Reviews, interviews, books to come

So anyway, the hardback of Nova War has been out for a few days and appears to be doing really well. Tor have taken off the 'movie blurb' type line from the version of the book cover that's been visible on Amazon and elsewhere, which is good, but have used a picture of me on the inside back flap that made me shriek when I saw it. Unfortunately the only person I can blame is myself, since I'm the one who gave it to them (slaps self around head).

(I am occasionally inflicted with the desire to have an author photo where I 'm standing with a copy of one of my books held up in front of my face. I once saw a guitarist on the cover of a magazine holding a 'stick' electric guitar upside down by the neck, so that the body of the guitar obscured his features. I've always been a bit, shall we say, ambivalent about the whole notion of author photos, and so this particular conceit holds some appeal to me.)

I was invited to go down to London not long after i first signed to Tor, partly so they could get their photographer to do a quick, professional shoot for the book covers. I never got round to it. But after seeing that, maybe next year I'll make the time to go down there and let them snap me.

I sent them a slightly better picture recently, and that's the one that appears in the most recent issue of Sci Fi Now magazine (where I have a short article on science fiction book covers, revolving around the poll I ran here with my editor to see which cover readers preferred out of a choice of two).

There are reviews of Nova War at Walker of Worlds, The Guardian, Fantasy Book Critic, and in the latest issue of SFX magazine, and so far they've all been very positive, I'm glad to say. There's an interview with me here, about the writing of Nova War and various and sundry matters, and it's crossposted here.

What else? I'm working on a proposal for a new book to come after Empire of Light, the third Dakota Merrick book. It was previously under the working title of The Array, but now I'm calling it Final Days, which has a good chance of being the actual title. That means putting together an outline - done - and maybe a sample chapter or two for flavour. I'm also thinking seriously about writing another book set in the Stealing Light universe, possibly with a completely new set of characters, and possibly set several hundred years after the events in Empire of Light.

There's good reasons to do so. One of the things that made writing Nova War and Empire of Light a relatively smooth process was that I was working in a ready-made 'universe', something that's benefited many other authors, most notably the likes of Iain Banks, Neal Asher, and Alistair Reynolds. I'm pretty sure there's more I can do in that setting.

I have a Mind Meld piece coming up on 'first sf books' for SF Signal, and I'll post a link when that goes online. For what it's worth, although my blogging rate has decreased a little over the years, I'm starting to use Twitter (there's a live feed over there on the right hand bar, if you're viewing the web page) more and more these days, so that's another source of occasional information.