SF writer Gary Gibson

So I'm playing around with ideas for what to do once Against Gravity is out of the way. Not that it's actually completed until the editor at Tor has decided what does or doesn't need to be changed: the edits on Angel Stations took a good few months last summer, and for all I know it could be just as much of a slog with AG. However, once I've finished AG as much as it can be finished before that process starts, I'll be thinking of other projects.

I may have said this before, but the most likely by far will be an extensive rewrite of my first, unpublished novel, Touched by an Angel. Except I'l be renaming it Leviathan's Fall. I've had some ideas floating around in my head, amongst many others. Here's a few:

a novel about the hunt for a fifth columnist in Hollywood just before America enters the Second World War, centring around the production of a certain famous movie, and also reflecting some of the issues raised in that movie.

Black Knight - sort of a rock and roll comedy based around a heavy metal band (called Black Knight) touring the UK in the early Eighties, but more about an obsessive fan who's determined to get to meet with the increasingly psychotic and delusional guitarist of same.

Real World Kills, which idea I detailed to some extent last year in this blog, playing around with virtual economies (but a lot more fun than that might sound)

And one or two other ideas, frankly too bizarre for me to be sure they'd even make sense if I tried to write them down here.

When you get a book contract, there's an understanding that whatever you're going to write is not too distant from whatever you sold to get that deal. That means I'm expected to write science fiction or, as my editor Peter Lavery said to me when I met him at Eastercon last year, 'now, you're not going to write any books about magic cats, are you?"

... and ever since, I've been trying to think of a way I can ... no, better not go there.

Which means if I want to go off writing non-genre books about fifth columnists or Hollywood or heavy metal bands, I'll (rather unsurprisingly) have to go somewhere else with them. I don't mind; I'm quite happy to write solidly sf genre books for a long time yet. But everyone looks for a chance to do other stuff as well.

Whether or not they actually get a chance to do that, the modern publishing market being what it is - that's probably another story.