Evening's Empires

So I've been working on this novel, Evening's Empires, for the past 18 months, and I've just finished the final version.  Or at least, the version that's sent to my editor (squirted down the tubes of the internet, rather than rehearsing the old rituals of realising that I'd run out of paper and/or laser-printer toner).  After this, there will be the editor's comments to deal with (and, usually, another so-called polishing draft), and then the copy-edit, the proofs . . .  But the part where I spend a long time alone in a room, trying to work out what my characters are doing, and why, is over.  For this one, at least.

It's the fourth novel in the Quiet War series, and the last for a while.  There are still stories to be told, I think, about the Black Fleet, the empire of the Trues, and ordinary life in the long golden age of the Great Expansion, but for now it's time for something else.

A few alternative titles:

Hari's Game
Kabadiwallah
The Last Voyage of Pabuji's Gift
Forgotten Things
Bring Me the Head of Dr Gagarian
These Ruins Are Inhabited
When the Saints
Human History

This Thing's The Play . . .

. . . that I wrote, with Anne Billson, Sean Hogan, Maureen McHugh, Stephen Volk, and ringmaster Kim Newman, who provided the frame and linkage for the five stories in the portmanteau piece.  It's enormous fun to be part of this project; we've just done the read-through with a great bunch of actors, and now it's time to fine-tune for rehearsals.  A very different experience from the usual sit-alone-in-a-room-in-front-of-a-screen stuff.

The Hallowe'en Sessions's run is 29 October - 3 November at the Leicester Square Theatre, London.  Tickets £15 full price, £12 concessions, available for booking now.  Here's the blurb:

A group of mental patients gather for a therapy session to each recount the terrifying events that caused them to lose their minds. But is their mysterious therapist all she appears to be, and will her course of treatment prove to be kill or cure?

Cigarette Burns and an award-winning team of horror/fantasy creators join forces to bring you a nightmarish evening filled with primal screams. Writers Kim Newman (Anno Dracula, Moriarty – The Hound of the D’Urbervilles), Stephen Volk (The Awakening, Ghost Watch), Anne Billson (Suckers, Stiff Lips) Paul McAuley (Fairyland, The Quiet War trilogy), Maura McHugh (Jennifer Wilde, Róisín Dubh) and director Sean Hogan (The Devil’s Business, Little Deaths) take you on a head trip through the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where no one – least of all the audience – escapes with their nerves or sanity intact…