Squidpunk!

In which the Vandermeers’ seeming boundless energy, creativity and inventiveness that has brought the world so many neat anthologies in recent times (Steampunk / The New Weird / FastShips, Black Sails) finally made them jump the shark…erm, squid. I hear they’ve even got Margaret Atwood writing a squid-in-space piece. Can’t wait!

I Know This World Is Killing You

Alison by Andrew Humphrey is the long awaited first venture in ages** into novel publishing by TTA Press. It finally hit the streets in February and my copy arrived at the weekend. Now, I don’t have a lot of time for reading at the moment, but whenever I get a new book I can never […]

Loggorhea Redux

Earlier this year we saw the publication of John Klima’s excellent anthology, Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. I mentioned it at the time (partially because it features my The Euonymist, partly because it’s a fab book), but to recap, this is a marvelous collection of stories inspired by the championship words in the US […]

Ebooks, and all that jazz

Prompted by the launch of Amazon’s new ebook reader, Gary Gibson has written an excellent and passionate post on the virtues of electronic books. I’ve been feeling myself change my mind about this for some time, slowly shifting from a staunch paper’n’printer to acknowledging that with paper costs and all that, the future can only […]

Stealing Light

The new book from Gary Gibson out this week from TorUK/PanMacmillan is called “Stealing Light“. According to John Berlyne’s exceptionally positive review Gary’s quickly establishing himself as a star of the “Scottish school”. Knowing Gary’s disinclination towards national appellations, I’m not sure how he’d feel about that claim. But I think it’s pretty accurate. And […]

And the winner isn’t…

Well no surprises there. Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things deservedly won the Best Collection statue at the British Fantasy awards. Well done to Mr G, and to all the other winners. Especially pleased to see Gary Couzens pick up the Best Anthology award for Extended Play, which featured great stories from Phil Raines, Marion Arnott, Rosanne […]

And the winner is…

Having been fortunate enough to have both of my books shortlisted for awards, I’d have to say that I’m generally in favour of them. Sales aside, it’s nice to know that people thought well enough of your work to want to mark it as worthy in some way. It’s not only gratifying, it gives a […]

Shriek (If ya wanna go faster)

Fans of Jeff Vandermeer’s astonishing 2006 novel “Shriek: An Afterword” (out now in paperback in the UK) will know all about the city of Ambergris and its facility for spilling/creeping/oozing out of the confining pages of mere books and into other media. In probably its most audacious attempt yet to cross-infect humanity there now exists […]

Stop Press!

Just heard that The Ephemera has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award. It’ll be presented at Fantasycon in September. I’ve already signed up, but I’m not holding my breath – the competition looks fierce!

Recommendations (1)

“Brasyl” by Ian McDonald Following on from 2005’s superb take on India-around-the-corner, “River Of Gods”, McDonald’s take on the glorious technicolour society of Brazil is as lush as the Amazon and as slick as the 21st century TV executives featured in one of its three strands. It’s wildly imaginative and it’s filled with truth. It […]