Category: Paul McAuley

October commonplace book

current reading :

— Paul McAuley. Loss Protocol. Gollancz, [2026].
Near future novel of an England that seems almost familiar and yet the fundamentals have changed after political and climate shocks. Winters is warden of a nature reserve on the estuarine island of Cynsea, sociable enough but with his own reasons to seek solitude. McAuley is good at constructing alien worlds, never better ; and the deep dreamers, ecological activists whom government agencies would gladly classify as terrorists, are suitably creepy. I can’t find the island in my 1955 3 Miles to 1 Inch Road Atlas, but I know it’s there, somewhere downriver from Maldon.

(One afternoon twenty years ago I went cycling, along the peninsula between the Blackwater and the Crouch, through fields out to the primitive church of St. Peter at the sea.)
Books wait for the reader. I have had this since May but only now have I started in : not sure where this is going, happy to be going there.

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My next book, forthcoming from Suntup Press (Fall ’27), is a new edition of two classic novellas by Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan & The White People, with an original essay as afterword. The book will be printed letterpress to the high standards of Suntup Press with original new illustrations, stone lithographs by Wales-based artist Flora McLachlan. The afterword will also include a reproduction of the original frontispiece by Machen’s friend Herbert Jones, intended for 1894 edition but never used by John Lane.  This is exciting news, the book will be beautiful !

https://suntup.press/the-great-god-pan-the-white-people/

N.B. The book sold out upon announcement (17 October).

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I have been enjoying Now Voyager, a new illustrated journal presenting international topics and some unusual perspectives, already in its fourth issue https://www.nowvoyager.com

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And it’s October, which means that Michael Swanwick is scattering the leaves of another dark tale, Autumn’s End, at his website

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/10/autumns-end-part-1-of-31.html

The other day, I received an envelope from Dragonstairs Press :

— Michael Swanwick. October Leaves [2010]. [Dragonstairs Press, 2026]. With a new afterword by the author. Edition of 48.

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It’s October, and that means the the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair will be upon us before long : Friday 6 through Sunday 8 November at the Hynes Convention Center, 900 Boylston Street. Your correspondent will be in booth 413 (Cummins), so come say hello. And drop me a note if you would like a pass.

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recent reading :

— Charles  Olson. Call Me Ishmael. A Study of Herman Melville [1947]. City Lights, [n.d., ca. 1968].
Amazing book ! A poet’s intense account of climbing the pinnacle of nineteenth-century American prose fiction. Rigorous and visionary and compelling.

— Christopher Morley. Parnassus on Wheels. Garden City, New York : Doubleday, Page, 1917.
A whimsical classic of the used book trade, a tale of itinerant bookseller Mr. Mifflin and his horse-drawn bookshop, and how the sister of a distinguished author makes a snap decision to leave the farm and go on the open road as a bookseller. (There is a whisper of that brief chapter in The Wind in the Willows where, between boating and motor cars, Mr. Toad takes up a canary yellow horse caravan.) With a practical demonstration of the bookseller’s cost code system, with purchase prices in cents ! A nostalgic picture of a vanished world.

recent reading : late june 2025

recent reading : late june

— Paul McAuley. A Very British History. The Best Science Fiction Stories of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011 [and:] . . . (Additional Stories). 2 vols. PS, 2013. Cover art by Jim Burns. Edition of 200 copies, signed by the author.
What a range of tone and subject, from far future urban sass and space drama to life in the ruins ; and McAuley’s hard science fiction as often engages political as scientific speculation. “Second Skin” (1997) and “Rocket Boy” (2007) are excellent hard tales; and “Cross Road Blues” (1991) and “The Two Dicks” (2001) are choice entries in the line of  subversive British literary pastiches of American popular culture — I am thinking of “The Big Fish” or Back in the USSR by Byrne and Newman, and similar delights — indisputably, Howard Waldrop was read over there east of the Atlantic ocean.
“How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen” (1999) is great, Nevil Shute in space, with a fine ending. [This is high praise, not a dig : Jack Vance made a whole late career cycle of Wodehouse in space.] “A Very British History”, published in Interzone in 2000, is a review of an imaginary book worthy of Lem, but only a tricky Brit could have rung this particularly bell so clearly.
The world-building in the stories is sly and integral. As in the novels, the dance of ideas includes gestures or flourishes that would be infodumps in other hands : McAuley knows when to let an idea go as a flash or hint. I had read Fairyland and a few other novels ; reading War of the Maps earlier in the month prompted me to look at the short stories.

— Michael Swanwick. [Singular Interviews] S1ngular 1nterv1ews. Dragonstairs Press, 2025. Edition of 60 copies signed by the author. Stitched in Indian paper wrappers of various hues, with title label.
Michael Swanwick is the originator of the Singular Interview (many were published in the New York Review of Science Fiction). When he asks a single question, people answer: John Crowley, Tom Purdom (a witty joke), Eileen Gunn, Gregory Frost, Paul Park, Mike Resnick, Samuel R. Delany, Karl Schoeder, David Hartwell, Henry Wessells, Greer Gilman, Spider Robinson, Fran Wilde, Tom Purdom (a serious answer this time), and Michael Moorcock.
[It is a useful conceit, and I have borrowed it on several occasions). The edition sold out almost immediately, as usual with this press (see me after class if you need a copy)].