That Was The Year That Was
A short, self-indulgent roundup of everything I published in 2014. Please bear with me. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
Novels
In February, the revised version of Confluence trilogy - Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars - was republished in a fat omnibus of close to 1000 pages that included two related short stories. I think that the trilogy contains some of my best work, so I'm very pleased to see it back in print. The mass-market paperback will be published in August 2015.
The mass-market paperback of Evening's Empires, the last in the Quiet War series, was published in April.
I was a guest of Polcon 2014 in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, and of the Bucharest International Literary Festival in Romania. The trips to Poland and Romania coincided with publication of Polish editions of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and a Romanian translation of The Quiet War.
Non-fiction
I was thrilled to be commissioned to write one of the British Film Institute's Film Classics books - a study of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. This was one of nine special editions on science-fiction films published in October as part of the BFI's season on science-fiction films, Days of Terror and Wonder, that's just ended. Writing it was a steep learning curve, and also something of a sprint. It was commissioned in January, and I turned in the final draft in May. So now I have an academic study complete with footnotes - more than a hundred of them - in my bibliography. And I was able to present Terry Gilliam with a copy.
Short Fiction
I published just one new short story this year - 'The Return of the King', in Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame (2014), the third in a series of linked portmanteau books edited by Stephen Jones. 'The Return of the King' closes out a story cycle that began with its heroine attempting to cure the heir to the crown of the effects of a zombie bite.
My short story 'Transitional Forms' was republished in Gardener Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, 31st Annual Collection, 'The Man' was republished in Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, and a Spanish translation of 'The Choice' was published in Terra Nova 3. I was guest of honour at Fanasticon in Copenhagen, where the organisers published Under Mars, a collection of my short stories translated into Danish. Oh, and Italian translations of two of my short stories were published as a little ebook.
Upcoming
I didn't publish a new novel in 2014, but I did finish one and write the first draft of another. Something Coming Through will be published in the UK on February 19th 2015, and I'm currently working on a companion novel (a stand alone that shares the same future history, rather than a direct sequel), Into Everywhere. Both are about the effects of first contact with playfully enigmatic aliens, the Jackaroo, and the weird stuff left behind by former clients of the Jackaroo - about the uses we find for technology, and the uses technology finds for us.
A novelette, 'Planet of Fear', will be published in Old Venus, an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, in March 2015. Also out sometime in 2015 should be 'Wild Honey', a story I wrote in November and sold to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Not a bad way to round off the year.
New Year's Resolution: write more short stories. And, as always, fail better.
Novels
In February, the revised version of Confluence trilogy - Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars - was republished in a fat omnibus of close to 1000 pages that included two related short stories. I think that the trilogy contains some of my best work, so I'm very pleased to see it back in print. The mass-market paperback will be published in August 2015.
The mass-market paperback of Evening's Empires, the last in the Quiet War series, was published in April.
I was a guest of Polcon 2014 in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, and of the Bucharest International Literary Festival in Romania. The trips to Poland and Romania coincided with publication of Polish editions of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, and a Romanian translation of The Quiet War.
Non-fiction
I was thrilled to be commissioned to write one of the British Film Institute's Film Classics books - a study of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. This was one of nine special editions on science-fiction films published in October as part of the BFI's season on science-fiction films, Days of Terror and Wonder, that's just ended. Writing it was a steep learning curve, and also something of a sprint. It was commissioned in January, and I turned in the final draft in May. So now I have an academic study complete with footnotes - more than a hundred of them - in my bibliography. And I was able to present Terry Gilliam with a copy.
Short Fiction
I published just one new short story this year - 'The Return of the King', in Zombie Apocalypse! Endgame (2014), the third in a series of linked portmanteau books edited by Stephen Jones. 'The Return of the King' closes out a story cycle that began with its heroine attempting to cure the heir to the crown of the effects of a zombie bite.
My short story 'Transitional Forms' was republished in Gardener Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction, 31st Annual Collection, 'The Man' was republished in Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane, and a Spanish translation of 'The Choice' was published in Terra Nova 3. I was guest of honour at Fanasticon in Copenhagen, where the organisers published Under Mars, a collection of my short stories translated into Danish. Oh, and Italian translations of two of my short stories were published as a little ebook.
Upcoming
I didn't publish a new novel in 2014, but I did finish one and write the first draft of another. Something Coming Through will be published in the UK on February 19th 2015, and I'm currently working on a companion novel (a stand alone that shares the same future history, rather than a direct sequel), Into Everywhere. Both are about the effects of first contact with playfully enigmatic aliens, the Jackaroo, and the weird stuff left behind by former clients of the Jackaroo - about the uses we find for technology, and the uses technology finds for us.
A novelette, 'Planet of Fear', will be published in Old Venus, an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, in March 2015. Also out sometime in 2015 should be 'Wild Honey', a story I wrote in November and sold to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Not a bad way to round off the year.
New Year's Resolution: write more short stories. And, as always, fail better.
posted by Paul McAuley at 5:08 pm
2 Comments:
I'd say Confluence is simply the single best SF novel of the 90s. I agree with you that it contains some of your best work. I re-read it in 2014 because of the omnibus; since then I've been tinkering with the idea of writing about it, but it's so rich and vast it's hard to know how to approach it.
Thanks Adam, that's hugely uplifting. I really do hope that I haven't accidentally written a novel impossible to review though. Deliberately - that's another game.
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