The Spoons That Are My Ears!

This is one of my very few fictions set in outer space. It's a retelling of the old story of Daphnis and Chloe but with robots and androids instead of goatherds and shepherds. The action takes place inside an asteroid rather than on an island.

I didn't follow the pattern of the original story exactly. My novella goes off at a tangent about halfway through. Originally I planned to call it Daftness and Chlorine but in one of my rare commercial moods I decided to give it a more marketable title.

The notion of 'rewriting' (and reworking) old myths and stories was suggested to me, I suppose, by certain works of Roger Zelazny and Samuel Delany, still two of my favourite science fiction writers.

I fondly recall the rather obscure Creatures of Light and Darkness by Zelazny, based on Ancient Egyptian mythology, the Zelazny book that has most inspired me (everyone keeps telling me that Lord of Light is much better, but I just don't agree). As for Delany: so many of his early novels and stories have some grounding in Ancient Greek mythology that it would be easier to list those that aren't connected to the Classic tales.

I am extremely pleased with the way Robots in Love has turned out. David Rix of Eibonvale Press is a truly excellent designer. The book currently exists only as a hardback but soon it will be a paperback too, and then hopefully an ebook edition will be released.

Last year I began a series of poems based on signs that I had seen while wandering about. I photographed these signs and used the wording on them to inspire poems. These poems were published in Borderless Journal, one every month, from March 2024 until June 2025.

I was never sure how many poems would be in the series in total. The answer turns out to be sixteen. The series is done now and all the poems have been collected into one volume, Signs of the Times, which has just been published.

The volume also contains an extra poem called 'Appendages' that has been split into several sections and positioned throughout the book in the appropriate places.

This won't be my last poetry collection but I don't think you can expect too many more of them. One day I will issue a monster collection of all (or almost all) my poems. It will be a huge and unwieldy book, the poetry equivalent of my Million Word Storybook. There's no rush...

Signs of the Times is available in paperback and ebook editions.