Elephants in Bloom now available!

A week late, but… my debut collection, Elephants in Bloom, is now out from Newcon Press! Got my contributor copies, and they look every bit as good as I was hoping.

If you read on Kindle, you can get the ebook from Amazon. Otherwise, depending where you are in the world, you can order the paperback or the signed hardback edition from a number of online dealers.

A quick note on the stories: in recent years, environmental concerns have been a near-constant focus, in my writing and in my life. However, stories of environmental destruction feel unsatisfying to me, not because they aren’t necessary, but because it sometimes feel as if our collective imagination has a way of cutting nature out altogether. Science fiction represents hyper-urbanised futures; mainstream fiction largely (though not always!) focuses on urban life, and the chic alienation one experiences when quietly despising nature; environmental fiction itself regularly depicts destroyed environment, as if the ability to imagine a real, deep, meaningful interaction between humans and the rest of the natural world was largely beyond the scope of our collective imagination, or nature was not much more than a backdrop, a gorgeous landscape to admire from the window of the tour bus rather than a meaningful part of our world.

As far as I’m concerned, nature is a part of my world, even though I live at the edge of a city, and most of my daily life happens between four walls. I’ve been doing my best to make it a part of my writing, too, a protagonist in its own right, without fear or romanticism. Most of the stories in this collection were born, partly at least, from that preoccupation. Other obsessions of mine showed up, my concern about the rise of neo-fascism, the layers of history buried just under the surface of the modern world, my native Provençal land, and whales (though I only realised that this last one qualified as an obsession after noticing that whales showed up in one third of the stories I’d gathered!).

I’ve tried to make that journey as memorable as I could. I hope it will be.