New Story: 01001001 01000011 01000101

I’m pleased to announce that a new short story of mine has been published over on Pornokitsch, the genre-loving, BFS Award-winning, Hugo-nominated and entirely-safe-for-work-despite-the-name online magazine.
My story is titled ‘01001001 01000011 01000101’. Its inspired in equal parts by Ray Bradbury, Tom Stoppard, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and the 2004 Dennis Quaid / Jake Gyllenhaal disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow. It begins like this:

The book was big and heavy, which meant it would burn well.

Click here to read the whole thing. When you have finished you might like to tweet about it or share it on Facebook. If you’re still on Facebook, of course. Continue reading “New Story: 01001001 01000011 01000101”

Multiple Matters: Twins in Fiction

Watson: Sherlock, could it be…
Sherlock: It’s never twins.

I wrote a very short piece for Multiple Matters, the official magazine of TAMBA.


Twins are a irresistible plot device, particularly for science fiction and fantasy writers who can have their characters appear to be omnipresent, to teleport, or even return to life. The ploy works for the same reason that random people obsess over the multiples they meet at school or in a buggy at the shopping centre: twins are are part of our natural world, but they are also somehow magical. Continue reading “Multiple Matters: Twins in Fiction”

Crises and Conflicts from NewCon Press

I’m delighted to have a short story featured in Crises and Conflicts, a new anthology of space and military science fiction, just published by NewCon Press as part of their 10th Anniversary celebrations.
My piece, ‘Round Trip’ is a tale of loneliness, obsession, patience, and the tedious experience of waiting for a no-frills budget space shuttle to Jupiter (we’ve all be there).
The central science fiction idea in the story is that the universe is finite and curved, a theory developed by the cosmologist Professor Janna Levin. I can highly recommend her book How The Universe Got Its Spots and her beautiful Moth story ‘Life on a Mobius Strip‘. Continue reading “Crises and Conflicts from NewCon Press”

We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal

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Update: PDF of my story here.

I’m delighted to have a story featured in the anthology We Need to Talk, launched yesterday.  The publisher is Jurassic London—here’s the blurb from their website:

All of us, at some point, are involved in difficult conversations. Whether that’s tough talks with clients or bosses, or break-ups, or coming out, or telling someone you love them, or giving advice to that friend who just doesn’t want to hear it. Some conversations are even more difficult, as sufferers of any potentially serious illness will know.

But one thing’s for sure, these conversations are fascinating. So much so that we’ve teamed up with Kindred and The Eve Appeal, to launch a writing competition on the theme of difficult conversations.

My story is called ‘Frozen Out’, an awkward conversation between a husband and wife.  Its inclusion in the anthology is all the sweeter because the other eighteen stories are uniformly excellent.

All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to The Eve Appeal to help fund its important work fighting women’s cancers.  Hard copies of the book are available from Foyles, either in-store or via their online shop.  You can get an e-book version from Amazon.

We Need To Talk was launched yesterday at Foyles on the Southbank.  Jenny Aims has posted about it on the Kindred blog.  There’s a photo of me in it.

We Need To Talk is an awareness raising project, so let’s be aware.  The Eve Appeal chief executive Athena Lamnisos wrote the afterword for the book, and it was published earlier this week on the Huffington Post, under the title ‘We Need To Talk About Vaginas‘.

Continue reading “We Need To Talk launched for The Eve Appeal”