October 2013 Archives

(Full resolution version here)

Behold: the cover of the Orbit (UK/Aus/NZ) edition of "The Rhesus Chart", Laundry Files #5. It's due out in the first week of July next year, and you can pre-order it now (here's the Amazon Kindle edition link). I'm pleased to say that this is the first Laundry Files novel to debut in hardcover in the UK—a sign of great expectations by my publisher!

(If you're on the other side of the Atlantic, do not worry: there will be a US hardcover and ebook from my usual publisher Ace: I've even got the final cover art. They just want me to sit on it until November 12th for some reason. As Ace is an imprint of Berkeley Publishing Group, which in turn was part of Penguin, who merged with Random House to form Random Penguin Penguin Random House a couple of months ago, I suspect they're still getting their internal product release procedures straightened out.)

Here's the first sentence:

"Don't be silly, Bob," said Mo, "everybody knows vampires don't exist!"

(In other news: blogging is quiet right now because I am in Brighton for WFC 2013. After which I will be proceeding cross-country to Oxford for an evening with the Oxford University SF Society, and thence to Nottingham, for Novacon, before driving home. And then it will be time to start work on the next book, and acquire a pair of kittens, in no particular order ...)

Gratuitous link of the day: SpyMeSat is an iOS app that lets you know which satellites are looking at you. (No, it probably doesn't have the Evolved Enhanced CRYSTAL or Zirconic spysats, but these days your typical Indian or South Korean earth resources satellite probably has peepers on a par with the NRO's Keyhole series—we've come a long way, baby!—and that's before we get into the private sector.)

But none of this should surprise anyone.

I've been quiet lately because I'm between trips and between books; aside from deliberating over copy edit changes to "The Rhesus Chart" I'm not actually working right now. (The next novel-shaped death march is scheduled for mid-November.) On the other hand, I can't stay idle for long. So it's computer neepery time!

We have verified that the Queen is not, in fact, a Reptoid. Neither is Prince Philip.

Reptoids cannot interbreed with humans. The idea that the Royal Family are Reptoids is alarmist nonsense.

However ...

My latest novella, "Equoid", is available in print ebook from Wednesday October 16th. It's only $1.99, or about £1.49 if you're in the UK (a chunk of that is sales tax). As it's my birthday on Friday, if you feel like buying an ebook I'll consider it a donation to my beer fund :)

You can buy it from various American ebook stores:

[Amazon] [Barnes&Noble] [Apple iBooks] [Google Play] [Kobo]

You can also buy it in the UK:

[Amazon.co.uk] [Apple iBooks (UK)] [Google Play]

(No W. H. Smiths link currently available because whoops).

(No, Microsoft Word was not used in the creation of this work.)

I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...

The act of reading is inextricably linked to the intertwined structures of language and consciousness ...

(Another polemic from Sprint Beyond The Book at the Frankfurt Book Fair ... )

In the future, readers will not go in search of books to read. Feral books will stalk readers, sneak into their ebook libraries, and leap out to ambush them. Readers will have to beat books off with a baseball bat; hold them at bay with a flaming torch: refuse to interact: and in extreme cases, feign dyslexia, blindness or locked-in syndrome to avoid being subjected to literature.

You think I'm exaggerating for effect, don't you?

I am in the center of Frankfurt for the Book Festival, and I plan to hang out in a beer hall on Friday evening. Venue to be decided (and I'll update this entry when I get somewhere definite): in the meantime, do any locals have any suggestions for places that serve good beer and that won't be impossibly crowded/noisy?

The venue: The pub is called the Twelve Apostles (in German: Zu den Zwölf Apostel), Rosenberger Straße 1. Nearest public transport: Konstablerwache. I'm going to aim to be there by 8pm (slightly vague due to the fact that the book fair is a zoo — around 200,000 people through the doors — and I need to freshen up and find vegan food for $WIFE first). If you can read this, you're welcome!

I'm in Frankfurt, at the Book Fair, on the first day of the Sprint Beyond the Book event, wherein a team from ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and others (myself included) try to produce a book on the future of the book in a little under 72 hours.

And I have a question for you. First, the preamble ...

I'm going to be at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week, because Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, in conjunction with Intel Press, are doing an interesting project: they're putting together a small team of publishing, journalism, academic, and futurist folks, and, in 72 hours, they're going to write and publish a book. The theme will be What is the future of publishing? To quote Dr. Ed Finn of ASU:

Why do this? We're tired of e-books as they exist now. They are, by and large, poor emulations of printed books, and they could be so much more. Intel's developing a revolutionary new digital publishing platform. We're going to put it to the test. We want to imagine the future of collaborative authorship and publishing by doing it, and we're hoping to invite hundreds of people beyond our hardy on-site band of pioneers to join in.

So I'm going along, to help crowdsource a book at the Frankfurt Book Fair. How cool is that?