2016

Well, it's been a pig of a year, I think we can all agree. But, look: this website is about what I write and what I publish, so let's focus-down our disappointment onto that for the time being, shall we? Which is to say, onto two things, sciencefictionally speaking.

The first is non-fiction: the revised second edition of my Palgrave History of Science Fiction. This is a comprehensively revised version of the 2006 first edition, including wholly new chapters (a new last chapter presents an account of 21st-century SF) and lots of extra new stuff and titivations and so on. It's not cheap I'm afraid, but you might want to order a copy for your local library. As a for-instance.

The second is fiction, a short novel called Bethany about a man who goes back in time to shoot Christ with a high-powered rifle, with this peculiar wrinkle: he plans on killing him after he has resurrected but before he ascends to heaven. This is about 35,000 words of text, so 'short novel' (I'm not sure whether, under the SF community's fiercely regulated nomenclature, it counts as a novella, novelette or novelicule) describes it. Were it published in hard copy it would be something like 140-pages long. Ah, but it's not being published in hard-copy: it's available only as an e-book title, and you can, if you are so minded, buy it from here.

This is the only book-length (or small-book-length) fiction I'm publishing in 2016. Slim pickings, I know. But, unlike the Palgrave book, it is at least relatively cheap: $/€ 3.99, £2.49. For a whole novel! A short novel, but still. Next year Gollancz will be proper-publishing my next full-length-novel, The Real Town Murders. So there's that to look forward to. If you're a looking-forward, 2017-surely-can't-be-as-ghastly-as-2016 sort of a person.