Bring me the increasingly massive head of Gary Gibson

Working from home now, and fair tearing through the new manuscript. It's a few weeks before I go on my holidays, and in the meantime the slow grind towards publication of Stealing Light continues with the occasional review appearing, like this one from Concatenation (thanks to Jim Steel for digging this one up).

British SF writers have a long tradition of excellent space opera. Yes, there is the average stuff, but equally every generation for all of the latter half of the twentieth century has seen some stunning British space opera. So the question SF aficionados will be asking is whether Gary Gibson's Stealing Light is run of the mill or is it something more special? The unequivocal answer has to be that the novel is decidedly ahead of much of the pack. If you had to place Gibson's Stealing Light somewhere in the contemporary landscape (and while I am not fond of pigeon-holing it does help in letting you know whether or not this is the sort of thing you are likely to enjoy) I would say that the novel comfortably sits between the space opera of Alastair Reynolds and Iain Banks. I understand that there are (at least) two more in the 'Light' sequence to come. I for one will be looking out for these. With two to follow, please do not think that this ends in a cliff-hanger enticing you to read on. Stealing Light neatly ties up all the plot strands so readers are not suckered in to having to buy the follow-ups. I liked that. Having said that, if the sequels are as complete in structure and plot-development as this then the series could well add up to more than the sum of its parts. We will see. This is Gary Gibson's third novel. If he can build on this standard with a new novel a year over the next decade then he could become a very big genre name.

Ooh, get me.

I could write rather a lot about what it turns out was going on at my workplace just prior to my starting to freelance for them, but present circumstances forbid it. Trust me, it's a doozy. But right now I'm quite enjoying doing the telecommuting work-from-home thing. It's rather relaxing, to my surprise. I'd be blogging more, but if the manuscript is calling, it's calling. There's also the BBC mini-mini script which is still chugging along through development, and a couple of interviews I've been asked to do, the questions to which need answering soonish.

People have told me their mail is getting bounced on its way to me, although I've in fact received it. Go figure. I'm not really that hard to track down - at the very worst, I check Myspace every couple of days so you could always leave a link there, and I'm on Facebook too now.