I mentioned a few weeks ago I was planning to write a pendant to the Apollo Quartet and publish it before the end of the year. It was prompted by a silly idea: making the Apollo Quartet eligible for the Best Series Hugo Award, due to be trialled in 2017 at Worldcon75. But to qualify as a series, the total wordcount must be over 250,000. Which pretty much rules out the Apollo Quartet. But… inspired by a recent read of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Dream, the fiction of Paul Park, a story idea I’d always planned to use about Soyuz 21, the films of James Benning, and a phrase I’ve used time and again to describe my fiction, “19 turns”, I went ahead and wrote something anyway.
It’s titled Coda: A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum and it will be published this week. For free.
It’s about 7,000 words long, and includes an introduction by Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself (among many other fine works of science fiction and science fiction scholarship). I’ll be making a zip file available here, and on the Whippleshield Books blog, which contains .mobi, .epub and .pdf editions. There will also be a paperback edition, limited to 25 signed and numbered copies, available in the New Year. I’ll put up a pre-order page for that soon.
To celebrate the release of Coda: A Visit to the National and Air Museum, I’ve dropped the price on all Whippleshield Books, both Kindle and paperback. To wit:
 |
Adrift on the Sea of Rains | Kindle £1.99 |
Paperback £3.99 |
 |
The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself | Kindle £1.99 |
Paperback £3.99 |
 |
Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above | Kindle £1.99 |
Paperback £3.99 |
 |
All That Outer Space Allows | Kindle £1.99 |
Paperback £4.99 |
 |
Dreams of the Space Age | Kindle £1.99 |
Paperback £3.49 |
 |
Aphrodite Terra | Kindle £1.99 |
Paperback £3.49 |
[prices in the US and other countries are equivalent to UK prices]
Go on, grab a bargain.
Incidentally, there are still signed and numbered hardback copies of The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, All That Outer Space Allows and Dreams of the Space Age for sale on the Whippleshield Books website. I’ve also put up some first editions of various books for sale on the site – see here – and will be putting up more as I slim down my book collection.
