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:
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.
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.
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.
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!
