Hampstead Heath, 28/12/25

 

That Was The Year That Was

Reading (in no especial order):

Helm, Sarah Hall; Pulse, Cynan Jones; The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk; The Land in Winter, Andrew Miller; Landfall, James Bradley; When There Are Wolves Again, E.J. Swift; Greyhound, Joanna Pocock; Sleeper Beach; Nick Harkaway; Halcyon Years, Alastair Reynolds; Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky; The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy, The Voyage Home, Pat Barker; Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner; The Trees, Percival Everett; Night Watch, Jane Anne Phillips; In the Distance, Hernan Diaz.

Book of the year: We Live Here Now, C.D. Rose. Bookended by a pair of fictional essays by an art critic, twelve chapters chronicle the intersecting lives of people connected to the experimental installation artist Sigismunda Conrad, whose last work was abruptly closed after people began to disappear inside it. Begining with a bleeding edge parody of the contemporary art scene and its relationship with extraterritorial tax havens and cryptocurrency, the novel grows ever wilder and stranger, culminating in the hallucinatory, apocalyptic labyrinth of Sigismunda Conrad's new show, where the voices of the various characters merge as they discover (maybe) that they've arrived where they began. Restlessly inventive, ruthlessly comic, it fully embodies the weird hauntology of our happening world, where everything connects but meaning is impossible to triangulate.

Writing:

Began 2025 by accidentally blurting out a short story for a themed anthology, blending human and cosmic time and compressing the heat death of the universe into a single day. The anthology will be published in 2026, I think, by MIT Press.

Spent most of the rest of the year writing a new novel, Heaven's Grand Design (about which I'll say nothing except that it's some kind of high fantasy), and with getting Loss Protocol ready for publication. Which is also a kind of fantasy, even though it's set in the near future, and a very personal work and grief and the thinning of our world. Begun in 2022, it's been a long time coming, but will at last be out in the world -- at last! -- in February 2026.

 

Hampstead Heath, 21/12/25

 

Hampstead Heath, 14/12/25

 

Christmas 'Cast

The Coode Street podcast is putting up short interviews with authors for their Advent calendar, one every day in December until Christmas. Mine is posted here. A few of the books I read this year, including my personal favourite, Christmas ghost stories, and a few words about Loss Protocol.

Hampstead Heath, 08:10

 

 

(For several years now I've been walking about on Hampstead Heath as early as I can every Sunday morning, and posting on social media a photograph (taken with an iPhone) of something I liked. Thought I'd start putting the results up here, as well.)

North and South

 One thing’s certain about the near future: as in the unfolding present, everywhere on the planet will continue to be affected caused by global warming, from increases in the price of coffee and chocolate in your local supermarket to calamities and mass migrations caused by extreme weather and rapid and radical climate change. Yet the present uncertainty about whether there’s the political will to undertake mitigating actions and the multiplex effects of destabilisation of climate and the thinning of the biosphere mean that fictions which extrapolate from the ongoing can be so vastly varied that, like these two recent examples, they defy any attempt to corral them within formal taxonomic boundaries.

James Bradley’s Landfall is a thriller that mixes the conventional elements of a police procedural with a deep dive into social stresses and divides intensified by climate change. Detective Sadiya Azad’s search for a missing young girl in the Floodline, the damaged, half-drowned fringe of near-future Sydney, is complicated not only by the urgent need to close the case in the handful of days before a superstorm makes landfall (a clever and apt take on the classic ticking clock plot device), but also by the tensions between the authorities and the dispossessed inhabitants of the Floodline, and juggling the demands of the investigation with care of her father, Arman, who is suffering from advanced dementia. The narrative switches between the meticulous details of Sadiya’s investigation, Arman’s growing disorientation as memories of the catastrophe which drove him to leave Bangladesh jostle with the confusion of the present, and the plight of a homeless refugee, Tasim, who witnessed the kidnapping of the girl. Bradley’s evocation of the stifling heat and decay of the city’s edgelands, and rendering of the crises which devastated the lives of Tasim and Arman are vivid and potent, grounding Sadiya’s increasingly desperate determination to rescue the missing girl. A powerfully humane story of the lost and the saved in an increasingly precarious world.

In contrast to Bradley’s depiction of survival in an overheated, storm-ridden and sea-drowned future, E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again, is a more explicitly hopeful portrayal of communitarian efforts to make good the damage done to the biosphere by climate change and human activity. Its narrative, mostly set in the UK, alternates between the life stories of two women, framed by their meeting near the end of the third quarter of this century. Lucy’s story begins in the lockdowns of the first year of the Covid pandemic, and charts her development from youthful natural history enthusiast to a seasoned activist who plays a significant role in the rewilding movement; Hester’s follows her rising fame as a filmmaker as, accompanied by a dog she rescued from the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, she documents the restoration of tracts of British wilderness.

As in her previous novel, The Coral Bones, Swift’s descriptions of the beautiful forms of the natural world are vivid and sympathetic. Instead of widescreen disasters or grimdark dystopian conflicts, there’s a scattering of melodramatic moments triggered by all-too-human foolishness and a steady sense of slippage and loss that’s countered by incremental changes won by hard work and self-sacrifice, culminating in an ending that feels deeply earned. And as in Landfall, the personal and political are inextricably intertwined, focusing on the granular details of the lives of the protagonists: the human stories in two distinctive versions of the Anthropocene.

Seems Somewhat Relevant

Stone remembered streets empty of traffic except for the armoured limos of bosses and apparatus men, and the personnel carriers and light tanks of the FBI. He remembered long lines of scarecrow people waiting to receive a daily ration of two ounces of mystery meat and a loaf of black bread that had the texture of ground glass bound by wallpaper paste. The show trials on TV, mass hangings of traitors and saboteurs. The hopeless gazes of starving children begging on the streets while posters everywhere boasted of record harvests. The military parades in Times Square, columns of soldiers saluting the Dear Leader and his trio of psychotic sons in their armoured-glass podium, missile carriers and tanks creeping between monumental buildings under a blizzard of ticker tape, accompanied by military bands and phalanxes of blonde, blue-eyed cheerleaders. He remembered the slave farms, and the vast death camp he and Tom Waverly had found in South Dakota: a discovery that had been instrumental in convincing President Davis, at the beginning of his first term, to approve LOOKING GLASS, the covert action that had led to the revolution.

 

From Cowboy Angels 

Very Special Offers

Right now ebook editions of my recent novels are presently on offer at the low, low price of just £2.99 -- or $2.99 in the US. The Secret of Life, Something Coming Through, Into Everywhere, Austral, and more.

 I don't know how long the offer will last, so if you're interested, head over to the web site for more details and links.

Cover Me

 

 

Loss Protocol continues to make its way into the world. It now has a finished cover, and a page on the publisher's online shop. Copy edit's done; proofs, the last best attempt to weed out every typo and word-processing glitch, are looming. UK publication date's still February 12th 2026 and should you want to show support you can preorder via your favourite retailer.

(Edited)

Edit of Loss Protocol finished and dispatched by zipwire.

 Still don't know what kind of beast it is. It's set in the near future (but isn't SF, or dystopian).

 There's a twisty noir storyline, but no murders (unless...).

There are many fantastical elements, incl. dreamscapes and things lurking in English woods (which may be only in the heads of drug-addled conspiracists).

 Anyway, it's some kind of novel. About different species of grief, and the past that's always in the present. And it's done, for now (until I get the copy-edit, and start twiddling with sentences again)

Development

 Development

There’s a house I especially like

On one of my London walks.

Small and flatroofed,

Leaning against its larger neighbour,

It might once have been an annex or a stable,

Except the side columns of the front door

And the large, arched windows of its upper floor

Suggest something more ambitious.

 

I liked to imagine living there.

It’s in a quiet neighbourhood,

And is exactly the right size.

 

But when I passed by a few weeks ago,

Beige hordings had been erected in front of it,

Bearing the name of the developer who

Was no doubt converting it into something

Suitable for sale by The Modern House.

 

Yet the door still smiles, lipstick red,

Between the arms of the hoardings.

And the red rambler rose

That climbs the front wall,

Planted by loving hands

In some half-forgotten year,

Is just coming into bloom.

Watchers of the Dark Revisited

Spotted in a charity shop: a copy of the UK hardback of Lloyd Biggle Jr's Watchers of the Dark (1966). Bought it on a whim. I remembered enjoying it, along with the first in the series, All the Colours of Darkness, back when I was a weird teenager haunting the SF shelves in my local library, and wondered if it still held up.

The series (five in all: Biggle published three more in the 1970s) elaborates the increasingly exotic adventures of private eye Jan Darzek, combining SF tropes with mystery plots -- Biggle also wrote traditional mysteries, including a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels. In All the Colours of Darkness, Darzek investigates the disappearance of a number of travellers using the new, disruptive technology of matter transmission. And in Watchers of the Dark, which also makes inventive use of matter transmission, he and and his secretary, Effie Schlupe, are recruited by aliens to probe the nature and cause of the Dark, which is driving planetary populations to sever all contact with the peaceful, multi-species, pan-Galactic civilisation.

Has it dated? Well, sure. Darzek is a competent hero in the Campbellian mode, possessing a singular human quality that's central to the mystery's solution. For much of the novel, Effie is more of a sounding board than an active sidekick, even though she's initially characterised as a tough, limb-breaking broad disguised by an innocent, little-old-lady act. Wives serve the interests of their husbands, even in inter-species marriages, and Biggle's vividly economical depictions of eldritch alien morphologies are somewhat flattened by stock characterisation and the centring of the kind of commodity capitalism which was a hackneyed and outdated raison d'etre for interstellar trading even back in the 1960s.

In short, it's an old-fashioned space opera in which the immensity of the Galaxy is reduced to a backdrop of conventional Earth-like, mono-cultural planets, populated by aliens whose weirdness doesn't much extend beyond gross-out body forms. And yet it's also a swift, entertaining thriller that combines high stakes with off-beat humour, sharp dialogue, and a cosy, low-key style. Apart from the early massacre of his employers, there's little in the way of mean-streets violence; Darzek is more like Inspector Morse than Philip Marlowe, a dogged, humane guy who uses intution, off-beat logic and some sly legardemain to unknot the how and why of the Dark's rabble-rousing nativism, and discover the identity of the agent it has secreted within a small group of interstellar traders. Effie Schlupe has a central role in the final, hectically wacky attempt to overthrow the Dark's machinations, there are smart observations on the vulnerability of liberal utopias, and the key to the Dark's manipulation of planetary populations has a relevance to current politics, and the spread of fake news and xenophobia through social media. While I'm not minded to actively search out the other volumes in the series, I'll definitely pick any I stumble across in the dust heaps of futures past.

Free Reads

Reminder:

I had two novellas published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine last year, and for reasons to do with award nominations, both are still available on the magazine's site. Blade and Bone is a Quiet War western set in the battered, history-laden deserts of Mars; Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene, is about generational differences, adapation to the ongoing climate catastrophe and a mystery revolving around seances. Check them out!

Migration

When I first started using the internet, back in the early 1990s, websites were so new that you could more or less visit them all in a day. Watch a coffee pot somewhere in Cambridge university, or a trafficam in Times Square! Check out Socks the White House cat! We were so innocent back the days of PINE and GNU. My first website, handcoded in barebones HTML, went up a few years later, but vanished when my ISP (Demon) was taken over one time too many and shut down. I rejigged the site at my new ISP, but some time in the middle of writing the New Novel the ISP decided that hosting websites was an unwanted botheration, and because I was in the middle of writing the NN I let it lapse. And now, between books, I've migrated it to a new hosting site, and it's back at its old address:

www.unlikelywords.co.uk

It's semi-hand-recoded because I've not yet been swept up by WordPress or other popular web builders that hosting sites prefer, and no doubt there are lacunae and broken links I haven't yet tracked down, but it's nice to be back.

The End of the Affair

 Yesterday, 14 months after its inception, I finished the final draft of a new novel. It's called Loss Protocol. A fantasy novel about the perils of misusing fantasies, set a few decades ahead. An Anthropocene novel that breaks one of Elmore Leonard's (partly tongue-in-cheek) writing rules by beginning with the weather. But the weather is omnipresent, now.  And the one thing we know about the future is that the weather will be bad and crazy and will keep getting worse  for the rest of the century, and almost certainly for centuries to come, along with everything else driven awry by global heating and the thinning of the biosphere and the general trashing of the planet. And since Loss Protocol is also about the worldgrief many of us feel, as well as several kinds of personal grief, I wanted to put the weird things the weather is doing and will continue to right at the beginning.

I began by saying that this one took 14 months to write, but I started a novel by the same name two months earlier, and quickly gave up on it because although the character was interesting, the story wasn't, especially. It was too transparent, held none of the inner mystery that informs everything without necessarily ever being revealed. So although that aborted attempt shared a couple of themes with Loss Protocol, nothing of it remains. I don't write long-running series and am blessed or cursed with the need to keep trying something new, something different. Every novel presents different problems to solve. The only thing I really know is that I've done this trick before, and if I keep going day after week after month, as long as I can get to the hinge-point where everything seems to move of its own volution towards an ending, I can finish the current work-in-progress before it finishes me.

Although, of course, it isn't finished. Story and scenes and themes and variations are in place, but there's still work to do. It's kind of like the production of a high-end fashion garment. The concept has been sketched, materials have been chosen and cut and shaped and gathered and stitiched, but there are still many microadjustments needed before it's a perfect fit. And so here. The manuscript needs to be read through and tweaks made at sentence level, so the meaning of each one is plain and each one builds on what's gone before. I have to persuade my agent that it's worthwhile, he has to persuade my editor, and my editor has to make its case to sales and marketing. And after that, there's the post-editing rewriting, and copy-editing, and proofing. So the affair is far from over, and yet, as far as all the heavy lifting is concerned, it is.

 

Shortlisted

 

 

Very pleased to announce that my climate-change novella 'Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene', first published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine last year, is one of the finalists for the Readers' Awards. Many thanks to all who voted for it.

Details and links to all the finalists for best novella, novelette, short story and poem can be found here.

The Shrimp Fishers

Part of writing a novel -- one of the most important parts of writing a novel -- is cutting out extraneous material. Sentences, paragraphs and scenes which, while perfectly fine, no longer fit the narrative as it evolves. The novel I'm presently working on is somewhat different in form, subject and angle of attack than its predecessors and has accumulated a considerable amount of this 'below the line' material. False starts, diversions, an entire secondary storyline that grew like kudzu vine and threatened to overwhelm the main structure. The piece below is one of the diversions. A puzzle-piece left over after the picture was completed.

It was something he’d found in the wreckage of the internet. A silent film clip from the early days of cinema, no more than 45 seconds long. Enfants pêchant des crevettes. Seventeen metres of 35mm film hand-cranked through one of the Lumière Brothers’ cameras. He’d been watching it over and again recently. Summer, 1896. Getting on for two centuries ago. An English beach in Kent or Sussex. Possibly Margate. There was a colourised version, but he preferred the original black and white, muting the whimsical music someone had added. Forty-five or 46 seconds of activity. Children in antique costume dragging long-handled shrimping nets through a shallow channel of seawater, a donkey cart in the background moving off, passing a small group of onlookers, the scene abruptly cutting when the spool of film in the camera ran out. And he’d tell his agent to play it again, the light of the lost world flickering on his face, throwing shadows across the ceiling of the narrowboat’s cabin.

Return To Mars

What did I do last year? Amongst other things, published two novellas. 'Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene', appeared in the March/April edition of Asimov's SF Magazine. And 'Blade and Bone', set on Mars, in the Quiet War universe, was published in the November/December 2023 edition of Asimov's. It was recently included on Locus magazine's Recomended Reading List, and Asimov's has put up a free version, along with other RRL nominees it published last year.

Here's something I wrote about it for Asimov's blog:

Where do writers get their ideas?

Four years ago, I re-visited one of my favourite places in America: the high Californian desert, and what is now Joshua Tree National Park. The location for some of Hollywood’s classic Westerns, it’s unlike any European landscape. ‘An aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else,’ as Jean Baudrillard observed in America. Almost Martian, in its inhuman sublime. 

I’ve visited Mars before, too, in novels and stories. First, in the science fantasy mode, in Red Dust, and some years later, closer to realism, in middle part of The Secret of Life, where characters follow actual waypoints on maps got up from orbital images. ‘Blade and Bone’ combines the two modes. Several of the places mentioned are actual Martian locations, as in The Secret of Life, although the terrain has been altered by the impact of spent cores of comets used to aid the terraforming of the red planet. And just as cowboys ride herd on yaks across ancient Martian sea beds in Red Dust, ‘Blade and Bone’ references the kind of Westerns, like Bud Boetticher’s Comanche Station and Scott Cooper’s Hostiles, in which a hard-bitten, flawed hero guides people through landscapes haunted by hostile inhabitants or, as Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, by their own delusions. The story’s landscapes are similarly hostile, haunted by old wars and unspent grudges of a thousand years of contested history that are dwarfed by the vast uncaring Martian sublime. 

‘Blade and Bone’ is also a Quiet War story, sharing the same future time line as four novels and a fistful of stories. The series ranges across much of the solar system, but apart from a couple of pieces of flash fiction, this is the first long-form Quiet War story I’ve set Mars. It features one of the series’ signature tropes, artificial vacuum organisms which somewhat resemble giant lichens, and like lichens can grow and utilise native resources in hostile habitats, and also enlarges an idea raised in Evening’s Empires, the fourth and last Quiet War novel: if current or near future billionaires can extend their lives by downloading simulations of their minds, what role might they play in the further reaches of the future? Finally, it borrows from one of the pieces of flash fiction the Samurai-like Knights of Cydonia: the bone and blade which are the story’s contested prize have been stolen from one of their tombs. The roots of its story, as its protagonists discover, go way back.

Q&A

Over at that very fine SF magazine Clarkesworld, I do my best to answer some interesting questions about Beyond the Burn Line and more. Link is here.

Brief Review: The Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift

The philosopher Timothy Horton described global heating, climate change species loss and all the other upheavals of the Anthropocene, as hyperobjects 'massively distributed in space and time relative to humans'. Although we can see evidence for their existence, the totality of these hyperobjects is much harder -- if not impossible -- to comprehend, and attempting to depict them from the default close third person point-of-view presents obvious difficulties for the novelist. One solution is to distribute the story amongst multiple characters scattered across time, a technique used to fine effect in E.J. Swift's novel about three women who in different centuries observe the unspoiled beauty and the decline and fall of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

In the nineteenth century, before the onset of the Anthropocene and global heating, Judith persuades her father to allow her to join his survey expedition of coral islands along the length of the reef. In the present, Hanna, a marine biologist trying to find ways to save the reef from climate change while coming to terms with the break-up of a relationship, becomes involved in the mystery of Coral Man, whose white-painted body is found adrift in an inflatable painted with a message: This is what it looks like when coral dies. And in a future where the interior of Australia is a hostile furnace and most of the reef is dead, Telma sets out along the coral ruins to investigate rumours of a seemingly impossible sighting of an extinct fish species. 

There are detailed, immersive passages describing reef biology, geology and history, and measuring the destruction and loss in the present and the consequences for the future against the unspoiled abundance and beauty of reefs in the before times of Hanna's explorations, but the narrative is very much character driven. Its three strands contrast the sacrifices each of the women make to pursue their obsessions, and despite the justifiable anger at the destruction and loss caused by human greed and carelessness, links subtly spun between their lives offer something a little more hopeful than a default dystopian wasteland.

 

Interview

Up on Interzone Digital, Simon Morden asks me some very good questions about Beyond the Burn Line, what's cool in science, the longevity of libraries and more. Check it out here!