Short Stories and Stuff

Well, it looks for sure like Piper’s Ash, who published Runcible Tales, has closed:

After some 40 years promoting new authors, we regret to say that we are now closing down our business. We wish new authors every success in the future with new publishers.

This means I now have a handful of short stories to go towards another collection: Always with You, Blue Holes, Dragon in the Flower, The Gire and the Bibrat & Walking John and Bird. Other stories that could be made part of a collection include Shell Game, The Cuisinart Effect, The Rhine’s World Incident and perhaps some others sitting in my files that are unrelated to the Polity (as most of these are) or Cowl (the Rhine’s World one).  The thing about The Gabble was that Peter Lavery asked me to confine myself to Polity stories so it fitted in with the rest of the Macmillan books, so I have plenty of other stories knocking about that don’t really fit anywhere.

Meanwhile, it’s lovely to discover that I’m right-wing (and probably a fascist) and that my writing is ‘a bit moronic’ and the ‘political anvils’ I drop into my work are naïve. This of course means that all of you who enjoy my books were too stupid to notice my obviously deep desire to stomp all over you with jackboots as opposed to, say, always protesting about big autocratic government. I never realized, but now it’s been made clear to me I will of course be off to get a swastika tattooed on my forehead. Surely it was clear that all the Polity books described the fascist state I wished we all lived in?

And meanwhile I’ll get back to Jupiter War, the last book in this Owner trilogy. I ask what I consider to be some serious questions, but these books are completely irrelevant. In failing to conform to correct political thought and not loving big state socialism I’m obviously as dumb as a box of spanners.

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