Collections

Rites of Passage, Infinity Plus Books, 2014

Rites of Passage is a collection of four long stories, one of which has never appeared anywhere before. The original, “Beneath the Ancient Sun”, is set on a far future Earth where giant crabs and a swollen sun threaten humanity’s existence. The three other tales are “Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders”,  a Victorian steampunk romp wherein the eponymous hero saves the world from alien invasion;  “Guardians of the Phoenix” in which a band of humans cross a lifeless desert in search of water in a post-apocalyptic world, and “Sunworld” which charts the journey of a young man who makes a discovery about himself and his world that will change everything forever.

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Strange Visitors, NewCon Press, 2014

Strange Visitors collects ten short stories and contains an original “P.O.O.C.H.”, written especially for this volume – a semi-autobiographical (in the loosest sense) account of owning a dog. Last year we acquired Uther, a red and white setter, and our lives have never been the same. The fine cover by Jim Burns illustrates one of the stories, “Bukowski on Mars, with Beer”, and shows Buk on Mars… with beer.

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The Angels of Life and Death, Infinity Plus Books, 2013

The collection contains ten tales of science fiction. The first six stories are what I call core SF – stories set in the future (with one exception) and featuring the staple tropes of aliens, telepathy, star-travel, futuristic sports, etc. The last four tales are more contemporary and character-oriented, while still rooted firmly in the science fiction genre. My favourite among them all is the title story, which pre-dates, and foreshadows, the Kéthani sequences of stories. An alien race comes to Earth bearing a gift from the stars…

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Ghostwriting, Infinity Plus Books, 2012

Ghostwriting is now available as an e-book and as a real, solid, print and paper object from Infinity Plus Books. It’s a collection of all my horror tales to date (excluding the novella A Writer’s Life), contains eight stories and an introduction.

I’m proud of the book. I don’t write many ghost/horror tales, but I enjoy them when I do.

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Paralax View, with Keith Brooke, Immanion Press, 2007

This is a reprint of our joint collection first published in 2000. It drops the two solo stories from that edition and replaces them with an original novella, “In Transit”: Abbott is a xeno-psychologist, sent into a war-zone to escort back to Earth the first ever captured member of the deadly enemy, the alien Kryte. When they crash-land on the fortress world of St Jerome’s, the Kryte prisoner turns the tables  and takes Abbott into terrible custody. What follows is a terrifying journey across a hellish landscape towards a finale that might change the destiny of the Kryte, and humanity, for ever.

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Threshold Shift, Golden Gryphon, 2006

This collection features two stories which won the BSFA: “The Children of Winter” and “Hunting the Slarque.” The first is a tale of a hopeless love affair between aliens on a remote ice-bound world in the far future. In the second, Hunter is resurrected from death by the owner of an extraterrestrial zoo and sent to the dying world of Tartarus in search of the creature that killed him, the Slarque.Three stories are set in the Kéthani universe. The Kéthani are aliens who arrive on present-day Earth and offer immortality, creating moral and ethical dilemmas for the humans who chose to accept – or reject – the alien gift. “Thursday ’s Child” is the story of parents whose daughter is dying; one wants the Kéthani to save their daughter, while the other is convinced, on religious grounds, that such restoration is wrong.

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The Fall of Tartarus, Gollancz, 2005

In myth Tartarus was the lowest region of hell. So low, it was said, that an anvil dropped from heaven, having taken nine days and nights to reach Earth, would take a further nine days and nights to reach Tartarus. But in reality things were very different… These are the stories of the people who are leaving Tartarus, those have decided to stay and those who are arriving on the planet for the apocalypse.

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Deep Future, Cosmos Books, 2001

A collection of stories published by Cosmos Books in the States. Deep Future contains some of my favourite later stories, first published in such magazines as Interzone, SF Age  and Spectrum SF.

 

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Blue Shifting, Pan Macmillan, 1995

My second collection of stories, reprinted from the anthologies Zenith 2, Other Edens 3, and the magazines Interzone, and Strange Plasma 1. Two pieces, the love story “Song of Summer” and the long novella “Blue Shifting”, are original to the collection.

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The Time-Lapsed Man and other stories, Pan

Macmillan, 1990

My first book, my first collection, is of course dear to me. It contains “The Time-Lapsed Man”, which might be my best short story, six other tales, and the novella “The Inheritors of Earth”, which is original to the collection, as is  “Pithecanthropus Blues”.

I wrote these stories, among others, over a period of three years after returning to England from India. The book contains all my early work first published in Interzone.