Downloads

Ventus - Complete novel

I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.

Complete novel: Ventus

To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. You can download it from this page. Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it; to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version.

I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative works or sell it.

Book Excerpts: Sun of Suns and Pirate Sun

I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here:

Major Foresight Project: Crisis in Zefra

In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario. The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency. The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.

If you'd like to read Crisis in Zefra, you can download it in PDF form.

Short Stories

I'll be adding new stories here periodically. First of all, you can try my Aurora-award nominated short story "Hopscotch." The year this was nominated, another of my stories was also nominated: "The Toy Mill," which I wrote with David Nickle. "The Toy Mill" won the award; but I've always been fond of "Hopscotch." Here it is, in its entirety excerpted from my collection The Engine of Recall.

Hopscotch

Personal tools

future projects

Jul 02, 2008

What he said

Filed Under:

Yes, I'm part of the "Sekret Projekt" John Scalzi just revealed. It's going to blow your mind

Way over at the Whatever, John has made an announcement about a really fun project he dragged me into a couple months back. It's true: John, and Elizabeth Bear, and Jay Lake, and Tobias Buckell and I have been working together for several months to present you with a new near-future vision, one that's decidedly urban but calls into question what a city really is... and what the boundaries of sovereignty are in a future where some of the world's cities will have greater populations than the countries they are in.

So, if the cyberpunks were all about corporate control, sticky technologies and software, we're all about sustainable communities, parallel economies and remapping reality with your GPS and your sleeping bag. It's the city alive, the city as beast and brother and increasingly, self-aware actor in the global political arena.

Or, as Shriekback sang in their song "Hymn to Local Gods" (a reference sure to date me as one of the old guys):

In the canals and the wastelands
Up in the spires, under the flyovers
Still you can see, with the right eyes,
The shining presence of the local gods
Stand in the silence you can hear them whisper
Hearing their laughter echo in the steel and stone

So leave a fire in the window
Pour the wine under the underpass
Let's all go down to the river
We'll go swimming with the local gods...

Apr 16, 2008

Interviewed by Parisian SF magazine

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The interview's in English

The excellent French online magazine ActuSF has published an interview with me. They wanted to know about Ventus and Permanence and some of the ideas I explored in them. It was refreshing for me to talk about those books, because as the current Virga quartet winds to its conclusion (not that there won't be further books set there, by the way!) I find my interests and attention wandering back to the issues I explored in my first three novels. I'm hugely interested in present developments in cognitive science, and am now thinking about how the vast array of settings and tech I developed for Ventus and Lady of Mazes might be used to support a novel about cogsci. --Relax, I'm just daydreaming, for now.