Comma Press

Edited by Geoff Ryman
ISBN: 978 1905583195
£7.99 or £6.75 if you buy online now at www.commapress.co.uk.
Published: 22 Oct 2009

How much of Science Fiction is genuine science? Take away the fantastical clichés of space-travel, time-travel and artificial intelligence, and how much of what remains accurately represents contemporary scientific thinking?

When It Changed is an attempt to put authors and scientists back in touch with each other, to re-introduce research ideas with literary concerns, and to re-forge the alloy that once made SF great. Composed collaboratively – through a series of visits and conversations between leading authors and practicing scientists – it offers fictionalised glimpses into the far corners of current research fields, be they in nanotechnology, invertebrate physiology, particle physics, or software archaeology. From Planck's Length (the smallest indivisible distance) to Plankton (potential saviours of the Earth's ecosystem), from virtual encounters between Witgenstein and Turing, to future civilisations torn asunder by different readings of the Standard Model, together these stories represent a literary 'experiment' in the true sense of the word, and endeavour to isolate a whole new strain of the SF bug.

Featuring...

WRITERS: Justina Robson, Paul Cornell, Sara Maitland, Ken MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, Adam Marek, Geoff Ryman, Michael Arditti, Simon Ings, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Kit Reed, Chaz Brenchley, Liz Williams, Patricia Duncker and Adam Roberts.

SCIENTISTS: Dr Andrew Bleloch, Dr Rob Appleby, Dr Jennifer Rowntree, Dr Richard Blake, Dr Kai Hock, Dr Vinod Dhanak, Emmanuel Pantos, Dr John Harris, Dr Matthew Cobb, Dr Tim O’Brien, Dr Steve Williams, Dr Sarah Lindley, Dr Steve Furber, Tim O’Brien and Dr Rein Ulijn.

LAUNCH

Manchester: Saturday 24th Oct. The Friends Meeting House, 1pm. £5/£3.
Reading with Geoff Ryman, Patricia Duncker, Liz Williams, Dr Tim O'Brien & Prof Steve Furber.
Part of the Manchester Literature Festival's Short Weekend.
More info and booking information here. To book call: 08432 080 500

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Geoff Ryman (Editor) has published ten books and won 14 awards. His novella Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter is currently on the shortlist for the Nebula Award, given by the Science Fiction Writers of America. In addition to being an established author, he has editorial experience. Among is his ten books is Tesseracts9, an anthology of original Canadian science fiction and winner of the Prix Aurore. His most recent SF novel, Air won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Canadian Sunburst Award, and the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award. He is the founder of the Mundane SF movement, which agrees to avoid badscience tropes. In 2008 he edited the Mundane Special Issue of Interzone magazine.

Michael Arditti is a novelist, short story writer and critic. He began his career writing plays for the stage and radio. His novels are The Celibate (1993), Pagan and Her Parents (1996), Easter (2000), Unity (2005), A Sea Change (2006), and The Enemy of the Good (2009). His short story collection, Good Clean Fun, was published in 2004. He was awarded a Harold Hyam Wingate scholarship in 2000, a Royal Literary Fund fellowship in 2001, an Arts Council Award in 2004 and a Leverhulme artist in residency in 2008.

Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since he was eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two major fantasy series; his most recent book is Bridge of Dreams. His novel Light Errant won the British Fantasy Award in 1998. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with a quantum cat and a famous teddy bear.

Paul Cornell is the author of two SF novels, Something More and British Summertime. His Doctor Who episode ‘Father’s Day’ was nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Drama: Short Form category and he has a new two-parter due this year. He’s written widely in television, and is the author of ‘Wisdom’ for Marvel Comics.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a novelist and screenwriter. His film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie, Code 46, 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story. In 2004, his debut novel Millions won the Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. His second novel, Framed, was published by Macmillan in 2005. He also writes for the theatre and was the author of the highly acclaimed BBC film God on Trial. He has previously contributed stories to Comma’s anthologies Phobic, The Book of Liverpool, and The New Uncanny.

Patricia Duncker was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 29 June 1951. Her novels include Hallucinating Foucault (1996), which won the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize, James Miranda Barry (1999), and The Deadly Space Between (2002). Her short stories have been published in two collections Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (1997), Miss Webster and Chérif (2006), which explores themes of desire, jealousy and revenge, and was shortlisted for the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and Seven Tales of Sex and Death (2003).

Simon Ings is an English novelist and science writer living in London. He was born in July 1965 in Horndean and educated at Churcher’s College[1], Petersfield and at King’s College London and Birkbeck College, London. His six novels include Hotwire, Headlong, Painkillers and The Weight of Numbers.

Gwyneth Jones, born in Manchester, 14th February 1952, writer. She’s the author of more than twenty novels for teenagers, mostly using the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded sf novels for adults. She’s won two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the P.K.Dick award, and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason.

Ken MacLeod was born in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, and currently lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh. His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, or extreme economic libertarianism, in SF contents, and include The Star Fraction (1995), The Stone Canal (1996) and Learning the World (2005), all of which won the Prometheus Award in the respective years.

Sara Maitland grew up in Galloway and studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. Novels since have included Three Times Table (1990), Home Truths (1993) and Brittle Joys (1999), and one cowritten with Michelene Wandor – Arky Types (1987). Her short story collections include Telling Tales (1983), A Book of Spells (1987) and most recently, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003). She also contributed a story to The New Uncanny (Comma, 2008) and is currently writing an entire collection of stories for Comma, with scientists, born out of this project.

Adam Marek’s stories first appeared in Parenthesis (Comma 2006), and New Writing 15 (2008), edited by Maggie Gee and Bernardine Evaristo. His debut collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing was published by Comma Press in 2007. He has also had stories in Prospect magazine and The New Uncanny (Comma, 2008) edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page.

Kit Reed is an American author primarily of fantasy, horror and and science fiction. Her first story was published by seminal mystery editor Anthony Boucher, and a good deal of her work could be classed as feminist SF. She has published 14 novels, including Mother Isn’t Dead She’s Only Sleeping (1961), Armed Camps (1969), Magic Time (1980) and most recently Enclave (2009). She has also published seven collections of short stories, most recently Dogs of Truth (2005). She has been been nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr Award three times.

Adam Roberts is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies. He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.

Justina Robson attended the Clarion West Writing Workshop and was first published in 1994 in the British small press magazine The Third Alternative, but is best known as a novelist. Her debut novel Silver Screen was shortlisted for both the Arthur C Clarke Award and the BSFA Award in 2000. Her second novel, Mappa Mundi, was also shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2001. It won the 2000 Amazon.co.uk Writer’s Bursary. In 2004, Natural History, Robson’s third novel, was shortlisted for the BSFA Award, and came second in the John W Campbell Award. Novels since have included Living Next-Door to the God of Love and Keeping It Real.


Liz Williams’ first two novels, The Ghost Sister (2001) and Empire of Bones (2002) were both nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. She is also the author of the Inspector Chen series. She has had short stories published in Asimov’s, Interzone, The Third Alternative and Visionary Tongue. From the mid-nineties until 2000, she lived and worked in Kazakhstan. Her experiences there are reflected in her 2003 novel Nine Layers of Sky. This novel brings into the modern era the Bogatyr Ilya Muromets and Manas the hero of the Epic of Manas. Her novels have been published in the US and the UK, while her fourth novel The Poison Master (2003) has been translated into Dutch.

Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright

978 1905583256
£7.99 or £6.75 if you buy online.
Published: 24 Sep 2009
But advance copies available to order via Paypal now!
To order online from outside the UK click here.

From hostage-video makers in Baghdad, to human trafficking in the forests of Serbia, institutionalised paranoia in the Saddam years, to the nightmares of an exile trying to embrace a new life in Amsterdam... Blasim’s stories present an uncompromising view of the West's relationship with Iraq, spanning over twenty years and taking in everything from the Iran-Iraq War through to the Occupation, as well as offering a haunting critique of the post-war refugee experience.

Blending allegory with historical realism, and subverting readers’ expectations in an unflinching comedy of the macabre, these stories manage to be both phantasmagoric and shockingly real, light in touch yet steeped in personal nightmare. For all their despair and darkness, though, what lingers more than the haunting images of war, or the insanity of those who would benefit from it, is the spirit of defiance, the indefatigable courage of those few characters keeping faith with what remains of human intelligence.

Together these stories represent the first major literary work about the war from an Iraqi perspective.

About the Author

Hassan Blasim is a poet, filmmaker and short story writer. Born in Baghdad in 1973, he studied at the city's Academy of Cinematic Arts, where two of his films ‘Gardenia’ (screenplay & director) and ‘White Clay’ (screenplay) won the Academy's Festival Award for Best Work in their respective years. In 1998 he left Baghdad for Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he continued to make films, including the feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the pseudonym Ouazad Osman, fearing for his family back in Baghdad under the Hussein dictatorship. In 2004, he moved to Finland, where he has since made numerous short films and documentaries for Finnish television. His stories have previously been published on www.iraqstory.com and his essays on cinema have featured in Cinema Booklets (Emirates Cultural Foundation). His first short story in English appeared in Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East (Comma 2008). This is is his first book.

About the Translator

Jonathan Wright studied Arabic at Oxford University in the 1970s and has spent 18 of the past 30 years in the Arab world, mostly as a journalist with the international news agency Reuters. His first major literary translation was of Khaled el-Khamissi's best-selling book Taxi, published in English by Aflame Books in 2008.

** Selected as part of English PEN's Writers in Translation series.**

Cover image: The Ministry of Planning, Baghdad, 19-27 April 2003 copyright (c) Simon Norfolk

edited by Sarah Eyre & Ra Page
ISBN-13: 978 1905583188
£7.95 or £6.50 if you order online now
To order online from outside the UK click here

** Winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Anthology**

Featuring:

A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest, Ramsey Campbell, Etgar Keret, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Maitland, Alison MacLeod, Jane Rogers, Gerard Woodward, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Nicholas Royle, Ian Duhig, Matthew Holness, and Adam Marek.

About the Book

In 1919 Sigmund Freud published an essay that delved deep into the tradition of horror writing and claimed to understand one of its darkest tricks. Like a mad scientist, he performed literary vivisection on a still-breathing body of work, exploring its inner anatomy, and pulling out mysterious organs for classification. His aim: to present to the world a complete theory of ‘das unheimliche’, the uncanny.

In the spirit of this great experiment, 14 leading authors have here been challenged to write fresh fictional interpretations of what the uncanny might mean in the 21st century, to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps, and to give the hulking canon of uncanny fiction a shot in the arm, a shock to the neck-bolts...

'It’s not too great a stretch to see Comma as the literary equivalent of Factory Records.' - The Herald, 2 Dec.

'Delightful and disturbing' - The Independent on Sunday, 14 Dec.

'A masterclass in understated creepiness... a deliciously macabre collection that the old Austrian might well have enjoyed.' - Book of the Week, Time Out, 12 Jan.

'If we need the uncanny – and I suspect we do – then we also need it updating... laudable.' - Book of the Week, The Independent, 2 Jan.

'A bold idea.' - The Guardian, 3 Jan.

Listen to AS Byatt and Alison MacLeod discuss the book on Radio 3's The Verb (scroll to 1:18:30 in).

Listen to AS Byatt read from her story and discuss the uncanny with Neil Gaiman on BBC Radio's The Strand, broadcast Thu 30 Oct 08.

About the Authors

A. S. Byatt was born in Sheffied, South Yorkshire, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Somerville College, Oxford, She is the author of eight novels to date: Shadow of a Sun (1964), The Game (1967), The Virgin in the Garden (1978) Still Life (1985) which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, Babel Tower (1996), A Whistling Woman (2002), Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale (2000). She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, several works of non-fiction, and five collections of short stories: Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998). She was made a dame in 1999 and currently lives in London.

Ramsey Campbell is described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’, and in 1991 was voted the Horror Writer’s Horror Writer in the Observer Magazine. His many award-winning novels include The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, The Overnight, and The Grin of the Dark. He has also published thirteen collections of short stories to date, most recently Told by the Dead (2003).

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a novelist and screenwriter. His film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie, Code 46, 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story. In 2004, his debut novel Millions won the Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. His second novel, Framed, was published by Macmillan in 2005. He also writes for the theatre and was the author of the highly acclaimed BBC film God on Trial. He has previously contributed stories to Comma’s anthologies Phobic and The Book of Liverpool.

Ian Duhig has published four poetry collections, including Nominies (1998) which was named as one of the 1998 Sunday Times Poetry Books of the Year and received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; and most recently, Lammas Hireling (2003) which was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His first short story was published in The Book of Leeds (Comma, 2007).

Matthew Holness won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2001 for Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead, and has since appeared in The Office, Casanova, and his own Channel 4 television series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner. His first short story was published in Phobic (Comma, 2007).

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer whose award-winning short story collections include Pipelines, Gaza Blues (with Samir El Youssef), The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God, The Nimrod Flip-Out, and Missing Kissinger. He is the author of three graphic novels, several award-winning scripts for TV, and the novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, which was adapted by director Goran Dukic into a feature-length film Wristcutters: A Love Story starring Patrick Fugit and Tom Waits. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages and has been the basis for more than 40 short films.

Hanif Kureishi's first play, Soaking the Heat, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976. Since then he has enjoyed success as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and short story writer. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, was published in 1990 to widespread acclaim, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has published also three collections of short stories: Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day and The Body and Other Stories.

Alison MacLeod is the author of two novels, The Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels. Her first collection of short stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction, was published in 2007. She lives in Brighton and teaches creative writing at the University of Chichester.

Sara Maitland grew up in Galloway and studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. Novels since have included Three Times Table (1990), Home Truths (1993) and Brittle Joys (1999), and one cowritten with Michelene Wandor – Arky Types (1987). Her short story collections include Telling Tales (1983), A Book of Spells (1987) and most recently, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003).

Adam Marek’s stories first appeared in Parenthesis (Comma 2006), and New Writing 15, edited by Maggie Gee and Bernardine Evaristo. His debut collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing was published by Comma Press in 2007.

Christopher Priest is the author of ten novels and two collections of short stories. The Glamour won the 1988 Kurd Lasswitz Best Novel award and The Prestige won the 1995 World Fantasy Award, the 1995 James Tait Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In 2006 it was adapted into a feature film by Christopher Nolan.

Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 and lived in Birmingham, New York State (Grand Island) and Oxford, before doing an English degree at Cambridge University. She has written seven novels, including Separate Tracks, Mr Wroe’s Virgins, Island and Voyage Home, as well as original television and radio drama. Her short stories were collected in Ellipsis 2 (Comma 2007).

Nicholas Royle is the author of five novels – Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp – as well as one collection of short stories, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail, 2006). He has edited twelve anthologies of short fiction including A Book of Two Halves, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams, The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories, and Dreams Never End (Tindal Street Press).

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961 and studied art and anthropology. He has published four poetry collections: Householder (1991), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; After the Deafening (1994); Island to Island (1999); and We Were Pedestrians (2005). His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award, and was followed in 2004 by I’ll Go To Bed At Noon (2004), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the third in this semi-autobiographical series, A Curious Earth (2007). His first collection of short stories The Caravan Thieves was published this year.

To order online simply click on the 'Add to Cart' button above and then proceed to checkout.
Alternatively you can order from Carcanet at 20% discount click here.

To order online from Amazon also at 20% discount click here.

All Comma titles can be ordered from any bookshop in the country. Please go to your local store and order it, quoting the title and/or ISBN number (see top of page). If you leave a contact number, the shop will get back to you within a week to say it's come in.