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.
