Théâtre des Dieux

I'm extremely happy to announce that Theatre of the Gods has been bought by the amazing independent French publishing house Au Diable Vauvert, translators of (amongst many others) Neil Gaiman, Douglas Coupland and David Foster Wallace. It will be published, all going well, in late 2015. 

Obsolagnium

My supernatural short story, Obsolagnium, is in Hamish Hamilton's Five Dials. You can download the issue for free here.

"Wilde was in the bedroom when the slat-blinds snapped. It was a calm, clear night. Earlier there'd been lightning over the lake. No thunder, the sound-waves had crashed into the lake. He’d looked up from where he’d been dragging branches to his new Timberwolf gravity-feed woodchipper and saw the purple veins of energy spread across the sky. He’d pulled the canvas tarp across his beast and hurried inside. He’d showered, scrubbed the yellowy green tinge of lawn-cuttings from his hands and lower legs. Now he sat on the end of the bed and lifted one foot so that it rested on its opposite knee. He observed the skin flaking off his heel. He could slough away with the lump of volcanic rock his wife had kindly given him for Christmas, but every week a sequence of mysterious processes would cause the dryness to return. He studied the dead, white zone and imagined he was looking down upon a wasteland. He imagined leaning down as far as it would take to perceive the microscopic communities who lived there. The muscles around his spine began to burn. He felt his eye-muscles strain. He imagined the creatures going about their business, bustling around the bergs of dry skin. Wilde considered that if you had a powerful enough listening device you might even be able to hear the sounds of these societies who live unwittingly upon the heel of a giant."

Electric Ink

AKH48 is our most famous artificial author – though he much prefers the term ‘synthetic composer’. He is a prolific author, critic and diarist. In his short career he has composed almost half a million novels, plays and works of short fiction. He is constituted from some 15,672 KXS120 hyper-cooled argon-vapour CPU-tubes which allow him to generate, according to his publicity material: ‘… critically competitive popular literature at a theoretical peak of 18 petaFLOPS.’

Electric Ink, my three-part interview with AKH48 is here

 

Welcome

Welcome to my brand new website, Field Notes. I hope you'll take the time to have a look around. This site is still in testing mode, so if you experience any difficulties, please be patient. Or not patient, it's really up to you. Also, while you're here, you might consider liking my Facebook page or befriending me on Twitter.