markbilsborough

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  • Brief update and Happy New 2026

    Happy New Year and, blimey, is it 2026 already? I seem to have been (ahem) too distracted to update here for a while, but new year’s resolutions and all…

    What kind of new year will it be? Well hopefully for me a year full of creativity but also some personal non-writing challenges, like the Boston Marathon in April. But also a year where I’m hopeful that many of the problems that the world’s facing today will seem a little less apocalyptic – everything needs to cool down a little. And we may even get back to the Moon, which would be about time.

    Since last time I’ve published a load of stuff in a few places and I’ll update the ‘stories’ page when I get a minute. I was particularly pleased to sell one of my favourites, The Memory Thief, to Summer of Sci-Fi (vol 4). Elsewhere I’m now the co-ordinator of the Orbit novel writing groups run by the BSFA so if you want to get involved in an oline critiquing group, let me know. I’m also reviewing stuff for SF Concatenation and I’ve bumbled my way onto the Milford Writing Workshop committee, and I’m currently editing their second Anthology, to be published through Wyldblood Press, which I also run. Wyldblood’s been on a bit of a hiatus but we’ve just published #17 of the magazine with more to come soon and have started trundling out novellas – check out the website for orders etc (paperback and all digital, with free flash on the site itself)

    I’m going to me much more regular with these updates, and get you some stories and reviews too. That’s a resolution. Happy New Year.

  • Flash in a Flash

    I’ve a story in the works at Flash in a Flash – all about lurking darkness, Demon in the Basement is short but it’s one to linger. Look for it on May 6th.

  • Two Worlds: out now in Synthetic Reality#4

    I have a new story out now in the fourth edition of Synthetic Reality magazine. Two Worlds is a story about life, death and choices. It’s fantasy, probably, though who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t? Certainly not the poor guy trapped in a world he barely recognises, where darkness encroaches…

    You can find it here (paywall)

  • new stories

    I’m pleased to say a couple of my short stories have just been published and both are available for free online. One’s a nice long piece of space opera (Rox) just out through Lost Colony and one’s a dimension bending flash piece (Shimmer) out now on the Theme of Absence site.

    Hope you like them – and there’s a few more in the pipeline so watch out for No Credit, Tally and Raul, Aja and Two Worlds.

  • Dreams for Free

    My fantasy collection, Dreams and Visions is available for free at Amazon US at the moment (also available in paperback). It’s packed with stories like Jennings’ dreams and Keepsakes, where you can buy someone else’s dreams or sell your own – but beware, you may find you’ve sold more than you bargained for, and no amouunt of money will ever be enough to buy them back.

    Or read From the Sea, where faceless creaures emerge from teh frigid cold depth and snatch uwarry villagwers. But all is not asa it seems…

    Or the gothic nightmare of The Pen, where success not earned can come at a heavy price.

    Ten stories of hope and despair culminating in a chess game with the Devil. Find it on Amazon.com or buy via the website http://www.markbilsborough.com

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  • J is for James

    After a hiatus I’m back with a rundown of my alphabetical fiction favourite authors. I’m going for P.D. James for J – largely because of her science fiction classic Children of Men, set in a near future world where fertility rates have plummeted and the remaining children are prized. Society begins to break down as despondancy sets in, Soon there are no new births. Until…

    This is a dystopian nightmare skilfully presented by a master crime writer switching genres (though I suspect she’s one of those authors who professes not to write science fiction, even though the evidence would suggest otherwise). There’s a geat movie version too, starring the much underused Clive Owen.

    Honourable mentions to Kij Johnson, multi Hugo/Nebula winning short story specialist (her novella the Man who Bridged the Mist is a personal favourite) and to N.K Jemisin, whose imaginitive work is getting increasingly recognised (the Fifth Season is a good place to start). But this time around PD James is my chosen author with Children of Men her standout novel.

    The Children of Men: James, P. D.: 9780307275431: Amazon.com: Books

  • Disorientation

    I’ve got a new story up at Every Day Fiction: Disorientation. It’s a body swapping mind menting slice of confusion and chaos.

    I’ve also sold stories recently to The Fifth Di… and Penumbric, though the first is behind a paywall and the second’s not out yet. I’ll post a link when it is.

  • Futures – a collection

    Futures

    A collection

    As the world heats we slowly retreat under domes and behind impenetrable walls, waiting for the end of days. But not everyone is ready to die. There are choices – abandon the world or rebuild it? But at what cost? That’s Valentine’s dilemma.

    What if you’re outside the domes, the planet frying around you. starving, desperate to get in? If, by some miracle, you succeed, will you remember your friends? Or will you leave your humanity behind, back in the scorched earth? The Beggar and the Golden Dome is a story of shifting perspectives against a background of desperation and salvation.

    Your creation is perfect in every way, and you love her. But does she love you back? And does she have a choice? And when you realise what you’ve done, how can you make things right? For Hannah is a story of obsession, oppression and redemption, hubris and enlightenment.

    You make first contact, where you least expect it. But there are people amongst you that cannot bring themeselves to beleve that we are not alone – for if there are others, how can we be the chosen ones? Certainty tests our boundaries and considers the lengths people are willing to take to deny what is right in front of their eyes,.

    You wake up in a hospital bed, alone in a sterile room. You can’t remember how you got there. You only see your doctor and there’s definitely someting wrong about her. It gradually dawns on you that you’re not in Kansas anymore. Why are you there? How cann you get home? And what’s with the fish? Spirit is a different take on alien abduction.

    Your team finds something msyterious in the jungle and people are willing to kill for its secrets. A gun to your head and a shimmering portal to your back – cue a high speed chase through a new world filled with flying monsters and gravity defying cliffs – Sideways.

    Then there’s an annoucnent of the end of the world that begins to believe its own publicity in Mad Panic, Flying Paper and Philosopher Cats, a tale of humanity’s retreat into VR tanks in Immersion, surviving the apocalypse in Twins, pulp-fiction space detectives in Hunter, a VR fight for survival in Click, King Lear in Pluto orbit in The Travelling Shakespeare Company and bonding over deep space chess in For Love.

    Twelve stories of the near future, some published before, many now out of print and some seen for the first time. Futures. For the future we may want, the future we might get, and the future we actually deserve.

    £3.99 ebook £6.999 print – click below to buy.

    ebook
    UK print
    global print

  • H is for Heinlein

    So, continuing my occasional trawl through my bookselves to find my A-Z favourites, H comes pummeling me over the head with countless options. Ask me tomorrow and I might go for Peter F Hamilton, because he’s so damn readable. But he’d be nowhere without Robert A Heinlein and this is certainly a case of giving due respect to your elders,

    Heinlein was one of the big three of science fiction’s golden age, of course, alongside Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, emerging from the pulps and going on to dominate the field through the 50s, 60s and 70s until age dimmed his talent and the next generation emerged. But, like Shakespeare and the Beatles, his legacy is evident everywhere. There would be no Peter Hamilton (as we know his writing) without Robert Heinlein, No John Scalzi, no Gareth Powell, no Alastair Reynolds, no Stephen Baxter, no Dan Simmonds and no James A Corey. Probably no Star Trek either, because Heinlein was out in space seeking out strange new worlds long before Gene Roddenbery put pen to paper.

    As a kid I couldn’t get enough. I worked through his ‘juveniles’ (Tunnel in the Sky, Red Planet, the Star Beast etc etc) and quickly on to his books aimed at older readers. Mid peirod Heinlein classics included Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, Glory Road and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and I’ve returned to them all many times. Later additions were longer, rambling, more indulgent and best forgotten but those early classics have a freshness and energy to them that is rarely evident in more modern work.

    Tunnel in the Sky, one of his ‘juveniles’ is my favourite. A bunch of kids on some sort of outward bound survival ecercise on a new planet get stranded with all the adults and teachers cut off when their wormhole link goes down. It doesn’t quite turn into Lord of the Flies in space, not quite.

    Heinlein’s politics got dodgy as he got older, and as the spiritual father of military SF he’s got a lot to answer for. But his grunts-in-space classic Starship Troopers also inspired Joe Haldeman’s seminal anti-war novel The Forever War, and early Heinlein would probably have barely recognised his later incarnation. So take him in the round, and like your grandad try and overlook his slightly dubious take on the world and remember what you love about him – strong storytelling, great characters, vivid imagination and the chance to live out your dreams, page by page. H is for Robert A Heinlein, then, and Tunnel in the Sky is my pick of his books.

  • G is for Gaiman

    G is for Gaiman

    In my A-Z run through of my favourite writers on my bookshelves (real and virtual) G throws up a conundrum or two. The contenders: Neil Gaiman, William Gibson and Ursula LeGuin. Surely the mother of Earthsea and the father of cyberpunk deserve the shout? Well, yes, probably, but they’re sharing an initial with Neil Gaiman.

    Sandman, American Gods, Stardust, Coraline. Need I say more? Well, yes, because Good Omens (co-written with the late, great Terry Pratchett) has always been one of my favourite novels. It’s witty, sharp and readable – the end of days with jokes.

    So G is for Gaiman and Good Omens is the book.