Just noticed that scfi.com have the full text of Thomas M. Disch’s classic short story, Descending, in their archive.

It is magnificent; a story which starts off as innocent and playful as a kitten with a ball of yarn but soon turns into a syphilitic eight-cocked demon with an utter absence of empathy in its eyes that wants nothing more than to make you pay for all the awful things that you’ve done.  At least, that’s the mood I took away from it.  Your experiences may be entirely different.

You can read it here.

Disch shot himself in his New York appartment on July 4th, 2008.

Project Luna: 1947 will be an 88 page original graphic novel written by me with art by Jim Boswell, who I worked with a little while ago on a four page sci-fi strip for Futurequake.

Contracts with Markosia are signed and we’re good to go.  Above is Jim’s first mock-up cover, a try out as he gets to grips with the characters, sorts out their hair colours and builds, designs the ships and what not, and it looks rather splendid.

Jim’s a great artist and I’m really looking forward to seeing his pages as they come in.

So, some good news to end the year on.  Who knows . . . next year might not be complete shit after all.

My short story, Spamface, appears in this week’s issue of Nature, on sale August 28th.

Here’s a panel from the first page of “Intergalactic Bank Robbing Teenage Space Aliens on the Run,” a four-page strip for FutureQuake.

Art and letters by Jim Boswell, who, as always, is doing an insanely good job.

I wish I could show the whole page, Jim’s art really is spiffing stuff.

My story Something out of Nothing appears in Barren Worlds, a new anthology from Hadley Rille Books.

$12.92 here.

Got some great news yesterday.  Nature editor Henry Gee emailed me to say that he’s accepting my short story “Spamface” for publication in the Futures section of an upcoming issue.

Click below for info on the current issue.

Click here, then Murky Stuff, Issues, PDF # 2 to download a free 22-page taster issue of Murky Depths.

Along with my short story, Shit New World, it also includes prose stories from Lavie Tidhar and Sarah Wagner. The original Episode #1 of Death and The Maiden from Richard Calder. Poem from Glynn Barrass with accompanying artwork by Luke Hinchley. Cover by Luke Cooper.

Murky Depths is a quarterly anthology of short fiction, poetry, articles and comic strips and you really should be reading it.

So says Sam Tomaino in his review of my short story Shit New World (Murky Depths Issue Three) over on SFRevu.

Much better than Michelle Lee’s review on The Fix in which she says, “. . . the tale itself is little more than a long complaint.”

Well, it is called Shit New World after all, that was kind of the point of the story, and it’s barely 500 words so it can’t be that long.

So then, one good review, one bad. I’m torn between having a celebratory drink or doing a Stephen Fry on it – hopping on a ferry and pissing off to Belgium in a huff.

I was in the local recycling centre yesterday and liberated this from the free book shelves. What kind of person would throw this away?

The dust jacket is a little tattered but apart from that it’s clean and brand new looking.

I could understand people throwing out really, really crappy books – and yet the shelves remain unburdened by the works of Dan Brown and Cecilia Ahern. Puzzling.