The latest Faction Paradox short story collection, The Book of the Enemy, is now up for pre-order. It has a story in it by me, “The Book of the Enemy”, as well as stories by some of my favourite writers and a couple I’ve never heard of before. I’ve read through a rough compilation of this (missing some last-minute additions) and it was magnificent.

To whet your appetite, here’s the first two paragraphs of my story:

The tale I have to tell you begins in the long winter of 19__, when I was, if not a young man, certainly a younger man than the one you see before you today. My hair had begun to thin, and my once-athletic frame had taken on that rotundity which in later years turns to mere sagginess, but I was then still able to walk without a stick, and to fool myself into thinking I still possessed some modicum of physical attractiveness for the opposite sex (though I was not such a fool as ever to put this hypothesis to the test, as I should surely have been disillusioned in that regard).

At the time of which we are speaking, I was a member of a gentlemen’s club. In these days of advanced views, gentlemen’s clubs have all but disappeared – as, indeed, have gentlemen – but at this time they were, if not thriving enterprises, at least still in existence, their genteel decline mostly notable in the increasing age of their membership.

My story is split into chapters (it’s 10,000 words long, so smack in the middle of the “novelette” category):
The Club
The Tale of the Oldest Member
At the Martian Embassy
The Martian Ambassador Explains
The Brink of War
The Book of the Enemy
The Death of Sherlock Holmes
The Aftermath

Anyway, buy the book, and you can not only read that but a whole load of stories by people like Helen Angove, Simon Bucher-Jones, Lawrence Burton, Jay Eales, Philip Purser-Hallard, and more.