I’m currently working on a loose sequel to my short story ‘Six Lights Off Green Scar’ (which first appeared in Aphelion in April 2005 and was then translated into Polish for the magazine Nowa Fantastyka, before being heavily revised for the Infinity Plus website in June 2007, where it appeared alongside work by Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, and Greg Egan).

The working title for the new story is ‘Caesar Murphy’. I’m currently around 600 words into it and I’ll post updates as I progress.

If you want to read ‘Six Lights…’ it’s available here, for free: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/sixlights.htm

• Ascendancies by Bruce Sterling
• The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

Sam Jordison has been writing about the collision of science fiction and mainstream literature in The Guardian.

1. Why Do Critics Still Sneer At Sci-Fi?

“Science fiction writers are dismissed by the mainstream, but for mind-expanding ideas and sheer narrative excitement the genre is hard to beat”

2. Literary Apocalypse Now, And Then

“So, novelists’ visions of the future are looking very bleak at the moment. What’s new?”

3. Reading Sci-Fi For Pleasure

“As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else.”

I have a brand new short story called “The Redoubt” included in the December/January issue of Aphelion, now online.

The story follows a pair of young lovers – Scott and Anna – in the last hours of a doomed holiday romance, and asks: if you were given the chance to live forever, would you take it?

The setting for the story comes from a week I spent in France at the age of sixteen, camping with friends in the grounds of an Ecumenical monastery near Cluny. Although the characters and events in the story are fictitious, I’ve tried to describe the countryside, the village church and the hot, sticky weather as accurately as possible.

Also in this issue of Aphelion is a story by fellow Friday Flash Fictioneer, Neil Beynon.

Brian Appleyard explores the “sniffy” British attitude to science fiction in an article for the Sunday Times.

“The truth is,” Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF scenario.” A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

He goes on to claim that HG Wells was responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Astounding magazine caused the Cold War…

Part one of my story “The Last Reef” was broadcast on the “Beam Me Up” show on WRFR Radio on 1st December. The show is now available to listen to as a podcast. Part two will be broadcast next week.

On Saturday December 1st, Paul Cole will play a reading of my short story “The Last Reef” on his show on WRFR Radio in the States.

WRFR broadcasts live from studios in Knox County, serving the Rockland Maine area. The show will be live streamed during the radio broadcast, and will be available online afterwards as a podcast.

Because of its length, the story may be broadcast in two parts.

I’ve just submitted two previously unpublished stories, each to a market I haven’t tried before.

In a review of Interzone 212, SF Signal says:

“…212 is chock full of stories. The standouts being: ‘Feelings of the Flesh’ by Douglas Elliot Cohen (a unique story with creature who can steal a person’s senses), ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ by Gareth Lyn Powell (about an underground comic character that becomes very powerful), and ‘The Algorithm’ by Tim Akers (a clockpunk story where God is of the machine, the best of the issue).”

Rudy Rucker joins the likes of Cory Doctrow, Charles Stross and Jason Stoddard, by making the entire text of his latest novel Postsingular available online as a free download.