Novels

Because I can, I write the future. A future, anyway. A miss-spent youth creating and playing labyrinthine role-playing games has given me a taste for telling individual characters' tales as part of a larger story, and most of my fiction is set in a coherent seven-thousand-year future history. During this time mankind falls and rises again—with help—leaving human-occupied space as an apparently stable area of several hundred semi-autonomous systems, no two alike. Unfortunately humanity's dark past won't stay dead and the future holds threats worse than any faced so far.

Principles of Angels coverThe first book to be published in this future history, Principles of Angels, is due out in June 2008 from Gollancz (see this press release). The novel is set near the end of the timeline, and is a story of self-delusion, secrets and betrayal that takes place in a floating city, a democracy by assassination where the will of the people is enforced by the ruthless and exotic Angels. Taro, a street-hustler, wants only to avenge the unjust death of the Angel who raised him, but he's going to find it hard enough to survive without her protection. When a reluctant visitor from another world arrives in the city on a deadly mission, it's not just his life that's threatened, but the city itself.

The next book in what is provisionally entitled the Hidden Empire series is due out in 2009 from Gollancz. Consorts of Heaven takes place at the same time as Principles of Angels in a primitive theocracy isolated from the rest of humanity. The arrival of an amnesiac stranger in a remote village transforms the life of Kerin, an outcast whose only status comes from her son, a boy 'touched by the sky'. The stranger's attempts to rediscover his past and Kerin's desire to secure a future for herself and her child set events in motion that will change their world forever.

The third (as yet untitled) book will tie together threads from the first two books and reveal more about the real history of humanity, and the fragility of the universe it now inhabits.

 Kesh City
Khesh City from 'Principles of Angels', by Zer05um

For National Novel Writing Month last year I decided to explore the other end of history. The result, Epiphany Night is set in the middle of this current century, when Western culture is both nostalgic for, and bitter about, the excesses of the era of conspicuous consumption. Though originally written as one book it is in fact a two intertwining stories that I intend to separate into two books. 'Epiphany Night' is an SF mystery that deals with an extraordinary and unexpected event that changes the lives of two very different women, who are both driven to uncover crimes long forgotten.