Matthew Hughes's Blog: barbarians of the beyond - Posts Tagged "extrasolar"
New Erm Kaslo story sold
Last month, editor Nick Gevers asked me to write a story for an upcoming anthology called Extrasolar, to be published by PS Publishing. Somebody who had been expected to deliver a story had not done so and the deadline was coming up.
Nick described the theme of the antho thusly:
Stories will deal with the recent discoveries via the Hubble Telescope and other efforts at identifying extrasolar planets--all those bizarre solar systems made up of superjovians, hot Neptunes, superearths, lots of planets close to their stars, wild eccentric orbits, etc. What are the implications of these observations, for the nature of planetary systems in the universe as a whole, for the hope of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy, for SF itself, a genre that traditionally has anticipated other solar systems arranged rather like ours?
So, basically hard SF, which I don't write, but I can do space-opera set against interesting backgrounds. So I was very pleased to take a shot at it. I decided to revive Erm Kaslo, my hardboiled "confidential operative" whose investigations take him out among the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray. The story is called "Thunderstone" and it shows Erm before the events in his upcoming novel, A Wizard's Henchman, when he has to deal with the universe arbitrarily switching its fundamental operating principle from rationalism to magic.
Nick has accepted the story. The antho will be out next year.
Fans of my Luff Imbry tales owe Nick Gevers a tip of the hat. It was he who suggested, after Luff's initial appearance in the novel Black Brillion, that I write some stories about him for the quarterly PS Publishing anthology, Postscripts. Without Nick's suggestion, I might have let the fat man fade into the shadows.
Nick described the theme of the antho thusly:
Stories will deal with the recent discoveries via the Hubble Telescope and other efforts at identifying extrasolar planets--all those bizarre solar systems made up of superjovians, hot Neptunes, superearths, lots of planets close to their stars, wild eccentric orbits, etc. What are the implications of these observations, for the nature of planetary systems in the universe as a whole, for the hope of finding life elsewhere in the galaxy, for SF itself, a genre that traditionally has anticipated other solar systems arranged rather like ours?
So, basically hard SF, which I don't write, but I can do space-opera set against interesting backgrounds. So I was very pleased to take a shot at it. I decided to revive Erm Kaslo, my hardboiled "confidential operative" whose investigations take him out among the Ten Thousand Worlds of The Spray. The story is called "Thunderstone" and it shows Erm before the events in his upcoming novel, A Wizard's Henchman, when he has to deal with the universe arbitrarily switching its fundamental operating principle from rationalism to magic.
Nick has accepted the story. The antho will be out next year.
Fans of my Luff Imbry tales owe Nick Gevers a tip of the hat. It was he who suggested, after Luff's initial appearance in the novel Black Brillion, that I write some stories about him for the quarterly PS Publishing anthology, Postscripts. Without Nick's suggestion, I might have let the fat man fade into the shadows.
