Here's the now confirmed cover for the forthcoming book. I chose it out of three options I was given, as I love the little figure seeming to prise the top of the mountain off and ducking in or out. It's a beautiful portrayal of the situation in which the protagonist of the lead novella ends up - trying to escape but ending up feeling trapped, in flight yet gloriously subversive. The gold-and-grey colouring is the livery of the Gold SF series to which the book will belong. I also love the way the gold is used as moonlight or sunlight, and the weird other-world effect of its light coming from the opposite direction to the setting/rising moon/sun/planet. Beside the novella there are twelve other stories in the book. I have to say that when I wrote those stories, I didn't consider them particularly speculative, but when Gold SF said they would like to publish The Mountain, they asked if I had any other stories to go with it to make a more substantial book, and when I went and looked at my uncollected stories I saw that they did indeed veer toward the speculative, being largely about forces beyond our control and our conception of reality. (It's the case that when I wrote my novel The Birth Machine, it never occurred to me that it would end up being considered science fiction as it is!)
Publication date is 27th April next year, and the book can already be pre-ordered from Amazon UK.
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