About This Year

I'm very pleased to announce that two of the stories I published this year will appear in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirtieth Annual Collection (full table of contents here). 'The Man' was first published in issue 1.2 of the new science-fiction magazine, Arc Infinity; 'Macy Minnot's Last Christmas On Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden' was first published in the anthology Edge of Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan, which collects thirteen stories about the colonisation of the Solar System (my contribution is a Quiet War story that frames a set of Quiet War stories). 'Macy Minnot . . .' was also selected by Jonathan Strahan for his The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven, which also includes many and various stories from an eclectic range of sources.

I also published two stories in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, ‘Bruce Springsteen’, and 'Antarctica Starts Here', and contributed a self-contained story, or chapter, or segment, to Stephen Jones' mosaic novel Zombie Apocalypse! 2, which is by no means as tongue-in-cheek as the exclamation mark suggests: a lovingly designed collection of journal and diary entries, emails, newspaper headlines, internet posts and other documents that detail the ongoing struggle between surviving humans and increasingly intelligent and organised zombie hordes. Also wearing my other hat, or William Shatner mask, of horror writer, I contributed to the portmanteau play 'The Hallowe'en Sessions'. With a framing story by Kim Newman, and other episodes by Stephen Volk, Maura McHugh, Anne Billson, and Sean Hogan, it had a short, sold-out run in the West End's Leicester Square Theatre, directed by Sean Hogan.  It was somewhat daunting, but in the end enormously enjoyable, to be a small part of this energetic and imaginative collaboration. An audiobook version of the play may well appear next year.

This year also saw the publication of my third Quiet War novel, In The Mouth of the Whale, and the completion of the fourth, Evening's Empires. That's gone through the first edit stage, and at the beginning of the year I'll be dealing with the copy edit and the proofs. It's scheduled for publication in July 2013. I've also dealt with the editing and proofreading stages of a big retrospective collection of my short stories, A Very British History, which PS Publishing will be releasing in April 2013. There'll be a Jim Burns' cover, and a couple of limited editions with various extras.

I also published two short ebooks for Amazon's Kindle, a spooky novelette set in early Victorian London, Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple, and another collaboration with Kim Newman, the post-alien invasion story Prisoners of the Action. And regular readers will know that I'm currently publishing more Quiet War short stories here on the blog, at the rate of one a week. When I have twelve or so I'll collect them in a new ebook, along with two or three longer stories and other pieces.

All of this fiction writing meant that, apart from a couple of book reviews, I had little time or energy left to pursue my ambition to write more nonfiction. Maybe next year. First, and somewhat behind schedule, I have to work up my plans for several new novels.  But before I do that, somewhat exhausted by contemplating this list, I might sit down with a cup of tea and a mince pie . . .