Books for Sale

Okay, I spent part of Sunday scrabbling about in my loft sorting out boxes and double-stacked shelves. I've been meaning to do this for some time because numerous copies of my books up in my loft do no one any good. Here's a list of what I have left if anyone is interested. The price will be plus postage and packing which can stack up if you're not in Britain (well, it can stack up if you are). Contact me at the email below my biography here. I also want to give a reminder to those who have contacted me about books: payment first and, if you don't get a move on, I can't guarantee that what you were after will still be available.


Update: For some reason I completely missed The Technician off this list. I have about 8 copies available.

Book	Detail	Number	Price
Gridlinked
Mass-market paperback	USA	1	£4
Hardback	USA Book club	1	£10
Brass Man
MM paperback	UK Old cover	10	£4
MM paperback	UK Sullivan cover	9	£8
Hardback	USA Book club	4	£12
Trade paperback	USA	19	£10
MM paperback	USA	19	£6
Polity Agent
MM paperback	UK Old cover	4	£4
MM paperback	UK Sullivan cover	11	£8
Line War
MM paperback	UK old cover	4	£4
Prador Moon
MM paperback	UK old cover	2	£4
Hardback	UK old cover	2	£15
Trade paperback	US Night Shade Books issue	24	£10
Voyage of the Sable Keech
MM paperback	UK old cover	7	£4
MM paperback	UK Sullivan cover	10	£8
Orbus
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	6	£8
Cowl
MM paperback	UK wraparound	4	£8
MM paperback	US	7	£5.50
Trade paperback	US	9	£10
Hilldiggers
MM paperback	UK old cover	8	£4
Shadow of the Scorpion
Trade paperback	UK old cover	5	£12
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	11	£8
The Gabble
MM paperback	UK old cover	11	£8
The Departure
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	11	£8
Hardback	UK Sullivan	1	£18
Zero Point
MM paperback	UK Sullivan	13	£8

New Books!

This is what happens when I'm let loose in Waterstones with a gift card. The card was for £30 and I ended up spending £49. Ah well, in terms of the hours of pleasure I will hopefully find here it's not much to pay. So, after I've finished the one I'm reading now (Reviver by Seth Patrick) which one of these do you think I should read next?

On Writing - Writer's Group

I got an invite to a local writer’s group a few weeks back and, since it was local, in fact in a pub I used to frequent over many years, I thought, ‘why not?’ though I added the proviso that I’d just go along for a chat and wouldn’t be giving a talk or reading. It all seemed to go pretty well and hopefully I said some stuff they found interesting. I also took along some professionally edited sheets from Zero Point for them to have a look at – the kind of stuff I would have killed for many years ago. Interestingly, they had a session of writing, whereby someone provided a sentence or line and everyone keyed off that for ten minutes. A sheet of paper was pushed my way and I considered running at that point, but then I told myself not to be such a wimp.

The line was, ‘I never suffer from writer’s block, but…’ and here’s my contribution:

I never suffer from writer’s block but, when asked by this writer’s group to produce, on the spot, I felt my sphincter tightening to the diameter of a needle’s eye. However, not to be beaten, I’ll waffle on about anything relevant. Too many years ago to count I wrote an article called ‘Beating the Block’. This concerned stream-of-consciousness writing, whereby you write just anything as it comes into your head. You don’t agonize over how much sense it makes or how correct is your English. You just write. The tangled bats were falling from the sky and forming drifts beside the sapphire roads etc. Ad nauseum. Eventually some sort of sense might arise out of this but it doesn’t matter – you’re no longer staring at a blank page. Moving on… One of the biggest causes of writer’s block is the angst about what to write and how to write, which in a way is daft with the editing tools now available. It’s not as if we’re working straight to a typewriter. Typex is no longer required. We have find-and-replace and in the end the ‘delete’ button is always available.  

This is as it came and certainly, as I just typed it here, I had to resist the urge to edit. I’d perhaps use ‘size of a needle’s eye’, since a needle’s eye isn’t circular. I’d add more about what you ignore when doing a stream-of-consciousness piece and I would have done a longer piece. I would have added more about the fear of getting it wrong being the cause of writer’s block and more about why that’s irrelevant now and, in fact, always has been irrelevant. Editing, even before we began working on computers, included a waste paper bin.

Anyway, this seems a good exercise to try if you have your own writer’s group, and in fact it might be something worth trying by yourself. Ask someone else to provide that line, or maybe even pick it at random from a book, and just write for ten minutes. Maybe those of you over here on the forum – the writer’s workshop – could try something?     

The Departure Review

Nice review of The Departure here on David Agranoff’s site.

I was particularly struck by how reasonable these paragraphs are:

The majority of Science Fiction novels with a political message are written by left leanings writers (like John Shirley, John Brunner or Kim Stanley Robinson) or straight-up radicals (like Ursala K.Leguin and Norman Spinrad). I would be lying if I didn't admit that I like to agree with my favorite novels. However as a political writer myself I don't want or expect all my readers to agree with me. So in return it is only fair that I read enjoy authors I don't agree with.

That is the thing, this novel feels very Ayn Rand influenced and seems to call for little or no government. Probably the opposite of John Shirley's recent anti-libertarian novel “Everything is Broken.” I don't really agree with a lot of the message but I enjoyed the story throughout.

Now why is it that a minority of reviewers are so obviously vitriolic about my stuff because they disagree with me politically? The prevailing meme among them seems to be: his political outlook is wrong wrong wrong, therefore he is a bad writer. Perhaps they can’t stomach the fact that I keep selling books? And why is it, I wonder, that the reverse doesn’t apply? I don’t often see reviewers objecting to a writer’s work because that writer is left-wing. And, frankly, if I objected to novels on the basis of the writer’s politics I would have missed out on a vast number of excellent books. It is sad.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

H. L. Mencken 

Video Clip

As many of you may know I have done a few video clips in which I answer fan questions. Here's the last one I did, last year. Yes, that ugly bugger is me.

Now, being a glutton for punishment. How about some questions for a new clip, or more? Post them in the comments section.  

Anti-Ageing Breakthrough

Well, I didn’t see this is one coming, and really should have. I’ve always felt that life-extension would go in a series of small steps, just as it has been going. There is no cure for cancer as a whole because there are thousands of different varieties of cancer. If a cure or some kind of delaying treatment is found for one kind then that pushes overall life-expectancy up, just a little. Just as if a better way of treating dementia or diabetes is found. Statisticians have a lot of fun with these figures because, with life presently being 100% fatal, if you cure one thing then more people die of another. Next time you hear ‘dementia on the rise’ just remember that is probably because less people are keeling over from heart attacks.

Since 1970 life expectancy in Western European countries has typically risen by six to eight years, and the rate of increase has been 2% a decade. Of course these figures vary hugely across the world and are dependent on numerous factors, but the trend is ever upwards. There are many coffin dodgers would like to try and stay within that slow rise and, unless our civilization collapses, there will be people born in the next 100 years who are just going to keep on living, with no end in sight.

However, even though most of the low-hanging fruit have been picked – consider how much life expectancy must have leapt up when penicillin was discovered – but the possibility of big jumps in life expectancy should not be discounted. And this looks like it might be one of them. Here is a link at Extreme Longevity, and another at Science Daily and lots more can be found if you just google ‘Anti-aging drug breakthrough’.

Publishing his work in the prestigious journal Science, David Sinclair of Harvard reports a breakthrough in the development of drugs that can block the aging process.

The article is entitled Evidence for a Common Mechanism of SIRT1 Regulation by Allosteric Activators, and reveals how interaction with a single amino acid in the SIRT1 enzyme is crucial for the ability of drugs that can activate the enzyme.

SIRT1 is an enzyme in the class of molecules called Sirtuins. Significant research shows that activation of sirtuins  reduces cellular aging through its interaction with other cellular master switches such as FOXO3a and PGC-1a

“At the cellular level,” explain the authors. “SIRT1 controls DNA repair and apoptosis, circadian clocks, inflammatory pathways, insulin secretion, and mitochondrial biogenesis”

The increase in centenarians is well known, but this particular comment caught my attention:

 “Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy. Things there are also looking promising,” he says. ”We’re finding that ageing isn’t the irreversible affliction that we thought it was,”

“Some of us could live to 150, but we won’t get there without more research,” he adds.

Zero Point Paperback

I just had to put up this picture of the paperback cover of Zero Point. What with the quote an all...

The Blackhouse - Peter May

Caroline’s gran used to say that she didn’t give up the booze and fags, they gave her up. I’m starting to understand how she felt. ‘Giving up’ in this case implies an effort of will to stop doing something you enjoy, whereas these things giving you up gets the sense of something you enjoyed becoming noxious; something that is no longer your friend. After consuming more red wine than was good for me yesterday, and enjoying it, I was quite prepared to accept the cost. This was presupposing that the cost would be me dropping into a coma, snoring like a pig all night, then waking up with gorilla pooh in my mouth, a mad dwarf making horseshoes in my skull and that general feeling of icky sickness. Unfortunately booze doesn’t do that to me any more. I did drop into the coma, but just for four hours. Waking at 2.00 I lay fidgeting, itching, feeling depressed and quite rough and by 2.30 knew that was the end of my sleep for the night. However, on the plus side, to distract myself from this malaise, I picked up the book I was reading and polished it off over the ensuing four hours.

The Blackhouse is a combination of a coming of age story and a murder mystery, and so much more than that. I was riveted to the end, fascinated by this glimpse into life on the Isle of Lewis, engaged with all the characters – liking and admiring some, hating others, and in one satisfying scene near the end all but cheering on one of them. If I have any negative criticism it is that a ‘reveal’ wasn’t sufficiently telegraphed earlier on so the reader could go, ‘Yes, of course’. This is an excellent book and well worth the cover price just for the guga hunt on An Sgeir. Highly recommended.  

Books, Update, Stuff...

Well the book sale went well. I’ve been packaging up books for the last couple of days and clearing a bit of space in my loft. The problem of course is that few people want the older cover Macmillan paperbacks that come later in the Cormac series. I’ve got plenty of copies of Brass Man, Polity Agent and Line War. I also have paperback editions of the Tor US releases. But then I guess the problem here is no one knows what is available. I guess I’ll have to go up into my loft again *sigh*.

Another thing I always forget to do is mention the translations. I’ve got a bookcase up there full of them. So, if you read German (plenty of those), Czech, Romanian, Russian, French, Japanese (just a few copies of Cowl) or Portuguese (and I’m sure there are others) and fancy buying a copy in those languages, then get in touch.

I was thinking back today about my first few books for Macmillan and how I was forever checking my Amazon ratings (well, that hasn’t changed) to check on my ‘success’. But of course a little thought about how people actually buy books and you realise that these things cannot be judged by those initial sales; that initial adrenalin rush when you are the new bright young writer (ho ho). People very infrequently walk into a book shop and pick up a hardback from a new writer; they tend to wander in a year later, perhaps five or ten years later and try a paperback. Hell, I’m only just starting to read Eric Brown and he’s done about 30 books since I read his short story Time Lapsed Man in Interzone back in 1988. It’s a long haul. Still, now, I get contact from people who have just discovered me, who have picked up a discounted paperback (or Kindle edition) and are going on to buy the rest.  

Moving on to other things: I was aiming to have done 80,000 words of Penny Royal III before we headed back to Crete. Since I’ve now done 77,000 it seems I’ll be hitting that target. Now I’m wondering if I can get it completed to first draft by then, which gives me plenty of time to iron out the kinks, and ensure all the plot threads are nicely woven together. However, another thought is now occurring … am I going to be able to complete this story in this third book? Could it be that this will be a trilogy (as per Douglas Adams) of four or five books?  

Books Sale

Having just carted a box containing 20 copies of Zero Point mass-market paperback up into the loft it occurred to me that it really is time for another sale of signed copies. I’ve got paperbacks of most of my books and hardbacks of a few of them. I was thinking of sticking another list here but since that would entail clambering up into the loft, pulling open boxes and counting for half the morning I’ll just say: get in contact and tell me what you want and I’ll see if it’s available. But let me get this out of the way first: copies of the paper version of Mindgames: Fool’s Mate, Mason’s Rats, Africa Zero, The Parasite & The Engineer (ReConditioned) are not available.

My email is on the right below my biography and you can find a list of all my books here. It’ll be full cover price plus postage and packing. However, since so many people are attracted to the Jon Sullivan covers, I’ll knock out the remaining paperbacks with the old covers for £4 each (that’s including the various Tor USA versions).

Xenopath - Eric Brown

Xenopath is the second in the Bengal Station series and another excellent novel. These books aren’t numbered and I had to go on the Internet to find out which one to read after Necropath (I have Cosmopath too) and now I’ve been trying to decide whether the order matters. If you were to pick up this one without having read the previous one there’s not much you’d fail to understand. In essence these are your hard-boiled detective book with an SF twist and reading them out of order would be like randomly picking up a Sue Grafton or Peter James. Reading in order enhances your enjoyment because you’re familiar with the main characters and their story, but each ‘investigation’ is self-contained. I can see how this could become formulaic with a whole series of ’paths after Cosmopath, but if it’s a formula you enjoy then there’s nothing wrong with that.