Paul McAuley's Blog

Stoneremembered streets empty of traffic except for the armoured limos of bosses andapparatus men, and the personnel carriers and light tanks of the FBI. Heremembered long lines of scarecrow people waiting to receive a daily ration oftwo ounces of mystery meat and a loaf of black bread that had the texture ofground glass bound by wallpaper paste. The show trials on TV, mass hangings oftraitors and saboteurs. The hopeless gazes of starving children begging on thestreets while posters everywhere boasted of record harvests. The militaryparades in Times Square, columns of soldiers saluting the Dear Leader and histrio of psychotic sons in their armoured-glass podium, missile carriers andtanks creeping between monumental buildings under a blizzard of ticker tape,accompanied by military bands and phalanxes of blonde, blue-eyed cheerleaders. Heremembered the slave farms, and the vast death camp he and Tom Waverly hadfound in South Dakota: a discovery that had been instrumental in convincingPresident Davis, at the beginning of his first term, to approve LOOKING GLASS,the covert action that had led to the revolution.

From Cowboy Angels 

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Right now ebook editions of my recent novels are presently on offer at the low, low price of just £2.99 -- or $2.99 in the US. The Secret of Life, Something Coming Through, Into Everywhere, Austral, and more.

 I don't know how long the offer will last, so if you're interested, head over to the web site for more details and links.

Loss Protocol continues to make its way into the world. It now has a finished cover, and a page on the publisher's online shop. Copy edit's done; proofs, the last best attempt to weed out every typo and word-processing glitch, are looming. UK publication date's still February 12th 2026 and should you want to show support you can preorder via your favourite retailer.

Edit of Loss Protocol finished and dispatched by zipwire.

 Still don't know what kind of beast it is.It's set in the near future (but isn't SF, or dystopian).

 There's a twisty noir storyline, but no murders (unless...).

There are many fantastical elements, incl. dreamscapes and things lurking in English woods (which may be only in the heads of drug-addled conspiracists).

 Anyway, it's some kind of novel. About different species of grief, and the past that's always in the present. And it's done, for now (until I get the copy-edit, and start twiddling with sentences again)

 Development

There’s a house I especially like

On one of my London walks.

Small and flatroofed,

Leaning against its larger neighbour,

It might once have been an annex or a stable,

Except the side columns of the front door

And the large, arched windows of its upper floor

Suggest something more ambitious.

I liked to imagine living there.

It’s in a quiet neighbourhood,

And is exactly the right size.

But when I passed by a few weeks ago,

Beige hordings had been erected in front of it,

Bearing the name of the developer who

Was no doubt converting it into something

Suitable for sale by The Modern House.

Yet the door still smiles, lipstick red,

Between the arms of the hoardings.

And the red rambler rose

That climbs the front wall,

Planted by loving hands

In some half-forgotten year,

Is just coming into bloom.

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Spotted in a charity shop: a copy of the UK hardback of Lloyd Biggle Jr's Watchers of the Dark (1966). Bought it on a whim. I remembered enjoying it, along with the first in the series, All the Colours of Darkness, back when I was a weird teenager haunting the SF shelves in my local library, and wondered if it still held up.

The series (five in all: Biggle published three more in the 1970s) elborates the increasingly exotic adventures of private eye Jan Darzek, combining SF tropes with mystery plots -- Biggle also wrote traditional mysteries, including a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels. In All the Colours of Darkness, Darzek investigates the disappearance of a number of travellers using the new, disruptive technology of matter transmission. And in Watchers of the Dark, which also makes inventive use of matter transmission, he and and his secretary, Effie Schlupe, are recruited by aliens to probe the nature and cause of the Dark, which is driving planetary populations to sever all contact with the peaceful, multi-species, pan-Galactic civilisation.

Has it dated? Well, sure. Darzek is a competent hero in the Campbellian mode, possessing a singular human quality that's central to the mystery's solution. For much of the novel, Effie is more of a sounding board than an active sidekick, even though she's initially characterised as a tough, limb-breaking broad disguised by an innocent, little-old-lady act. Wives serve the interests of their husbands, even in inter-species marriages, and Biggle's vividly economical depictions of eldritch alien morphologies are somewhat flattened by stock characterisation and the centring of the kind of commodity capitalism which was a hackneyed and outdated raison d'etre for interstellar trading even back in the 1960s.

In short, it's an old-fashioned space opera in which the immensity of the Galaxy is reduced to a backdrop of conventional Earth-like, mono-cultural planets, populated by aliens whose weirdness doesn't much extend beyond gross-out body forms. And yet it's also a swift, entertaining thriller that combines high stakes with off-beat humour, sharp dialogue, and a cosy, low-key style. Apart from the early massacre of his employers, there's little in the way of mean street violence: Darzek is more like Inspector Morse than Philip Marlowe, a dogged, humane guy who uses intution, off-beat logic and some sly legardemain to unknot the how and why of the Dark's rabble-rousing nativism, and discover the identity of the agent it has secreted within a small group of interstellar traders. Effie Schlupe has a central role in the final, hectically wacky attempt to overthrow the Dark's machinations, there are smart observations on the vulnerability of liberal utopias, and the key to the Dark's manipulation of planetary populations has a relevance to current politics, and the spread of fake news and xenophobia through social media. While I'm not minded to search out the other volumes in the series, I'll definitely pick them up if I stumble across them in the dust heaps of futures past.

Reminder:

I had two novellas published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine last year, and for reasons to do with award nominations, both are still available on the magazine's site. Blade and Bone is a Quiet War western set in the battered, history-laden deserts of Mars; Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene, is about generational differences, adapation to the ongoing climate catastrophe and a mystery revolving around seances. Check them out!

When I first started using the internet, back in the early 1990s, websites were so new that you could more or less visit them all in a day. Watch a coffee pot somewhere in Cambridge university, or a trafficam in Times Square! Check out Socks the White House cat! We were so innocent back the days of PINE and GNU. My first website, handcoded in barebones HTML, went up a few years later, but vanished when my ISP (Demon) was taken over one time too many and shut down. I rejigged the site at my new ISP, but some time in the middle of writing the New Novel the ISP decided that hosting websites was an unwanted botheration, and because I was in the middle of writing the NN I let it lapse. And now, between books, I've migrated it to a new hosting site, and it's back at its old address:

www.unlikelywords.co.uk

It's semi-hand-recoded because I've not yet been swept up by WordPress or other popular web builders that hosting sites prefer, and no doubt there are lacunae and broken links I haven't yet tracked down, but it's nice to be back.

 Yesterday, 14 months after its inception, I finished the final draft of a new novel. It's called Loss Protocol. A fantasy novel about the perils of misusing fantasies, set a few decades ahead. An Anthropocene novel that breaks one of Elmore Leonard's (partly tongue-in-cheek) writing rules by beginning with the weather. But the weather is omnipresent, now.  And the one thing we know about the future is that the weather will be bad and crazy and will keep getting worse  for the rest of the century, and almost certainly for centuries to come, along with everything else driven awry by global heating and the thinning of the biosphere and the general trashing of the planet. And since Loss Protocol is also about the worldgrief many of us feel, as well as several kinds of personal grief, I wanted to put the weird things the weather is doing and will continue to right at the beginning.

I began by saying that this one took 14 months to write, but I started a novel by the same name two months earlier, and quickly gave up on it because although the character was interesting, the story wasn't, especially. It was too transparent, held none of the inner mystery that informs everything without necessarily ever being revealed. So although that aborted attempt shared a couple of themes with Loss Protocol, nothing of it remains. I don't write long-running series and am blessed or cursed with the need to keep trying something new, something different. Every novel presents different problems to solve. The only thing I really know is that I've done this trick before, and if I keep going day after week after month, as long as I can get to the hinge-point where everything seems to move of its own volution towards an ending, I can finish the current work-in-progress before it finishes me.

Although, of course, it isn't finished. Story and scenes and themes and variations are in place, but there's still work to do. It's kind of like the production of a high-end fashion garment. The concept has been sketched, materials have been chosen and cut and shaped and gathered and stitiched, but there are still many microadjustments needed before it's a perfect fit. And so here. The manuscript needs to be read through and tweaks made at sentence level, so the meaning of each one is plain and each one builds on what's gone before. I have to persuade my agent that it's worthwhile, he has to persuade my editor, and my editor has to make its case to sales and marketing. And after that, there's the post-editing rewriting, and copy-editing, and proofing. So the affair is far from over, and yet, as far as all the heavy lifting is concerned, it is.

Very pleased to announce that my climate-change novella 'Gravesend, or, Everyday Life in the Anthropocene', first published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine last year, is one of the finalists for the Readers' Awards. Many thanks to all who voted for it.

Details and links to all the finalists for best novella, novelette, short story and poem can be found here.