Richard K. Morgan's Blog

And Home of the Brave Pepper-Spray Wielding Uniformed Thugs.

So this week Peter Watts, brilliant Canadian hard SF writer, marine biology PhD, good e-cquaintance of mine, and by all accounts all round nice guy in the flesh, was pepper-sprayed, beaten up, and imprisoned by US border guards as he tried to leave the US for Canada. His crime apparently consisted of having the temerity, when pulled over, to exit his vehicle and ask what was going on (twice, because they ignored him the first time h...

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So my local DVD rental store has this 3 for 2 deal on new(ish) releases, and as a result I've recently found myself watching a lot of add-on, look-it's-for-no-extra-charge-might-as-well-have-it, third-choice movies.

Depressingly, a high proportion of these have been SF.

Equally depressingly, on viewing these movies, my lowered, oh-well-not-like-I-paid-for-it expectations have been pretty much seamlessly met.

Is it just me? Let's see. Here, in alphabetical order, are the last three SF mov...

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Very happy right now - my obsessively pre-ordered Black Rebel Motorcycle Club live CD/DVD package showed up this week, and in between zipping in and out of the country, I finally managed to grab the time to sit down and watch the DVD in full.

Fuck me, I'd forgotten how good those guys are.

I saw this tour, back in 2007, though I had to drive four hundred miles to my old hometown, Norwich, to see it and the gig itself was a little soured by segments of the audience who evidently considered t...

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So - long time, no post. Is my life really that boring? (Don't answer that). Have I really sat in a puddle of disinterest since I got back from Australia, and done nothing worth talking about since?

Well, no, in fact I've been doing a bunch of stuff that I'm not allowed to talk about. Or more correctly a bunch of stuff I can now talk about a bit - but you can't tell anyone else about this, because it's a secret, just between us. Shsh.

Happened like this.....

About a year ago, and out of the ...

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So it's out - the B format MMP of The Steel Remains, complete with reader-drawn map of the Yhelteth Empire and Trelayne League territories to the north. A handsome piece of work if ever I saw one and, I am assured by its author, utterly geographically sound. Not to mention revised numerous times with fanatical attention to detail.

See, the competition winner, one Ravi Shankar, turned out to be not just a fan of my books, not just a fantasy fan in general, but also an enthusiastic amateur fant

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So here's how it works:

I'm taking a shower and through the steamed up glass I spot something on the bathroom floor - something organic and oddly twisted looking, and pretty much the size of a couple of my larger fingers folded over each other. I step out of the shower, curious; and almost at once I realise that this something (in fact it's a broken segment from the strap on my wife's leather toiletry bag) is neither alive nor dangerous.

And I'm disappointed. To the depths of my being.

Quick tu

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Hmmm......time for an update, perhaps. Let me just get out of my bathers here and find a terminal....

Okay, first things first; here's an up-to-date list of the gigs I'll be doing on the eastern side of Australia this month, starting with Melbourne, next week:

Guest speaker at Melbourne Science Fiction Club, Friday 7 May @ 9pm Address: St David's West Brunswick Uniting Church, 74 Melville Rd, Brunswick West, VIC http://msfc.sf.org.au/index.php

Guest speaker at Nova Mob, Saturday 8 May @ 12pm Addre

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Formal notice: the Great January Sale in February and March will end at midnight GMT on Sunday March 29th. Payments received before that deadline will be processed and the books sent out. Anything after that, I'm afraid, will fall into the void.

The sale has been a great success - I now have the novel experience of being able to move from one side of my office to another without tripping over a pile of books or a cardboard box. So many thanks to all who took part - we must do this again someti

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Yes - some of you will probably have already noticed that The Cold Commands has surreptitiously changed its name to The Dark Commands, and is also now showing a UK publication date in mid-2010.

Sad but true. On both counts.

The title change alone is a big disappointment for me - I loved the alliteration of the thing (my London editor's idea, curse him, not mine), and the thematic implications. But unfortunately, the way the narrative is unfolding there's nothing remotely cold about any of it; wor

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Happy New Year!

Bit of a crisis of office space right now. I have author copies of my stuff piling up everywhere, and it's getting so I've forgotten what colour the floor beneath all the cardboard boxes is. So - for a limited period only - I'm offering a bunch of my books for sale.

Basically, the deal is this: I'll sign and/or personalise to e-mail order as requested, and then sell you the resulting copy for cover price plus postage. If that seems fair, all you need to participate are:

1) A pa

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