Helicon turned out, alas, to be Hellishcon for Lou and me. What we thought was food poisoning turned out to be a stomach bug which left us seeing rather too much of our hotel room, specifically our hotel bathroom, and rather too little of our fellow convention-goers or of Jersey itself. I managed a day and a half of health before being laid low, during which time I hung out with the various members of the Gollancz crew and a few non-aligned others, and that was fun. So hello to all of them and to everyone I didn’t get to meet at the Con, and I hope I haven’t infected you with anything dire. I don’t want to get a reputation as the Typhoid Mary of genre publishing.

Visitors to this site who are of a sequential-art bent may be interested to know that I have begun providing a quasi-monthly comics review column for that esteemed and celebrated e-thereal forum The Alien Online. Go to the Reviews section of the site and follow the logical prompts, and you will find (as of writing) three helpings of my deathless and incisive critical approach to such works as The Fantastic Four and Essential Howard the Duck. It’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity or the inclination to attempt reviewing, and this time around I’m dealing with stuff I really know about and have been a fan of for thirty years, so I’m enjoying myself with it and I’m grateful to the mighty Ariel (of this parish) for strongarming me, er, I mean coaxing me into doing it.

Meantime, publication of Untied Kingdom approaches. Start getting excited, kiddies!

Oh, and book recommendation of the moment: The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza. It starts out looking like a murder-mystery set in Ancient Greece and soon develops into something far stranger, more complex and more intriguing than that. A ground-breaking literary conceit, brilliantly executed, and a page-turner to boot. Read this novel!