Back in Silver (8/2/2021)

Posted in News

The last four five years have been… odd. I’ve been writing other names. The Magenta trilogy was  written and sold and largely vanished without a trace, although it was very, very nearly a TV series, which would have been quite something.

I’ve since changed publishers, a parting of ways that was very mutual. I’ve written a crime novel for Arrow and I’m very happy with it. I’m now writing fantasy for Angry Robot. I like to think, as in the start of any new relationship, we’ve both put in the effort to make it work. COVID certainly isn’t helping. It IS nice, however, to have the same editor at publication as commissioned the books in the first place. With one exception, this is the first time in twelve books that’s happened.

I have a new agent too, this time because Robert had to quit for personal reasons.  We didn’t always see eye to eye but I can’t fault the effort he put in to getting I Know What I Saw  made into a novel that works.

Brexit is still a stupid act of national self-harm but I won’t bang on about it here. The facts and figures speak for themselves. If you don’t want to see them, you’ve already made that choice. There won’t be much politics here. We’ll back to reviews and giveaways and a little self-promotion and the odd extra scene that didn’t make it into the final MS and that sort of thing. It won’t be as regular as it once was, but it’s the books that matter, right?

The Moonsteel Crown (February 2021)

Posted in Books | Excerpts | Temp

The Emperor of Aria has been murdered. Dead Men walk the streets and the Empire has been thrown into crisis Myla, Fings, and Seth, however, couldn’t give a shit They’re too busy trying to survive on the cold, Sulk-struck streets of the city of Varr, committing petty violence and pettier crimes to earn their keep in the Unrulys, a motley gang led by Blackhand.

Until the Unrulys are commissioned to steal a mysterious item to order, by an equally mysterious patron, the trio are thrust right into the bitter heart of a struggle for the Crown, where every faction is after what they have. Forced to lie low in a city on lockdown, Myla, Fings, and Seth will have to work together if they want to save their skins. But for thieves, working together can sometimes be… difficult.

I Know What I Saw (October 2020)

Posted in Books | Excerpts | Temp

Imagine a heart ready to burst with joy. Christmas mornings as a child, passing your final exams, the thrill of a first kiss – all that and more. Imagine being able to reach and find those glorious moments whenever you want, the feelings fresh and intense, undiminished by time. Imagine sinking into them when the world grows heavy, always there whenever you call. If I describe my perfect memory to you like this, does it sound like a gift? Something precious, even something to envy?

From Divergent Suns (April 2019)

Posted in Books | Excerpts

Five years ago, Keon fled the colony world of Magenta to Earth, running away from his grief. Now he’s come home, bringing with him with the two things that between them have the power to unravel the truth: an all-consuming hunger to know what happened to his wife . . .

And me. A highly illegal simulated personality. LISS. ALYSHA RAUSE 2.0.

I did not ask for my creation, but here I am: a pseudo-Alysha built from a dead woman’s data and the face she showed the world, a ghost summoned to her husband’s side. Keon wants nothing more than to find out who killed me. The problem is, I think I already know.

From Distant Stars (April 2018)

Posted in Books | Excerpts

What do you get if you take every fragment left behind after someone dies? Every electronic message, every image caught on every camera, every word caught by every microphone? If you sent a computer program across the world and crushed every trace of a person onto a blank waiting canvas?

My name is LISS, and that’s how I was made. KEON made me in memory of his wife ALYSHA the embryo of an artificial intelligence fertilised with a dead woman’s data in a shell of metal and plastic. The United Nations Right to Uniqueness and Individuality Act makes my creation illegal on every world, yet here I am. Everything about me is the way you’d remember Alysha if you knew her; whatever mask she chose to wear for you, I wear it too. I talk like Alysha, sound like her, move like her. My gestures, my mannerisms, my smiles, all of them are hers; but the person behind those masks, the private inner person that was the true Alysha? She’s gone. In his head Keon knows that, but in his heart… His heart doesn’t want to know.

From Darkest Skies (April 2017)

Posted in Books | Excerpts

When a minor celebrity dies of an apparent drug overdose, Keon is drawn into a world of drug dealers and quantum chemists, of quasi-religious anti-technologist fanatics and the world of xeno-gens, hallucinogens engineered from Magenta’s native lifeforms. Cashing in old favours, Koen and Liss piece together his wife’s last days. As past and present converge he closes in on a conspiracy to re-engineer humanity from the ground up; ultimately he must choose between knowing the truth behind Alysha’s end or exposing a sinister cabal whose aim is to change the very essence of what it means to be human, no matter the cost.