Twenny-twenny

Here, to quote the Chemical Brothers, we go. And what does 2020 hold, for me? Some books, one appearance, and otherwise a considered and proportionate, I think, public-profile autodeëmphasis. So it goes.

Bookwise, I'm talking about a non-fiction on the end of the world (working title, which the publishers may or may not wear for the actual publication: It's Nigh or Never) and a fiction title for Gollancz (working title, which the publishers may or may not wear for the actual publication: The This). The novel may appear late 2020 or early 2021. It is a hive-mind novel, divided between a near-future London-set storyline and a further-future US-set one, saying stuff about social media and identity and community. It's also a novelisation of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, a fact which will surely disendear it to any potential readers who were put off by the Kantian conceit of The Thing Itself, a book simultaneously my best work and biggest popular failure. The non-fiction work is about the end of the world.

Otherwise, I'm the fourth of four GoHs at Eastercon this year: an honour to me, and, I suspect, the easier gig of the four: attention will be on my three more famous and noteworthy fellow GoHs, allowing me to wander about, chat with people, and generally keep as low a profile as is consistent with GoHness. I shall be treating it as a vastly less flamboyent lower key Elton John Farewell Tour kind of gig, and am looking forward thereafter to a broadbrush policy of individual declination and general going-into-the-West.

I'm tinkering with some final revisions to The This as we speak, and blocking out another novel, perhaps to be called Purgatory Mount. And a happy new year to all.