Friday, January 29, 2010

The Gondolier in Galician

The Gondolier has been published in Galician on Nova Fantasia, the site that last year published Travel by Numbers.

Galician is the 27th langauge for The Gondolier and the 9th language it has been published in.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Reading List

The BSFA Award shortlist has been anounced, and unfortunately I've not read any of the 4 short-listed novels. I don't see how I'll have tome to read them before April either.

I've read Albedo One #37 and Interzone #226 in the past couple of weeks, as well as At All Costs, the latest Honor Harrington book from David Weber. I say latest, but it seems to be 4 years old. It's taken me that long to get round to it. I've now started Colin Harvey's Winter Song and my contributor copy of Galactika finaly arrived today. That won't take long as I can't read Hungarian.

Lined up I have:

Cherie Priests two books Boneshaker and Clementine, which will be my first steampunk novels
The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, one of my favourite authors
Journeys: Stories by Ian R. Macleod, his forthcoming new collection

Friday, January 22, 2010

Spanish Bibliography

The Spanish website Tercera Fundacion keeps track of speculative fiction published in Spanish and provides comprehensive magazine and author listings. I have my own bibliography page there.

It only mentions Spain-based publications, not the Spanish stories published in Argentina, but it's a nice reference.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Roadmaker in Spanish


The Spanish translation of the original Roadmaker story appears in this month's edition of Aurora Bitzine.

This is my second story in Aurora Bitzine and my tenth story in Spanish.

Roadmaker has already been translated into Catalan for Catarsi and accepted by Hebrew webzine Bli Panika.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Just a Novella

The story I've been writing with Jonathan C Gillespie, Quivira, reached the conclusion this weekend. It totals just over 17,500 words, making it just qualify as a novella. It will shrink below this marker by the time we've edited it, which will be an advantage when we come to look for a home for it.

Monday, January 11, 2010

First New Language of the Year

A work colleague translated my short Roadmaker story Dog's Best Friend into Bengali, or Bangla, for me last year. The translation has just been accepted by Bangla webzine Sonajhuri and will appear in their February issue. The editor says I will be the first non-Indian writer to appear on the site.

Saturday, January 09, 2010

A Fourth Gareth

Issue #37 of Albedo One contains a story by Gareth Stack - his first published story in fact. This takes the total numner of SF authors called Gareth to 4, as far as I am aware.

- Gareth D Jones
- Gareth Owens
- Gareth L Powell
- Gareth Stack

Of course there may be more. Drop me a line if you're an SF author called Gareth.

Surprisingly there aren't that many authors called Jones, considering it's a pretty common surname.

Friday, January 08, 2010

One More Mention for Roadmaker

Prolific reader and reviewer Richard Horton provides his annual summary of reading over at The Elephant Forgets. In his round-up of Jupiter magazine he mentions two stories that were also on my list of favourites and gives a mention to my Roadmaker story Dog's Best Friend.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

SFF Meta Review Site

I've discovered a rather fabulous new review webite called SFF Meta. It collates reviews from a growing number of different review sites and gives an average score. Each reviewer has their own page, and it's actually a better summary page than I have here,though only for my more recent reviews that have appeared at SF Crowsnest.

Comparing my reviews with the averages, I seem to be a bit more generous than most. Of course we don't give scores on SF Crowsnest so the SFF Meta people have assigned a score based on the tone of the review. A couple of these are a bit optimistic, but overall I found it a great site.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Magazine Review: Interzone #225


Adam Tredowski’s run of cover art comes to an end with issue #225 of Interzone. Once again he portrays a scene of fabulous technology imbued with an aura of mystic grandeur. It’s a picture of intricate detail and complexity that bears lengthy scrutiny. Inside the glossy covers the fiction continues to live up to the high standard set in recent issues, with such perennial favourites as Jason Sanford and Lavie Tidhar making welcome appearances.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Book Review: The Prisoner by Carlos J Cortes


Having spent time working on various effluent treatment plants I know something about waste water, drains and even sewers. Not nearly as much as Carlos Cortez has discovered in his research for The Prisoner though. About a third of the book is spent in the sewers beneath Washington DC, where the author’s first-hand experiences shine through in wonderfully varied and graphic descriptions of life beneath the streets.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Book Review: Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams


Little did I know twenty years ago when I first became enthralled by The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy that twenty years later I would be completing a review of the entire series to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first book. That sentence may seem rather long and unnecessarily complicated, but its typical of the rambling ideas that Douglas Adams weaves throughout his work. His sentences are usually funnier and more clever than that though.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Magazine Review: Midnight Street #13


As is the case with many a small press magazine, the editor of Midnight Street has announced that issue #13 is to be the final print edition. Future issues will be in PDF format, but there will also be an annual anthology of original stories not seen in the electronic version. Good news for lovers of the kind of dark speculative fiction that is the speciality of this magazine. It’s a publication with a definite feel to it: a very British, often pessimistic air that experiments with the edges of reality in a subtle but effective way.

Read the rest of my review at SF Crowsnest.

Monday, January 04, 2010

Three AM


The new issue of Golden Visions magazine is now out and contains my story Three AM. The story is set aboard the orbital habitat Astropolis, the setting for my previous stories The Blind Collaborators, Travel by Numbers and Up To My Neck In It.

It's a bit of an experimental story - the same incident told from three different viewpoints. It's a bit of a mundane story that is barely SF except for the setting. I enjoyed working on it though.