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I've a short story in an anthology on Amazon. It's pretty old now, more on that later, but it's in the excellent Kimota Anthology from Preston SF Group bloke Graeme Hurry. It's not just me but there's early Neal Asher, Stephen Gallagher and Steve Laws in there too. If you feel like a cracking anthology of stuff then you you can get it here (http://www.amazon.com/The-Kimota-Anthology-ebook/dp/B004QTOFQG) for the bargain basement price of 2.99!
Novie's Ark was an interesting story for me. It was 1998, I had just got divorced, my life as I'd known it was in the toilet and I was completely stone broke. So I was spending a lot of time chatting online and writing stuff. About a year before I'd finished a first draft of a novel set in a vaguely steam punkesque "hand me down" universe about 20,000ish years after a singularity had taken everybody away and left nothing but ruins and tech. Orion Rising was a mixture of deep space archaeology and speculation on what AIs who left behind get up to...
Anyway, it needed a lot of work but I wrote as short story, which ended up at 6500+ words about the events immediately before that singularity, and then another 14,000 words of draft of what had happened to postpone a singularity in the 2030s... So, Novie's Ark started to turn into the middle of a triology.
For now though, it was the first story I was proud off and like any aspiring young SF writer I sent it out to a lot of places. It bounced. Not too hard. Interzone sent me a long list of things I needed to do and asked me to send them more stuff as soon as I could. Graeme picked it up for Kimota which was semi-prozine small-press and technically it was first and penultimate sale.
Novie's Ark was an interesting story for me. It was 1998, I had just got divorced, my life as I'd known it was in the toilet and I was completely stone broke. So I was spending a lot of time chatting online and writing stuff. About a year before I'd finished a first draft of a novel set in a vaguely steam punkesque "hand me down" universe about 20,000ish years after a singularity had taken everybody away and left nothing but ruins and tech. Orion Rising was a mixture of deep space archaeology and speculation on what AIs who left behind get up to...
Anyway, it needed a lot of work but I wrote as short story, which ended up at 6500+ words about the events immediately before that singularity, and then another 14,000 words of draft of what had happened to postpone a singularity in the 2030s... So, Novie's Ark started to turn into the middle of a triology.
For now though, it was the first story I was proud off and like any aspiring young SF writer I sent it out to a lot of places. It bounced. Not too hard. Interzone sent me a long list of things I needed to do and asked me to send them more stuff as soon as I could. Graeme picked it up for Kimota which was semi-prozine small-press and technically it was first and penultimate sale.
In 1999, I started working in mobile, my work-life balance went all to hell and the trilogy of Transcendence Lost, Novie's Ark and Orion Rising are sitting as a massive pile of notes and files around the place.
I re-read Novie's Ark last night and it was an interesting experience. I'm still proud of the story, but it's interesting what a difference a decade makes to how the mind works. I could see the clumsy wording better and some of the use of tenses was completely wrong for the feel of the story. I'm almost tempted to do a re-write.
Interesting, what I'm most happy about, given that I wrote the tech/pre-singularity scenes over 12 years ago, I'm still pretty happy that I've got the tone of that bit right.
As a separate now. I started the notes and outline for the first part of the trilogy in 2002 and it starts in 2013/14 - which seemed a REALLY long way off then :)
