Monday, 18th of December, 2000

Well, I’ve found something worth linking to! I’ve recently been discovering some excellent contemporary (hard) science-fiction authors to compete with my Greg Egan obsession. Wonderful people like Paul J McAuley (who writes frequent reviews for Interzone, UK’s superlative science-fiction magazine, and mind-expanding science-fiction), Kathleen Ann Goonan, Simon Ings and others come to mind…

I’ve known for a while that I must check out Brian Stableford. I read an interview with him in a recent Interzone, in which he expressed a philosophy very similar to mine - not just atheist, but no supernatural stuff at all; and this is reflected in his writing (as it is in Greg Egan’s and Paul McAuley’s and Kathleen Ann Goonan’s, at the very least)… Stableford has written an enormous amount, amongst which he’s quite well known for some revisionist vampire and werewolf novels, in which all the traditionally supernatural stuff is explained in terms of the biological sciences (and the social implications are explored of the potential that biotech gives for everyone to have access to the “supernatural” powers).
His most recent (ongoing) novels form part of the Emortality sequence, set centuries in the future, with the stress on biotech/nanotech/cyberpunk - “emortality” is his substitute for immortality, where emortals have potentially unlimited life-spans (but are not un-killable).

Most interesting, but until now I hadn’t read anything by him. I’ll get those recent novels soon. In the meantime though, I just found a short story of his, In the Flesh at the ever-reliable Infinity Plus. Everyone must go and read immediately. A wonderfully touching story about a child with motor-neuron disease in a medium-near-future setting (”lightly cyberpunk” one might say). Now I know I’ve gotta check this guy out.

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