Cold Hands and Other Stories

I’m sure I’d be a lot more famous if I weren’t so slow, but better late than never: I’m pleased to announce that Cold Hands and Other Stories is now available from Lulu.com in print form, with cover art by the estimable Richard Bartrop. Trade paperback, 230 pp. $11.99.

The body of my short fiction divides pretty much in halves: Stories focused on AI, and stories focused on everything else. I published all of my AI shorts in Souls in Silicon back in 2008. Cold Hands and Other Stories contains everything else, albeit with a new excerpt from my nanotech AI novel, The Cunning Blood. And “everything else” covers a lot of ground: spaceflight, aliens, religion, calculus, witchcraft, and steam locomotives, or at least steam locomotives hacked together from alien parts that probably weren’t intended to go into steam locomotives.

Most of the stories have appeared in print before, and one, “Cold Hands,” was on the final Hugo ballot in 1981. There are a few new ones, including one as new as late last week. Here’s the lineup:

• “Cold Hands” (from IASFM, June 1980)
• “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” (from Nova 4, 1974)
• “Inevitability Sphere” (from IASFM, Sept./Oct. 1978)
• “Whale Meat” (from Starwind Magazine, August 1977)
• “Born Again, With Water” appears for the first time.
• “Drumlin Boiler” (from IASFM, April 2002)
• “Drumlin Wheel” appears for the first time.
• “Roddie” appears for the first time.

Rounding it out is another excerpt from The Cunning Blood, different from the one I published in Souls in Silicon, and not available anywhere else but in the novel itself.

A big chunk of the book involves the Drumlins world, which I introduced in 2002 and intend to do a lot more with. Calling it steampunk isn’t quite fair, as it doesn’t take place in Victorian times and corsets are mentioned exactly once. Someone described “Drumlin Boiler” to me as “hillbilly steampunk” (steambilly?) and while that’s a surreal notion, it may be as close as you’ll come.

Yes, an ebook edition is planned, though given the sad, fragmented state of the ebook world right now, it’s going to take some time to kick the file down the tool chain into all the requisite formats. Fortunately, Lulu is a certified aggregator for iBooks, so once I have an EPub that passes the gnarly epubcheck test for standards compliance, I’m going to give it an ISBN and let Lulu list it on iBooks.

As always, blog mentions and reviews are much appreciated!