• A wild Graft appears

    After a mild print hiccup delayed the UK print run, Graft is now officially launched in all Angry Robot territories. I think I’m allowed to breathe again. Ebook, US, UK. And a nice rug. Not pictured: an estranged audiobook. As part of our publicity assault drive, I had a short essay published on SF Signal that delves into…

  • Nearly there…

    Most writers would probably agree that an impending release causes a strange mix of excitement and anxiety. So it feels ace that with only a few weeks until Graft is published, some reviews and mentions are starting to pop up around the internets. In its review, Publishers Weekly says Graft ‘captures the dark underbelly of Manchester in visceral prose’, and that…

  • #robotchristmas

    It sees you when you’re sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. It knows if you’ve been good or bad. And it may exterminate… Angry Robot has sorted out a lovely campaign in time for Christmas over on the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog. It’s called the 12 Days of Robot Christmas, and so far it’s like…

  • Meet Y

    I’ve been dying to share the remarkable cover for Graft, designed by World Fantasy Award-winning artist John Coulthart, since I saw it a fortnight or so ago. Except it isn’t actually one cover, but three. The Angry Robot team liked three of John’s colourways so much that they’re using one for each edition. So, the UK edition…

  • It’s a boy

    Our son Albert was born in the early hours of last Friday. My memories of the actual birth are basically too surreal to relate in any meaningful way, but the cliches list themselves: terror, elation, (over)protectiveness, and a sense everything was being reshuffled at a cellular level. Albie wasn’t too well for his first few hours…

  • Kids in clogs

    I’m currently working with a brilliant artist called Yu-Chen Wang on a short piece of Turing-inspired science fiction for her upcoming exhibition at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry. Along with Sarah Baines, a MOSI curator, we’re writing a story that explores the interior lives of four items in the museum’s collection. The finished text…

  • GRAFT to Angry Robot

    I’m proud and giddy to announce that Angry Robot Books has picked up my second SF novel, Graft. Set in the same alt-future Manchester as The Folded Man (but seven years on, and, save a few familiar faces, not a sequel), Graft follows a local mechanic called Sol who’s caught up in a human trafficking conspiracy when he finds a three-armed woman called Y. Graft…

  • Dredging

    The other week we met a man who sells ‘ballast water management systems’ to shipping operators. A challenge with global shipping, he told us, is that big vessels tend to dredge a lot of marine biology into their ballast tanks as they cross the world’s oceans. This means ships can easily introduce invasive species to new areas when they dump…

  • Roadtrip

    Megacities, uncanny valleys and alien moonscapes — all from our roadtrip up the west coast of America.  

  • Saying sorry

    Writers’ loved ones are the world’s most patient people — after taxi drivers in the arrivals lounge, anyway. They really deserve so much better than the crap they get served by writers in full-blown writing mode, word-wangling somewhere up their own W-hole. Here’s a customisable letter of apology the average writer can use to start…