signs of our times

The second generation of astronauts takes to the skies while flying saucers lift off on Earth and giant spider robots prepare for world domination...

Well, the saucers and the space tourists might not leave the ground until 2011, so this is really a news-flash from those times, but the spiders are real. Check them out! I'd love to march through the parklands on my daily mail run astride one of those things.

Godlike Machines

I'm absolutely delighted to have had a piece accepted for publication in Godlike Machines, an anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan, featuring Stephen Baxter, Cory Doctorow, Greg Egan, Robert Reed, and Alastair Reynolds.

Part of the Science Fiction Book Club's original anthology series (which includes such wonderful titles as Forbidden Planets, Galactic Empires and Alien Crimes), Godlike Machines is composed entirely of six or so novellas inspired by this particular theme.

Unlike Cenotaxis, "A Glimpse of the Marvellous Structure (and the Threat It Entails)"* isn't set in the Astropolis universe. It taps into a world I first wrote about in 1992, and may yet evolve into something much larger, one day. Weighing in at 24,000 words, this will by my only new "short" work published this year.

I am doing a happy dance, but will spare you a detailed description of that.

* The title, btw, was inspired by the following Einstein quote: "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." Smart fellow, that one.