With a little good fortune the next episode of the Coode Street Podcast will be out with the world sometime in the next thirty-six hours. This week’s episode features the first ever “live” interview/chat with World Fantasy Award winning author K.J. Parker. We will be talking about Parker’s new online project with Orbit, new novel with Subterranean and, of course, what it means to be K.J. Parker./ We’ve been waiting for this one for a while, and think it should be pretty special.

I’ve been blogging over on Facebook this week about some of the great Australian science fiction and fantasy books I encountered when I first entered the SF field.  If you want to check them out,  they’re in here somewhere.

The book that really stands out for me, the first explosion on the local scene, was when a UK publisher gathered together the first batch of hard science fiction stories by local writer Greg Egan in Axiomatic.

Egan had been publishing standout stories like “Learning to be Me”, “The Moral Virologist”, “Axiomatic” and others. Big SF stories tackling big ideas.  I’ve said elsewhere that the stories Egan published between 1985 and 1995 represent one of the great bodies of SF short fiction and stand among the great entries to our field, and this book was a key part of that.  Heady stuff, and still recommended.

I’m getting ready to edit a new hard science fiction anthology, the fifth in my ‘Infinity Project’. I’m pretty excited about it. The theme is good, it’s fairly loose which I prefer, and it gives me the chance to work with a variety of writers. All good.

Before I get too far into the project though, I thought I’d spread my field a bit wider than usual. So if you have any recommendation of new hard SF writers I should be checking out, please let me know. I’m interested in any hard SF writers, but especially ones either starting out in their careers or based outside the US and UK.

I have no doubt I’ll be working with some of the fabulous writers I’ve been lucky enough to work with in the past, but I’d love to add a bunch of new names to that list.