I was websurfing and stumbled across news that Mike Harrison has a new novel, Nova Swing, set to be published by Gollancz in November of this year. Mike confirms on his noticeboard that the novel, a sequel to Light, has been completed and delivered, and that the due date is about right.  The online description reads:

It is some time after Ed Chianese’s trip into the Kefahuchi Tract. A major industry of the Halo is now tourism. The Tract has begun to expand and change, but, more problematically, parts of it have also begun to fall to earth, piecemeal, on the Beach planets. We are in a city, perhaps on New Venusport or Motel Splendido: next to the city is the event site, the zone, from out of which pour new, inexplicable artefacts, organisms and escapes of living algorithm – the wrong physics loose in the universe. They can cause plague and change. An entire department of the local police, Site Crime, exists to stop them being imported into the city by adventurers, entradistas, and the men known as ‘travel agents’, profiteers who can manage – or think they can manage -the bad physics, skewed geographies and psychic onslaughts of the event site. But now a new class of semi-biological artefact is finding its way out of the site, and this may be more than anyone can handle.

 I’ve got no doubt that this will be one of the novels* of the year. Can’t wait to see it.

* Edited as per G. Nix, Clovelly, NSW.

So, I just received an email from Marty Halpern over at Golden Gryphon letting me know that they have just started shipping Jeff Ford’s incredibly wonderful new collection, The Empire of Ice Cream. Marty’s one of the good guys so, to be honest, getting the head’s up from him would have been enough to make me want to pick up a copy of the book, but it just so happens I’ve read twelve of the fourteen stories in the book, and can personally attest to the wonder of The Empire of Ice Cream.

Put simply, Jeff Ford stands in the top five or six short fiction writers currently working in the field. This collection, which assembles stories from the past three or four years, contains no duds at all, and a goodly handful of stories that are sufficiently wonderful as to almost leave your humble correspondent speechless. If you love short fiction, you need this book. If you love great science fiction or fantasy period, you need this book. It’s still early in the year, but I’m completely confident when I say that there won’t be a more essential collection published all year.

Oh, and should you wonder if a third collection could possibly match this, I have a story of Jeff’s called “The Dismantled Invention of Fate” that will appear in my anthology The Starry Rift in mid-2007, and it is a complete peach of a story.

The contents of The Empire of Ice Cream are:

Introduction – Jonathan Carroll.

1. The Annals of Eelin-Ok
2. Jupiter’s Skull
3. A Night in the Tropics
4. The Empire of Ice Cream
5. The Beautiful Gelreesh
6. Boatman’s Holiday
7. Botch Town
8. A Man of Light
9. The Green Word
10. Giant Land
11. Coffins on the River
12. Summer Afternoon
13. The Weight of Words
14. The Trentino Kid

I’ve been asked if I would post a list of the table of contents of The Starry Rift, mentioned in the post about Jeff Ford’s The Empire of Ice Cream. As soon as some details are ironed out, I’ll definitely post a list of contributors, but I thought I might save the full ToC until publication. There’s something about running your eye over a table of contents filled with stories with names you’ve never heard before that I’ve always loved, and I’d like to preserve that this time, if I can.

I loved the covers that Edward Miller (aka Les Edwards) did for the British editions of China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station and The Scar. When it came time for the third Bas-Lag novel, though, his UK publisher opted to pick up the US covers instead. Turns out that his Czech publisher liked the Miller covers too, and ended up commissioning the cover you see on the right for their edition of Iron Council. You can see a larger version of the cover on Miller’s website.

Just a quick note. All comments on this blog are moderated, so it may take a while for your comment to show up. I apologise for this, but I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam, so it’s a compromise.