Richard K. Morgan's Blog

Twenty three years I’ve been doing this for a living, and still, it always comes as a bit of a bit of shock to the system when you realise that not only have people read and enjoyed your work, but they’ve spent measurable time afterwards pondering it in depth. That smart people have passed hours arguing your fiction back and forth, scouring the text for clues and meaning, asking questions about character and event that in many cases you’ve never given more than scant thought to yourself!...

The address was in West Erlsley – they often were – in a maze of rundown tenements and concrete walkways that stank of piss and the charred extinction of small conjuring fires.  Pathetic remnants of bone and fur and feathers in sheltered corners, where the meagre sacrifices had been made.  Huldu runes scrawled across the stone in charcoal or daubed in blood.  As far as Duncan could tell, most of it was gibberish.  Certainly, there was nothing you’d call a functional spell anywhere on these w...

Assiduous readers of this blog will have noted that there’s a six month delay on the publication date for No Man’s Land. This was largely due to the mechanics of briefing a cover and putting together a launch campaign for an author who has been, ahem, shall we say, somewhat scarce of late……

Anyway – the wait is over, at least for me (hence the grin). ARCs are in!

Had this rather gratifying response from one early reader……..

….and Publisher’s Weekly have been kind e...

He made it back to the tram terminus just in time for turnaround.  Grabbed a seat at the window and dozed with his head against the glass as the tram rattled back into town.  Ragged, flash-lit dreams, fragments from the war, stalking his shallow sleep. Machine gun fire, screams and pleading eyes.  A soft, Welsh accented voice.  And somewhere in there, little Ellie Furlough, falling terror-stricken into a hole filled with mud and rusted barbed wire and the rotted corpses of men still somehow ...

He walked the rest of the way to Crumley & Kegg’s at an irritable forced pace, trying to recapture his prior mood.  Caught up with it, more or less, as he shouldered open the venerable oak frame door of the emporium and breathed in the familiar blend of scents it held – leather, tweed, shoe polish, cordite and solder; some skewed sense of homecoming to it all.

Reuben Kegg saw him  come in, put aside a pair of walking boots he’d been buffing, came out from behind the wooden counter with a ...

They pulled out of Huddersfield on time, made Manchester Piccadilly a couple of minutes ahead of schedule.  Duncan thanked Ferguson, begged off going for a jar with the crew, and got his bags from the carriage below.  Hefting them felt awkward – his hands as much as his face were chilled almost numb from the journey in the turret.  He checked for his connection to Macclesfield, ran and missed it, had to sit and wait an hour for the next service.  Garner met him at the other end with the horse an...

  Albion Place, at the heart of Erlsley’s bustling municipal centre, looked pretty much the way you’d expect with a name like that.  Proud Victorian facades in blonde sandstone faced each other across a boulevard-width street.  Big doors and porticos every thirty yards and tall sash windows on every floor.  Number 28 featured a grand porch held up by four smooth columns on a two step base, and the Union Jack on an angled flagpole above.  Twinned brass plates on the forward columns announced ...

No-one was very sure why the witches of Erlsley had chosen to congregate their shopfronts and offices at the top of the steep, clambering curve of Victorian tenement architecture known as Crawgate, out on the northern edge of town. There was a theory going around – that the street name had once been pronounced Crowgate, referencing, back in some period or other of medieval gloom, the hordes of querulous black birds that would gather to pick at the rotting bodies of criminals left on gibbets ...

He came out of the Forest at Dunsany Crag as night was falling, stood for a moment looking down into the dale.  The sky above was bruising steadily to black.  The winking lights of villages showed like clusters of votive candles across the valley floor.  He heard a dog bark in the distance; the iron clank of a farm gate as it closed.  Breathed deep, as if trying to catch odours to go with these faint sounds of human habitation.  He shoved the cut-down McCulloch trench gun into the leather sh...

You know that moment in the western where the two grizzled veteran gunslingers meet up in a bar and it’s years since they’ve seen each other…..

They trade stories, catch up on daring and dirty deeds, and then have to go out in the street and fight a gun battle side by side.

Similar thing right here, except instead of grizzled gunslingers, it’s grizzled SF writers, and – full disclosure – we never did have to go out in the street and shoot anyone. But apart from that…….

I’ve never made...