Audiobooks and honorable mentions

You can hear a sample of Clare Corbett’s reading The Way Through the Woods here (you can also purchase the recording there too!). There’s a rather nice review of the (dead tree version of the) book here (super-spoilery). And I’m very pleased that my short story “War Without End” received an Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best SF anthology. The story appears in the NewCon Press anthology...

Writing for pleasure

I’m coming to the end of what’s been an extremely busy period of writing projects and teaching commitments, and last week was my first chance to play with words for entirely my own purposes for quite some time. At this time of the year, my imagination usually wanders back to Middle-earth. Yesterday was the ninth birthday of a mailing list that I set up in the wake of the release of Peter Jackson’s film of The Fellowship of the Ring. The mailing list is a place where people who enjoy writing Tolkien-based fanfiction can gather to share stories. For those...

Doctor Who: The Way through the Woods

Exciting things going on in advance of the release of my new Doctor Who novel, The Way through the Woods. An extract is now available on Amazon (and you can pre-order the Kindle edition there too). And don’t miss the extracts from the other two books coming out at the same time: Dead of Winter by James Goss and Hunter’s Moon by Paul Finch. I’ll be signing copies of The Way through the Woods at Forbidden Planet in London on Saturday April 16th. James Goss will be there too signing Dead of Winter. And don’t worry if you can’t make it, because...

New publications this week

My Eleventh Doctor novel The King’s Dragon is now available for download as an audiobook read by Nicholas Briggs (published by AudioGo). You can download it from here. In the city-state of Geath, the King lives in a golden hall, and the people want for nothing. Everyone is happy and everyone is rich. Or so it seems. When the Doctor, Amy and Rory look beneath the surface, they discover a city of secrets. In dark corners, strange creatures are stirring. At the heart of the hall, a great metal dragon oozes gold. Then the Herald appears, demanding the return of her...

Some questions…

…for World Book Day: The book I am reading: Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles. The book I am writing: Currently exists on the back of two pieces of A4 printout, and is made of hope. The book I love most: Hardly original, but it is The Lord of the Rings. The last book I received as a gift: I will say Jeremy Dyson’s short story collection The Cranes that Build the Cranes, because I have just finished reading it. The last book I gave as a gift: Philip Kerr, The One From the Other, due to be dispatched via BookMooch tomorrow. The nearest book on my desk:...

The future must not be beige

Oh Outcasts, with your big budget, your fabulous cast, your lovely starscapes – why were you so bad? [1] What in the name of God happens in our near-future to make human beings so humourless and interchangeable? Why do they all buy their clothes at Gap? Why was there a stupid conversation in which a man and a woman complained to each other (respectively) about women and men? How does Gap survive the apocalypse? And why oh why would anyone paint the future magnolia? Gods of the Tellybox, why do you taunt me? Last year, I all but convinced myself that television – an...

Whoviana

Some Doctor Who related things, some of which involve me. Issue 9 of splendid webzine The Terrible Zodin is now available for download here, including a little interview with me. TTZ’s Who-ish version of Monopoly, Logopoly, is also available to download for the festive season, see here. Coming in January – the Science Fiction Foundation’s volume of essays on new Doctor Who: The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the new Doctor Who, edited by Simon Bradshaw, Graham Sleight, and Tony Keen, with a foreword by Robert Shearman. Full list...

Two octogenarians

Last Friday I went to hear Chinua Achebe give the first Annual Lecture in African Studies at the Law Faculty here in the Unreal City. On Monday I went to hear Russell Hoban speak about his novel Riddley Walker, which is thirty years old this year. The Law Faculty was packed for Achebe (eighty years old). I got there forty minutes before Achebe was due to speak, and found myself at the end of a queue of several hundred people, with more arriving. We were directed to an overflow room that had been arranged with a video link, but I sneaked past the stewards and grabbed a...