Picocon

I'm one of the guest speakers at Picocon 43, a day-long convention held in the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, London on Saturday, 7th March. Details of membership here.

 

 

 

12 Stories

Jonathan Gibbs's online project, A Personal Anthology project has a simple but effective premise: each week, a guest editor picks 12 of their favourite stories, and writes a brief introduction to each one. It's been running since 2017, and features the selections of over 300 contributors. I'm honoured to be the latest; my dream anthology, winnowed from a long list of stories which have taken up permanent residence in my head, has been posted up on the project's substack pages, before it migrates to the website. Check it out here.

On Being Launched

Publication day for Loss Protocol, February 12th, was also Darwin Day. Appropriately enough, given that one of the themes of the weird little novel is the slow depletion of the kind of richness of forms of life evoked by Darwin's description of an entangled bank at the end of On The Origin of Species.

My publishers and I arranged a small launch party at Ink@84, an independent bookshop close to where I live. A few photos of the event below, courtesy of Stephen Jones.

My editor, Marcus Gipps, warns the crowd that I'm about to give a reading.

 

 L to R: Kim Newman, Peter Hamilton, PM, China Miéville.

 

L to R: Sean Hogan, Kim Newman, Jay Russell.

 

L to R: Alastair Reynolds, PM, Oliver Morton.
 

Publication Day!

 

The UK edition of Loss Protocol is published today. I began to write it at the beginning of 2023, so this is the culmination of three years work by myself, my agent, and my editor and the production team at Gollancz. It started out as a completely different story, but although that shared the same themes, I quickly realised that I was writing about the wrong person in the wrong place, and after I discovered the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, and began to uncover Marc Winters' story, everything began to come together. And here we are. Fantasy? Climate Fiction? SF? Some kind of a novel, anyway.

Available now at all good booksellers -- an especial reminder that like every title published in the UK, it can be ordered via your small, local, independent bookshop. And, I hope, you'll be able to find it in your local library, too.

NB Several people in the US have asked about availability there. I don't yet have any information about that, but my UK publishers have an arrangement with a distributor in the US, and copies are usually available in bookshops and via Amazon.com 3 - 6 months after UK publication. Meanwhile, Blackwell's is probably the best option, as it appears to have a reasonable shipping charge.

  

That Shelfie Thing

 

 

A few of my bookshelves feature in the latest episode of Lavie Tidhar's and Jared Shurin's Shelfie website. Find out more about the shelves and details of a few of the books right here. 

Relaxed Reminder

 

 

Along with Kim Curran, I'll be a guest of the Super Relaxed Fantasy Club on Tuesday February 10th. As its name suggests, it's a social event with a couple of guest authors attached. I'll be interviewed about Loss Protocol, and will give a short (and first!) reading from it. Hopefully, there'll be a few copies on sale too, a couple of days in advance of publication. As always, the event is free but spaces are limited, so you should book (link's here).

First Takes

Loss Protocol is featured in New Scientist's selection of this month's best new science fiction books. There's also a nice review in SFX magazine: 'Throughout, as with McAuley's Austral, there's a sense of a writer engaging with the climate crisis in a way that perhaps only Kim Stanley Robinson has equalled in recent years.'

On The Forthcoming

Hey! Loss Protocol gets a nice mention in a 'most anticipated' post on Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Are You Super Relaxed?

I'll be a guest of the Super Relaxed Fantasy Club on February 10th, upstairs at The Star of King's Pub in King's Cross: there will be readings by and interviews with myself and fellow author Kim Curran. It's free, but numbers are limited by the venue's size, so if you'd like to attend you need to grab a ticket: link right here.

There should be copies of LOSS PROTOCOL for sale on the night, so it's your chance to grab a signed copy before the official date of publication.

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.