REVIEWED AGAIN...

Another nice Point review over at BiblioBuffet, which also nicely analyses the role of a reviewer and how personal taste and expertise intersect with responsible analysis. The reviewer is Australian writer Gillian Pollack, and the bibliographic description includes this: "She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans." But it doesn't mention which con she acquired them at...

She also writes: I absolutely don’t want to live in the world Blackthorne has created. I didn’t want to in Edge (the first book in the series) and I most certainly don’t want to now. I do, however, want to read about it. It’s relentless and gripping, with a brilliant balance between the personal and the political. She is clearly insightful and vastly intelligent, and her hobbies are her own affair.

POINTERS

Point is on io9's "The Books We Can't Wait For This Spring" list. Ta loads.

Plus there's a most excellent review on The Eloquent Page. Point is described as "the perfect blend of action and science fiction", which is exactly what I was aiming for. Good-o! Or as the younger generation say, sick. Or mint. Or lush...

I'm gearing myself up to revamping the Amazon listing for my Kindle ebook, New Jerusalem, and actually, y'know, featuring it here on the website. Owning up to authorship, if you like. It's SF only if you insist that all alternate history forms an SFnal subset - a perfectly reasonable viewpoint that I subscribe to about 50% of the time.

The story is a cold-war espionage tale set in the 1960s of a world where the independent Jewish state is in... West Germany. (Yes, I worked on this between other projects, before Michael Chabon came out with his book.)

Even though Charlie Stross likes it, no British publisher is going to look at a book with a Jewish spy as a protagonist. (Not even a half-English, half-American, Jewish-atheist physicist-spy in a world where the Middle East is at peace.) So I self-published on Amazon. I am a decent copy-editor - I suspect most writers are either very good or rubbish at this - plus I was able to manually hack an intermediate file to improve the formatting... There are advantages to being an old programmer!

For tech-heads: my current software-related project, having rewired my brain years ago to become fully OO, is to absorb the functional programming way of thought, something I've been putting off for some time (though I'm fine with twisty XSLT, which is part-way there)... I have Haskell installed, and I'm raring to go.

Writing-wise, and more to the point: I'm brainstorming some new stuff at the moment, 2 or 3 new projects, not all of them SF. That's in the hiatus before immersing myself in Resonance, the final Ragnarok book, which is somewhat terrifying, because I so have to get the ending right...

Appearances-wise, I'm mentally preparing myself for being Guest of Honour at Novacon 41. Yvonne has just now dug up my 33-year-old membership badge from Novacon 8, being my very first con. (Her first con was also in '78 - she's rifling through a box right now, and saying: "There's three decades of badges in here.") Good grief.