… or, I’m moving again from tomorrow. Will only be checking e-mails sporadically and web site will most likely stay inactive for a little while. See you on the other side of the planet!

Just saw the 2010 Locus Recommended Reading List: pleased to discover two of my stories on there – The Shangri-La Affair and The Dying World – and also two of the original anthologies I was in last year, the 20/21 issue of Postscripts (edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers) and Lovecraft Unbound (edited by Ellen Datlow).

My latest short story, “The Language of the Whirlwind”, is now available at Clarkesworld Magazine.

The boy kept whistling. Touched by God, the boy was. No one knew who his parents had been — or who had given him the whistle. The first the priest knew of him was when he saw him, in that first week after the Event — the catastrophe, the apocalypse, that thing that had happened, suddenly and inexplicably, to the city of Tel Aviv. He was not yet a priest, then. He had been a… well, did it matter? He had had a wife, and two children, still very small — some friends — a job — a television licence.

This is a stand-alone story set in the world of The Tel Aviv Dossier, the new edition of which should be getting to the bookshops some time in the next couple of months, I am told.

HebrewPunk, my collection of linked, Jewish-themed pulp fantasy stories, recently released for the Kindle, is now available in a variety of formats (including epub, LIT and PDF) over at Fictionwise. The paperback edition is still available on Amazon, of course.

Over at the Apex Magazine Blog, Jason Sizemore saw fit to resurrect my Confessions of a Book Junkie column, so (sequentially numbered 19), I get to talk about collecting steampunk, the books I still have, the books I found, and the books I lost along the way:

I’ve been trying to think if I have a decent steampunk collection or not. I’m still not sure. The first and obvious thing I’m missing is K.W. Jeter’sInfernal Devices. I don’t even think I have it in paperback. And my James Blaylock collection–Homunculus, Lord Kelvin’s Machine, the wonderfulThe Digging Leviathan (not to mention books like The Paper Grail and The Last Coin) I only have in paperback. Even worse, I did have the first edition hardcover of Paul di Filippo’s The Steampunk Trilogy (collecting the novellas Victoria, Hottentots and Walt and Emily) but I don’t think I have it any more.

Which leaves… what?

Well, for one, I have a UK first edition hardcover of Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s The Difference Engine–and it’s signed by both authors. I remember getting it quite vividly, because it was in this bookshop in Greenwich (that wonderland of books) and it was priced, in pencil, at £12–but when I took it to the counter the seller said, no, no, this is from the previous shop! We actually sell it at £18! .

So I huffed and I puffed and I walked away, and agonised over it for a couple of hours–and then I came back, resolved to pay the whole £18, as unfair as it seemed.

But the owner was no longer there. His assistant was, and when I asked for the book he reached for it, gave me a little smile and said, ‘That’d be twelve pounds.’

Bless that nameless bookshop assistant. Perhaps he was the saint of poor book collectors in disguise. Do book collectors have a saint? Do poor ones?

Probably.

And then, of course, there’s my Tim Powers collection. – read the rest of the column…

A couple of weeks ago the Mad Hatter’s books blog got in touch with me with the question: What is the weirdest book you’ve ever read?

They were only asking for a paragraph or two but I got a little carried away talking about one of my favourite books: Luna, The Genetic Paradise, an obscure Hebrew SF novel by Ram Moav, an Israeli geneticist who was dying of a terminal illness at the time of writing the book…

This is such a bizarre novel, that I find myself going back to it, again and again—I have even managed to acquire my own copy of what is by now an incredibly rare volume (it has never been reprinted). It is not a particularly good novel, but it is disturbing on so many levels… and thought-provoking. And it does that rare thing—it offers a searing critique of Israeli identity, of the mythos of Israel itself.

A lot more about Moav and his creation over at the Mad Hatter.

My story “The Secret Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is now live as a podcast at Escape Pod, read by Stephen Eley.

It was afternoon, after school has ended for the day. Sash has been working in the hydroponics gardens, helping the adults with the delicate work of picking the buds. It was flowering time, and the ganja plants were at the end of their cycle.

It was then, with her hands sticky with resin and her skin tingling pleasantly from the work and the heat, with Mama Kingston’s deep, melodious voice saying ‘a good harvest, child, a good harvest’ with a throaty chuckle, when Sash felt about herself the presence of Jah in everything she did and was profoundly happy: it was then that Sash discovered, for the first time, the existence of the Secret.  - click to listen to the story!

I have a new guest-post, this time over at the Falcata Times blog, talking about genre-crossing:

I never really understood why people get so worked up about trying to distinguish science fiction from fantasy, literary fiction from crime, romance from horror (haha, just joking). Emma is both romance and literature, surely? And L.A. Confidential is, besides being a “crime” novel, also one of the great works of American literature. Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia is as much a work of fantasy as it is science fiction, just as Zelazny’ Lord of Light beautifully blends the two.

More and more, crime narratives influence science fiction novels. Romance is shaping up modern fantasy. And all these genres feed back into the world of literary fiction – Number9dream or Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow immediately come to mind.

As a writer, I have very little patience for the artificial borders of genre marketing. Zoran Živkovic argues for all non-realistic fiction to be called Fantastika, which I think is quite a wonderful way of putting it – at least if you care for that sort of thing. I prefer to simply think of genres as toolboxes sitting by the desk, waiting to be used – or, if you prefer, as stepping-stones in a stream where you can hop from one to the other at leisure (just trying not to fall into the water in the process!) – read the rest of the post.

HebrewPunk is now available in a Kindle edition! And can also be downloaded in PDF from Drivethrustuff.com.

I’m guesting over at the SFF World message boards at the moment, answering questions – feel free to drop by and listen to my inane ramblings!