Here you can find details for all of James Lovegrove’s published books, most recent first.
The Age Of Zeus
When Solaris asked what I wanted to do next for them after The Age Of Ra, I straight away said two more Age Of (Fill In Name Of Heathen God Here) books. Zeus is a flat-out action-adventure effort. There’s power armour, monsters galore, violence, intrigue, deception, betrayal, violence, Australian swearing, punning porn movie titles … did I mention violence?
Click here to read an extract, the prologue of the novel.
The Age Of Ra
George Mann of Solaris Books rang me up and asked if I’d like to do an alternate-history novel for them. Naturally I said yes, not least because I’d been hearing nothing but good reports about Solaris since the imprint’s inception (and you won’t hear anything but good reports from me either).
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The Clouded World series (as Jay Amory)
In 2004 my editor at Gollancz, Simon Spanton, suggested I have a crack at a Young Adult series and, moreover, that I base it on my tale “Wings”. He said the world of “Wings” was crying out to be built upon and expanded, and naturally I disagreed and hummed and hahhed and said I didn’t think it would work, the story was a closed loop, I couldn’t extract any more mileage from it. And then I started thinking about it, and realised it could work, and might work pretty well, and next thing I knew, I was writing a novel called The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson.
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Dead Brigade
I love a good zombie movie, me, and I’ve long been harbouring thoughts of writing a story in that genre. So when Barrington Stoke told me they were starting a new line, Most Wanted, for Reluctant Readers who aren’t teens (i.e. adults), I thought I’d have a bash at giving them a tale about the shambling undead.
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Kill Swap
The idea for Kill Swap came to me, as the author’s note in the book states, when I was lying awake at four o’clock one morning.
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Cold Keep
Cold Keep came about largely because I wanted to write a story with a tough, resourceful young female protagonist and because the title, which popped into my head one morning, was just too good not to have a tale attached to it.
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Provender Gleed
The initial inspiration for the novel came to me while my wife and I were on our ‘third honeymoon’, a three-week trip to the US.
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Ant God
This is the third of my Barrington Stoke books for Reluctant Readers. The concept is a Big Idea which I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while, about the nature of divinity and the corresponding relationship between human beings and lesser creatures.
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Worldstorm
Worldstorm is a big fantasy novel, something I could never have envisaged myself writing, but then never say never when it comes to envisaging your own future. The setting is a world much like ours was about two centuries ago but with one crucial difference: everyone in it is born with some form of super power, latent till the onset of puberty.
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Gig
The idea for Gig came to me, as ideas sometimes do, while I was out on a run.
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The House of Lazarus
My second book for Barrington Stoke rewrites the short story which first appeared in the Destination: Unknown anthology (see the ’short stories’ page for details).
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Untied Kingdom
The book is set in a near-future England which has been ostracised by the rest of the world following widespread civil disorder and the collapse of government. People are surviving, despite the frequent missile attacks launched by the so-called International Community which are intended to improve the situation but only make it worse. A semblance of societal order remains, not least in one small southern town called Downbourne, where the book’s hero, Fen Morris, a schoolteacher, lives with his wife Moira.
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Imagined Slights
My first published short story, ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’, came second in a competition held by the late FEAR magazine. The prize was a signed, slip-cased, illustrated, limited-edition copy of Douglas E. Winter’s horror anthology Prime Evil.
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Wings (aka Adenydd)
Wings is an adaptation of a story which appears in the aforementioned Imagined Slights, rewritten for what are known as “reluctant readers”, which means readers in their early teens with a lower-than-average reading age.
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The Foreigners
An alien race who have chosen Earth as a tourist destination, the Foreigners are tall, golden-robed, elegant and unknowable. Their arrival has brought peace and stability to the planet, and no one wants to see this peace and stability maintained more than Jack Parry, a captain with the Foreign Policy Police.
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The Hand That Feeds (with Peter Crowther)
The Hand That Feeds came about when Pete (Crowther) asked me if I wanted to revive the old collaborative team and write a story with him for a White Wolf anthology based on one of that company’s magic games.
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How The Other Half Lives
William Ian North is an absurdly successful moneymaker. His nigh-unimaginable wealth gives him the ability to found and topple governments, ruin nations, even start wars. But down in the cellar of his mansion lies the secret of his success and it’s a close-to-home secret in more ways that one. It’s also a surprisingly nasty secret, and nastily surprising.
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The Web : Computopia
Collected with five other stories (by Maggie Furey, Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Pat Cadigan and Eric Brown) set in the same universe, in Web 2028.
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Guardians : Krilov Continuum & Guardians : Berserker
The Guardians was pure work-for-hire. The basic concept was dreamed up by one of the higher-ups at Orion Books – a one-line idea about two races of aliens waging war on Earth – which I then developed and fleshed out, adding characters, history and basically everything else.
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Escardy Gap (with Peter Crowther)
A short-story collaboration that ended up five hundred pages long, Escardy Gap was pure fun from start to finish.
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After a big ship, why not a big shop? The Hope
The Hope is a vast ocean liner, five miles long and two miles wide and one mile high, which lurches through the waves on a voyage to nowhere, carrying a million passengers in her rusting belly.
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