Another brief B‑road of the information superhighway:

I will be signing at Garforth Independent Bookshop at 11.00am til noon, Saturday 29th August, if you've missed me at Leeds, Reading etcetera.

As a final and somewhat further flung item on the tour (1) I will be in Poland from the 5th to the 8th November to catch up with the Krakow science fiction fair and sign books (I assume sign books). My Polish publishers, Rebis, are working out the details, but I'm likely to be hitting Warsaw too. Specifics as I have them.

If you are in Poland, then you should also definitely catch up with

 

where Rebis will be, I think, releasing previews of the Polish language version of Empire and similar goodies.

Sticking with the English language version, there is a new interview up at Fantasy Book Critic here in which I talk about, among other things, plans for the future of the series.

Finally, and into the realms of the completely mad, a friend sent me this link which surely qualifies as "some people have too much funding." As you see, someone has finally produced a cyborg insect. Not in a "giant cyborg insect is in your cities eating your population" sort of way, or a "six million dollar insect fights crime", but in a "if we spend enough money and do enough science we can turn a large beetle into a kind of remote control plane. No doubt this has colossal espionage/intelligence gathering potential (2).  Except to be honest, what this experiment seems to have created is, essentially, a remote control plane that (a) doesn't really go where you want it to go, and (b) drops dead after about 20 days. And stealth? These beetles are not small insects. Anyone who's seen even a rosechafer in flight, let alone a stag beetle, will know how clumsy, noisy and all-round attention seeking they are, and unicorn beetles are the same kind of scale or larger. And that's when they're not equipped with what appears to be a gun turret over the thorax as though they're ready to be ridden by tiny US army pixies. (5)

(1) Note for Londoners — it is possible to go somewhere more far-flung than Yorkshire

(2) What the beetle thinks of this is unrecorded (3)

(3) Possibly "wheeeeeeeeeee!". Alternatively, "Get this f**king electrode out of my tiny brain", or even "Oh no, not again." (4)

(4) On the subject of Douglas Adams, we are moving into the 30th anniversary of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for which Tor are bringing out a new edition of the books. Joyously, this edition will come with a blank cover, and a set of stickers to customise your own cover! This may qualify as New Best Thing Ever.

(5) This reminds me of another piece of insect engineering a while ago. Some scientists had engineered a mosquito that would when released into the wild (I think I recall) mate with the wild malarial population but not produce offspring, thereby keeping the numbers of the disease-carriers in check. The scientist behind the innovation admitted that some people were scared about the possibilities of releasing a genetically modified organism into the wild. To reassure people, however, he had ensured that you could tell the new mosquitos from their regular natural cousins. How? Glowing red eyes. I'm reassured. How about you?