leak the Pentagon Papers, demonstrating that the then US government had been lying to the public about the aims, causes and scale of the Vietnam war.

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BOOKS READ/LISTENED TO IN 2021:

HOLLYWOOD VERSUS THE AUTHOR edited by Stephen Jay Schwartz REVIEWED BELOW (non-fiction/essays on writing)

WYLDING HALL by Elizabeth Hand REVIEWED BELOW (fiction/supernatural horror)

THE SECOND SHOOTER Nick Mamatas (sf/weird fiction hybrid)

THE KING AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD Arthur Philips (historical fiction) REVIEWED BELOW

ENTANGLED LIFE: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake (non-fiction/ecology & science. REVIEWED BELOW

THE TOMB (Repairman Jack 1) by F. Paul Wilson (fiction/horror)

POSTER BOY by NJ Crosskey (fiction/sf & near-future contemporary)

A SONG FOR A NEW DAY Sarah Pinsker (fiction/near-future sf)

ROCKONOMICS: How Music Explains Everything by Alan Krueger (non-fiction/economics)

QUESTLAND by Carrie Vaughn (fiction/sf)

SLEEPING GIANTS Sylvain Neuvel (fiction/sf)

MONEYLAND: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule The World and How To Take It Back by Oliver Bullough (non-fiction/crime & economics)

THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS BY Stephen Graham Jones (fiction/horror)

THE BOOK OF ACCIDENTS by Chuck Wendig (fiction/horror)

TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump (non-fiction/politics & psychology)

LIMINAL STATES by Zack Parsons (fiction/horror & sf)

SPACEFARERS: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars and Beyond by Christopher Wanjek (non-fiction/space exploration)

STEIN ON WRITING: A Master Editor Shares his Craft, Techniques and Strategies by Sol Stein (non-fiction/writing techniques)

2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis (fiction/near-future speculative politics)

CHASING THE LIGHT: How I Fought My Way into Hollywood by Oliver Stone (non-fiction/autobiography)

RABBITS by Terry Miles (fiction/horror, sf & conspiracy)

BECOMING A WRITER, STAYING A WRITER: The Artistry, Joy, and Career of Storytelling by  J. Michael Straczynski (non-fiction/writing techniques & autobiography)

STRANGE WEATHER by Joe Hill (fiction/sf, horror and contemporary novellas)

THE LAST PASSENGER by Manel Loureiro (fiction/horror)

GOLDILOCKS by Laura Lam (fiction/sf)

INFINITE DETAIL by Tim Maughan (fiction/near-future sf)

A HISTORY OF WHAT COMES NEXT by Sylvain Neuvel (fiction/sf)

WARDENCLYFFE by F. Paul Wilson (fiction/horror)

THE FUCK-IT LIST by John Niven (contemporary fiction)

DICTATORLAND by Paul Kenyon (non-fiction/politics)

ALL SYSTEMS RED by Martha Wells (fiction/sf novella)

NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl (fiction/crime, supernatural & conspiracy)

THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY: Two Full-Cast Audio Dramatisations by Douglas Adams (fiction/original BBC dramatisations)

A LIBERTARIAN WALKS INTO A BEAR: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling (non-fiction/culture and politics)

THIRTEEN STOREYS by Jonathan Sims (horror)

CONFESS by Rob Halford (non-fiction/autobiography)

EXHALATION by Ted Chiang (sf/short stories)

THE BEST OF RICHARD MATHESON by Richard Matheson (sf & horror/short stories)

OTHER MINDS: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life by Peter Godfrey-Smith (non-fiction/biology & science)

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE by Daniel Ellsberg (non-fiction/politics, history and technology)

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS READ IN NOVEMBER

WYLDING HALL by Elizabeth Hand 

Told in the form of interviews with members of a fictional Sixties band to an interviewer preparing for a documentary, this proves to be a perfect set-up for audio, and I’d urge you to listen to the audiobook, voiced as it is by a number of different narrators voicing each of the main characters. 

It’s short, but powerful: Windhollow Fayre are a psych-folk band in the very early Seventies sent off to the eponymous Wylding Hall in rural England to write their second album, far from the distractions of Swinging London. But the singer Julian Blake (and how perfect a name is that?) may have encountered something strange in the woods, and the longer they stay at the Hall, the more Blake seems to become somehow separate from the rest of the band. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the band have their own interpersonal dramas to deal with, all played out against the increasingly eerie background of the Hall. And eerie it very much is, with hallways that never seem to lead to the same room twice, startling unseen presences wandering its rooms and corridors, and the constant motif of something lurking in the nearby woods which the locals refuse to enter after dark.

Altogether a very much superior ghost story.  

ENTANGLED LIFE by Merlin Sheldrake

Sometimes, you can tell something about someone by their name. There’s some excellent and jaw-dropping science in here to do with mycelial research, interspersed with, surprise surprise, observations about mind-altering chemicals derived from plant life and even a little a bit about how to brew your own beer and wine at home – and how that, too, ties into the rich diversity of mycelium.

Really, there's so much in here I find it difficult to precisely recall some of the best bits, my brain having been crowded with so many 'wow' moments: but there was something about how, if you took all of the mycelial threads reaching through the undersoil of the planet and linking wildly disparate forms of plant life and strung them out in a single line, that line would be the width of the Milky Way.

And it's undeniable how far-reaching this ongoing research really is: even to the point of it influencing surprising areas of popular culture, such as the most recent incarnation of Star Trek (which, I was pleased to see, Sheldrake suggests ‘got the science entirely wrong’). 

Even though it's about biological life rather than the farthest stars, this is some of the sharpest, bleeding-edge hard science popular writing I’ve read in some time and it comes highly recommended. 

HOLLYWOOD VERSUS THE AUTHOR by Stephen Jay Schwartz (editor)

Perhaps not of interest to all of you, but certainly to anyone who ever dreamed about selling a script or book to Hollywood.

Yes indeed, there are many horror stories presented here by a wide range of novelists and script writers who saw their work butchered and, in a worrying number of cases, outright ripped-off.

One particular case revolves around the film Gravity, which the director claimed to be an original idea of his own, until it turned out he had consulted on an adaptation of a novel some years before which had exactly the same story and which saw the author struggling to gain recognition and recompense for the theft of her story. Cue the attack lawyers.

But they aren’t all bad experiences. There are stories of success against the odds, and one particularly illuminating essay by a novelist who had both pitched scripts and been the person pitched to. Not essential unless you're a writer, but if you are, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

THE KING AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Arthur Phillips

I'm not normally one for historical fiction, but something about this caught my eye, particularly the title and then the intriguing setup.

The story is of a Turkish doctor sent with a diplomatic mission to the court of Queen Elizabeth the 1st, unaware of the Machiavellian scheming of the powerful man who sent him far away so he could steal both the doctor’s wife and his home back in Constantinople.

 Once in London, he befriends Dr. John Dee and is otherwise quite horrified by the cold, wet, miserable and generally backwards and ignorant England of the time. So naturally he’s even more horrified when he finds himself 'gifted' against his will to the court of Queen Liz. 

Later – much later – after having gone through a forced Christian conversion, he finds himself caught up yet further in the machinations of the court once it becomes clear that Queen Elizabeth is ailing and the nearest and most likely heir to the throne is King James the sixth of Scotland.

There's just one catch: the Scotland of the time is still largely a Catholic country, and England is still licking her wounds from a conflict that saw it torn apart by religious divisions. 

So the doctor is taken under the wings of a spy master who has only one overriding question he wants the doctor, as a relative outsider, to answer: is King James truly a Protestant as he claims, or is he secretly a Catholic who will bring back the worst excesses of the past as soon as he becomes King of both Scotland and England?

And so the doctor must travel north to Edinburgh, there to attempt to win the confidence of the King, and then to find an answer to that single question: to which church does James truly owe his allegiance?

What you get is a twisty, historical spy thriller of games within games and hidden intentions seen through the eyes of a man to whom Britain is a strange, frequently incomprehensible and entirely foreign country. A fascinating and absorbing read.

That's it for this time. Have a great New Year.

My new book ECHOGENESIS is out now.

My new book, ECHOGENESIS, is now available to order in paperback, hardback and as an Amazon Kindle ebook. This is a reposting of my regular, monthly newsletter that went out to subscribers a few days ago, with full details of how to buy it and where.

The paperback and hardback will also be available from retailers other than Amazon, but it might be a few days yet - perhaps longer - before it shows up on the websites for, say, Waterstones, Indiebound and others. It's on B&N's website already, though. Here are the main links so far:

ORDER LINKS

Amazon UK: Kindle / Paperback  / Hardback

Amazon US: Kindle / Paperback / Hardback

Barnes & Noble: Paperback / Hardback

If you want to order the paperback or hardback at a local bookshop, you'll need the ISBN numbers:

Hardback ISBN: 978-986-06770-1-0

Paperback ISBN: 978-986-06770-0-3

Local or independent shops, however, will sometimes buck the price up, so be aware of that. 

Here's the short version of the blurb:

"After waking next to a wrecked spacecraft on an uninhabited world, fifteen survivors struggle to find out how they got there.

Soon they realise something has gone badly wrong: something that could mean humanity's survival...or its extinction."

Getting this book into your hands has been a long, exhausting and at times wearying process stretched over a number of years. Not that I'd have it any other way.

I consider it to be both my most ambitious and my most thematically ambitious novel by far. It's also the closest I've got to true hard sf because it involves a form of interstellar travel that is perhaps the closest to what the reality might actually be, unless there's some unexpected breakthrough in the laws of physics that changes everything.

People sometimes have questions about availability and format, so I've tried my best to answer these below:

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LEAVE A REVIEW!

I hope you enjoy it, and let me know if you do. I also hope you consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever you prefer, whatever you think of it. Reviews can make a big difference.

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OTHER NEWS

I only just came across this article first published in Locus Magazine back in 2018 about SF in Scotland. They interviewed me for it, but at the time the article was print only: now it's online.

NEW STORY IN SHORELINE OF INFINITY

And talking of SF originating from Scotland, I have a new story in Shoreline of Infinity 25. The magazine is looking better and better with every issue. Go buy it!

BIRMINGHAM SF GROUP

I was kindly asked to be interviewed over Zoom for the group and had a very nice chat with Ian Morley of Durdles Books . It'll be released to the group as a prerecorded video.

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ANOTHER, BIGGER NEWCON SALE

Ian Whates of Newcon Press is having a big clear out of stock, with lots of paperbacks and hardbacks at half price  or less. You can get a signed, hardback copy of Devil's Road for just £9.99 if you're quick enough, and also a paperback copy of Ghost Frequencies for just £3. There are also dozens of other books by major writers to be found there, so go check it out.

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BOOK REVIEWS

CHASING THE LIGHT by Oliver Stone

I've always been fascinated by Oliver Stone and a fan of his film Salvador. It's long been a favourite of mine at least in part because of its Hunter Thompson-fuelled eccentricity. He's more famous of course for PLATOON, JFK, and NATURAL BORN KILLERS, but what draws me in here is the skill with which Stone applies himself to detailing his early struggles as a writer and his initial attempts to become a novelist. Eventually Hollywood came calling, but success was neither immediate nor guaranteed: after early success writing SCARFACE for Martin Scorsese, he wrote the Michael Caine flop THE HAND, and then spent some time in the Hollywood wilderness watching his career slip out of his grasp.

Coming back from that wilderness takes guts and determination, qualities you'll find in any novelist or screenwriter for whom any other life is inconceivable. PLATOON of course grew out of his own experiences in Vietnam, and it says something that the movie for which he's best known is the one that grew the most directly out of his personal experiences - from traumas and tragedies that helped define and shape him both as a man and as a creator of stories. I found it affecting and involving, while also tickled to find he not only wrote a screenplay adaptation of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man but also an early version of the script of Conan the Barbarian from which he extensively quotes his version of the ending.

RABBITS by Terry Miles

A more unusual and ultimately engaging novel based, so I gather, on a fiction podcast of the same name. 'Rabbits' in the novel is an online game which may predate the internet by some decades and even, according to a few, by some centuries: a game in which one uncovers hidden connections between objects, places and people in the real world and which lead to more clues with a grand if unspecified prize to be claimed by one winner.

The protagonist is a non-neurotypical young woman in Seattle with a fascination for and affinity with patterns. Together with her friends, she obsesses over each 'iteration' of Rabbits, the mysterious winners, and just what it is you get if you win.

My own tastes incline me to seek out stories that I can't predict and feel different from what has gone before, and Miles certainly manages that here. The protagonist occupies a peculiar demimonde world of night-time cafes, games arcades, and backstreet alleys in Seattle as she tracks down cryptic clues left by whomever or whatever is behind Rabbits, while friends disappear without a trace of having ever existed, other players are murdered or turn up mysteriously deceased and she is gradually led to a fairly cataclysmic ending that may or may not have something to do with a notorious games company and the lone genius who founded it.

It's good, and at times very good indeed, but if I were to have any criticisms, it perhaps tries *too* hard to explain what is actually going on. With reflection, the author might have been better adopting a more David Lynchian approach and leaving more unsaid or unexplained. Nonetheless, it was an engrossing, enjoyable, and, best of all, quite an unpredictable read.

2034 by James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman.

I bought this one with research in mind since the book I'm working on just now involves a future version of China nearly a century from now. This is the story of an imagined conflict between the United States and China in the South Asian Sea north and west of Taiwan where I'm sitting right now after a US carrier battle group captures a Chinese fishing vessel in danger of sinking and carrying a variety of surveillance equipment that has nothing to do with fishing.

What follows is a gradual escalation of intent and countermove as each side moves against the other. A US pilot is downed by the Iranian air force and an American White House aide whose family comes from India make up the other narrative strands.

I was afraid this might be one of those books crammed to the gills with military acronyms and stiff-jawed generals, but fortunately, it's nothing of the kind. Instead, it's a more character-driven affair in which the authors lay out their case for how the US has both become overreliant on technology and most especially suffers a lack of imagination in its inability to predict ways in which things might go badly wrong for them in a war with another superpower.

As speculation on how things could get badly out of control very fast, it's honestly frightening stuff, especially given the credentials of the authors - one is a former Marine and sits on the Council of Foreign Relations in the US and the other is a retired US Admiral. It would be interesting to read this together with Daniel Ellsberg's Doomsday Machine, about how close the world came to nuclear war on multiple occasions, and which I reviewed here last year.

And that's it until next time, Go read Echogenesis!

Total website revamp coming soon

 Just a heads-up I'm going to be radically revising the website sometime soon. I'll be switching over to a service called carrd.co. Carrd doesn't host blogs, so I'll be maintaining the blog here on blogger.com for a while yet and linking back to it from the new site: but I'll change the template to something much more simple and, hopefully, somewhat more friendly to modern PCs, tablets and phones. 

I've been using a very heavily modified Blogger template for the better part of fifteen years, mainly because it's free, and partly because the paid alternatives are frankly a bit expensive and/or complicated. But it's looking ooooold. 

The new site is primarily static - if you're still coming here, you know I don't update as often as I used to bar the occasional newsletter. And again, if you want to keep up to date with me without having to come here I recommend you either sign up to the regular monthly newsletter (and get a free book) or join my Patreon for as little as a pound or the equivalent thereof per month, which gives you access to more than 140 posts that include short stories, unpublished exerpts from novels, serialised chunks of novels and previews of pretty much everything I'm working on far in advance of when anyone else gets to see it. 

Another reason to sign up to the newsletter: it'll have exclusive news about a forthcoming book. The next newsletter, early next month, will have the blurb for my next book Echogenesis, with the art to follow later. 

I'll have a link back here on the new website, so people new to me can still come here and check it out. But when I change over fully, "garygibson.net" will redirect to the new site, not here. 

The new site is still a work in progress but close, I think, to completion. If you want to see it before I unleash it on the world, you can see it at its current pre-launch web address of garygibson.carrd.co. 

The only glitch I've seen so far is that icons and buttons tend to show up as blank white spaces on phones and tablets. I've been in touch with the company about that. 

Freebie and a sale

Should you be interested, my prequel to Devil's Road, 'Our Lady of Holy Death', is now also available free on Amazon and on other digital stores as well as through my mailing list.

Our Lady of Holy Death

And Doomsday Game, the sequel to Extinction Game and Survival Game, is on sale for the first and possibly only time, and only for another few days: https://getbook.at/DGame.

Story sale, mailing list, and Zardoz

 I haven't been keeping up with posting my newsletters to the blog, but I'll try and get back on track with that. But expect at least a month's delay before you get news from me unless I have a new book coming out.

And a reminder: if you want to hear from me regularly, sign up to my mailing list because blogs are dead and mailing lists are the new thing. You get a free novelette currently not available anywhere else (it's not even been submitted to any markets and was in fact created especially for my mailing list), and I write about writing progress, upcoming projects, books I've read and other news. 

The number of subscribers, I'm glad to say, has been climbing steadily, and it's the only guaranteed way to find out what I've been up to and what I've been working on. A new newsletter comes from me at the start of each month, and you can unsubscribe as easily as you can subscribe.

Here's a quick summary of the main points from my most recent newsletter:

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PODCAST

I was recently interviewed by Gareth Jelley for his science-fiction interview podcast series, INTERMULTIVERSAL. There are a lot more interviews with other authors, so definitely check it out.

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SCREENWRITING

A few weeks back I wrote a ten-minute screenplay for a short film and submitted it to a script competition - what most screenwriters do, apparently, to get their stuff noticed. 

Last year I wrote a feature-length script, mainly to see if I could do it, based on an old and unused novel outline. I think it came out reasonably well. 

Here's the logline for the feature-length script - Hollywood-ese for a one-sentence summary: A detective investigates a series of grisly cannibalistic murders that threaten to reveal the existence of a secret society of people able to absorb the memories of the recently dead by eating their flesh. 

Since major publishers don't seem to be fighting their way to my door, cheque-book in hand, I might as well explore other means of telling stories for money.

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STORY SALE

I sold a short story to PS Publishing's new UK science fiction magazine project, Parsec, edited by Ian Whates.

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FUTURE RELEASES

It's looking likely I'll have a new book out sometime later this year, but a release date is far from certain. More news on that as it comes. It'll be the first time since 2016 that I'll have published a full-length novel that isn't a sequel to something else. More details as they come.

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THE MITRE PUB AND INTERZONE

Paul Brazier, who was involved in Interzone's earliest days, has released a short e-book detailing the early meetings of the magazine's editorial staff back in the eighties when they used to meet in a Brighton bar called The Mitre.

Given how big a role Interzone played in my development as a writer, I couldn't help but buy it, even if it's just the collated minutes of different meet-ups. Back then, I'd have loved to be present at some of those pub meetings.

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WRITING PROGRESS

The sequel to Ghost Frequencies, Phantom Circuits, is past the 30,000-word mark and still steaming ahead – it's certainly going to be a longer book than the first one.

I still have to go back and write the second draft of another short novel I wrote earlier this year, The Moon Man.

Once this latest first draft is out of the way I'll be moving on to a first draft of what I'm hoping will be an epic story of outer solar system exploration, The Medusa Net.

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ZARDOZ

I maintain, and will continue to maintain, that John Boorman's 1970s film ZARDOZ is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time, whether or not it happens to feature Sean Connery wearing a handlebar moustache, kinky leather boots, leather underwear and, at times, a wedding dress. THESE ARE NOT TRUE MEASUREMENTS OF ITS GREATNESS.

Anyhow, I came across this fascinating little piece on Youtube about the making of the film and it's pretty interesting. Check it out.

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BOOK REVIEWS

JOHN DIES AT THE END, THIS BOOK IS FULL OF SPIDERS and WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST READ by David Wong.

I've been trying to think of how on Earth to describe these books and the best I can come up with is that they read like a Bill and Ted film as scripted by HP Lovecraft. Or possibly, The Colour out of Space as directed by Kevin Smith.

Two small town idiots make use of an otherworldly drug they call "soy sauce" that allows them to see beyond the veil of normal reality into a realm of uncanny horror and monstrous intrusions into our universe. But, it must be emphasised, with an inordinate number of dick jokes included.

Personally, I found these books an absolute blast. If the idea of cosmic horror filled with dick jokes doesn't do it for you, you're probably doomed anyway.

ALL SYSTEMS RED by Martha Wells.

One of the few times I find myself agreeing with the hype: I'm not even sure how many Murderbot novellas and novels there are now, but if they're half as good as this one I'll almost certainly be buying them.

THE SCIENCE OF INTERSTELLAR by Kip Thorne.

When it comes to non-fiction books about extreme physics, I'm a sucker for punishment. A great deal of this of course went sailing straight over my head, but that doesn't make it any the less fascinating.

In fact, it's extraordinary just how much truly hard science underpins Christopher Nolan's epic science-fiction film, enough so that I really need to give it a re-watch.

Apart from the very deep physics-oriented considerations that went into the film, there's also a good amount of detail here regarding the production and the development of the script along with Kip Thorne negotiating his way through Hollywood as he tries to raise interest in making a science-fiction film like no other.