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Forgive the long pause, as the bear said, but in my defence, I've been writing.

Anyway, I'm delighted to confirm that my new novel, The Doors of Eden is out very soon, which is to say around 20th August. Waterstones link here, Forbidden Planet link here, and Amazon here.  For those in the States, the US release is September.

What the hell is the Doors of Eden? It's a standalone SF set partially in the real world in the modern day, and partially on a whole load of other parallel earths where things have gone very differently. It has espionage and spy stuff, crytozoology, higher physics and speculative evolution by the spade-full. I somehow scored a review in the New Scientist here.

I had inordinate fun writing this book, which has been on the factory floor being planned out and assembled for a long old time — the first seeds were planted back in 2014 at Loncon, springing out of their excellent series of panels on spec evo. It frankly has more of the sort of evolutionary science weirdness that marks Children of Time than anything else I've written. And yes, there are spiders, though not centre stage. Plenty of other invertebrates to take up the slack, however.

(For other news, you may also want to look out for:

A new space opera trilogy! — This is coming out in the UK from Pan Macmillan and in the US from Orbit (as with Children and Doors) from 2021 onwards and represents me finally giving in to my desire for people to go from place to place in space at relativistically impossible speeds. Needless to say the mechanics of said FTL travel basically got very complicated and ended up being the actual core concept of the book. Plus aliens, from sentient crabs through cyborg hive minds to moon-sized monsters that destroy planets.

Time travel! - One Day All This Will Be Yours, a novella from Rebellion which is a conceptual (not actual) follow-on from Walking to Aldebaran, with the same general theme of someone stuck somewhere isolated and unnatural. In this case, the end of time. Also dinosaurs, time warriors, saccharine utopias, inappropriate cameos from historical characters! There will be two other novellas in this little set, a third to the Ironclads-Firewalkers dystopia sequence, and then one more story of weird isolation.

A sequel to Dogs of War! — unannounced as yet but on its way from Head of Zeus. I'm currently going through the edits and its current title is Bear Head. Bears, Bees, politics, Mars.

A sequel to The Expert System's Brother! Entitled The Expert System's Champion showing a world, and a Handry, ten years on. Handry has built a weird compromise between his outcasts and the villages, but now a new threat has arrived that threatens to tear it all to pieces. From tor.com.

A super secret project I can't talk about! — which I can't talk about!

And, at some point in the future, I do intend penning a third Children book.