Chart / March

March 31, 2024

This month, I was away at a writer’s residency at Joya:AiR in southern Spain, a climate-positive, not-for-profit, off-grid farm-like Moon base, where I found out that I can channel my inner Stephen King and somehow write 4,000 words per day. I also learned that being isolated on a mountain, a four-hour walk from the nearest town, with a handful of strangers to keep me company is quite the challenge. Plus, I eat more food than the average person, apparently (in service of dem gains). All in all, it was a great experience, the surroundings were magnificent, and I’ve made significant headway with the old magnum opus (no, really, this time).

In Pacific State news….there is no news. Poor baby is tanking hard and it pains my sensitive heart that my favourite of all my novels has by far the lowest audience, but such is life. Locus asked to review it, at least, and it has been submitted to a couple of awards, so there’s a chance it’ll find a new lease of life at some point. But maybe it just isn’t meant to be appreciated in its own time.

Other writing news: I translated a couple of photobooks that will be coming out this year, my own photobook is at the dummy stage, and I’ve started a new climate-related book project that - I hope - will see the light of day this year. Even so, it’s April tomorrow and things are piling up. It’ll be 2025 before I know it.

Book of the month: I’ll go with Night of the Hunter by the fantastically named Davis Grubb. The film with Robert Mitchum may be more famous (and I believe it may have provided some inspiration for Cape Fear), but the novel is tightly plotted and darkly endearing. I love the Southern turns of phrase and the quasi-oedipal battle between John and Preacher for the mother/wife’s heart. Seems like every single page has a new description of the Moon on it, but it all helps create an expressionist mood suffused in sweat and fractious energies.

Film of the month: I finally watched Fear and Desire, Kubrick’s earliest film. It’s rough and ready and the seams are extremely visible, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. There’s a spark there throughout, though the only really worthwhile scene is when the youngest of the soldiers goes insane while taunting a woman prisoner tied to a tree. I felt echoes of Gomer Pyle (Full Metal Jacket appeared a full 34 years after F&D) while watching it. It was only an hour long, too - good job, as the actor who plays the captain is unbearable.

Album of the month: Invincible Shield by Judas Priest. Pure, beautiful metal by a bunch of men over the age of 70. I don’t even really like Priest (except Painkiller), but this may end up being my album of the year because why even pretend I’m in touch with the kids anymore eh.

Lights, camera, music:

1 Duke Boara - Sapphire

2 Mall Grab - Dive

3 Will Silver - Maybe It’s Not Our Time Yet

4 Tom VR - Heart Can Still Somersault

5 Supreems - Nachtschone

6 Vegyn - Makeshift Tourniquet

Chart / January

January 29, 2024 in diary

NEWSFLASH: I’m back.

It’s been a while since I did one of these….September, in fact. The reasons are myriad: I relocated to Athens, Pacific State needed a promotin’ (number #1 for cyberpunk in the USA last week!), and I have a few projects keeping me busy. Two days ago I wrote the last line of a neo-Western thriller I’ve been working on for a year. Perfect timing, because from mid-February I’ll be in residence at JOYA: AiR, a not-for-profit, carbon-positive arts residency supporting artistic projects “at the intersection between creativity and the environment”. My residency will last for three weeks, during which I hope to sketch out the structure for a new masculinity and climate-focused novel and write the first chapter.

Book of the month: Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I’d been aware of this book for many years, but I’d never actually paid it much attention beyond the gnarly cover art. For some reason, I’d assumed it was written in the 1960s. WRONG. It’s a mashup of Conrad, Gibson and Homer. And it’s fantastic. Not since the Three-Body Problem have I read science fiction so rich, with 10+ fully fleshed characters all with their own incredibly well-constructed stories. The world-building is flawless, the language varied and the dissection of religion compelling.

Film of the month:

In November Criterion put up a selection of ‘end of the world’ films, with some of the usual suspects including Mad Max, Threads and Escape From New York. I’m still working my way through the titles I’ve never heard of. Two I did watch were Dead End Drive-In and Night Of The Comet. Both distinctly B-movie, both rough around the edges, both with dodgy pacing, paper-thin characters and editing choices (Night has a pivotal scene where most of the world is turned into red dust by a comet passing overhead…all we see of this catastrophe is one woman closing her eyes and uttering a bored ‘oh’). The saving grace: the sets, costume design and cinematography (particular for Drive-In). Wow. Neon-soaked cities, orange horizons, bloodied skies. It more than makes up for dialogue like “Yeaaaah my name’s Crabsy, because people thought I had crabs, But I don’t”. That’s the protagonist saying it. Our hero. The guy we want to believe in.

Buena Vista Music Club:

1 The Beaches - Blame Brett

2 Phoebe Bridgers - Scott Street

3 sign crushes motorist - theres this girl

4 Pinegrove - Need 2

5 flyingfish - wonder if u care

6 Soap&Skin - Me and the Devil

My Favorite Bit with Mary Robinette Kowal + Pacific State reviews

January 18, 2024

Pacific State, my second novel in the Sundown Cycle, is up and running, and it seems to be quite the hit among reviewers both of the print persuasian and the garden variety. Foreword Magazine was effusive in its praise and rating (5/5), stating:

the book excels at worldbuilding, dropping evocative hints at the full scope of its dystopia. It’s peppered with slang references to foodstuffs, new technology, and organized crime that pique interest in its wider world. It mixes oracular pronouncements with striking descriptions in prose that is stylish and sometimes beautiful, as when a building is described as having a “dreadnought silhouette” that creates “a negative space in an overcast sky,” or with notes about “sodium-lit streets” and a “spit-shined moon hung up on display.”

Then we have reviewers such as The Dragon’s Cache (nice), who picked up on all kinds of throwaway world-building elements, which I find wonderful, ultimately declaring that “Price…decries our casual disregard for climate change, reminds us of the dangers of unrestrained commerce, and argues that risking our lives to stamp out cruelty can be a noble cause.”

Another fun one is Pagefarer, who sums up what we’re all thinking by writing, “It’s a great book. It’s tightly written, full of believable and three-dimensional characters, and the worldbuilding is excellent.”

Also, a special shoutout to….this cool guy for describing the novel as follows: “it's like Gibson and Stephenson had a brainchild and it's all chromed up in neon and existential dread.” Very nice indeed.

ELSEWHERE…

I wrote a short article for the website of Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal about my favourite aspect of Pacific State. This is my second appearance on the site, with my first entry waxing lyrical on the use of flashbacks in everyone’s plucky post-apoc champ, By the Feet of Men. This time around, I’m in a more linguistic mood as I discuss a shorthand, corporate-only language I conceived for the novel called Whicolla. As always, I tie it into the climate crisis, because we’re still sleepwalking to our collective doom.

Read the full article right here.

PACIFIC STATE is out today!

December 21, 2023

The day is here: PACIFIC STATE, the second novel in the Sundown Cycle, is out now from Black Rose Writing. Taking place in a near-future Berlin ravaged by the effects of the climate crisis, it’s a high-octane, cerebral technothriller that takes the many, many problems we are currently facing as individuals, local communities and a global society and blows them up to outsized and unsettling proportions – like any good science fiction should.

Here’s the scoop:

On the streets of Berlin all morals can be bought for a price, and Owen Resler sold his long ago. Once an underground dissenter, now a corporate drone, he spends his days reluctantly manipulating data for Big Pharma.

Across town, notorious gun-for-hire Mia Warsaw is putting together a team to assassinate one of the city's more unscrupulous business moguls and she needs someone to handle the ones and zeroes.

When Warsaw crosses paths with an increasingly desperate Resler, she hands the former radical an ultimatum: he can either succumb to death by a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts or take a chance with her.

Of course, there's no guarantee he'll survive that, either…

I am extremely proud of this novel, not least because I feel like it transcends the genres of cyberpunk, thriller and general sci fi to offer something unique in a crowded market. The early reviews have been extremely positive, with my favourite coming from the esteemed Midwest Book Review:

“The result is more literary than most cyberpunk creations, more psychologically astute than the typical thriller story of intrigue and dangerous connections, and more original and compelling than many. Libraries and readers seeking near-future worlds that stand out for their feel of authenticity and doom will find Pacific State a winner.”

Pacific State is available to buy from these outlets:

Alternatively, order it from your local bookshop (<3) and do your bit to chip away at the corporations.