The design team at Fahrenheit have created a wonderful cover (they also came up with the new title 'Iteration' to replace my working title 'Jennifer's Garden') - and the book is due to hit the shelves tomorrow.
Here’s the blurb:
Behind the perpetual cornfields and fast-maturing livestock of the world’s most effective genetic engineering project, computerised efficiency has outstripped even the smartest human mind. Famine, warfare, and the effects of natural disaster will soon be neutralised forever. But when unexpected events suggest that the supercomputer in charge is conducting its own secret experiments, only one person guesses exactly where this could lead. And it’s down to Dr Jennifer Munroe to convince an increasingly careless task group to listen to her fears…
Spanning two thousand years and told by three narrators, Iteration follows the consequences of computation on the world around us - and on the future of the human race.
End of blurb.
I’m seriously excited about Fahrenheit Press publishing my second novel. Fahrenheit are due to put ‘Iteration’ forward for the Arthur C Clarke Award 2018 (which is open to any SF novel published the previous year; all titles to be nominated by their publisher). I’ve heard that in previous years, considerably more male authors have had works entered than female, but a quick scan of the 2017 list shows quite a few women’s names. The general thought on this is that women write more fantasy than SF, something hotly debated on genre fiction forums.
Talking of genre, I can’t resist quoting Ursula Le Guin:
“...the only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving towards genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn't SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my arguments by writing well.”
The Wild Girls, Ursula K Le Guin, 2011
Now all I need is a bottle of something cold and fizzy to put in the bottom of the fridge for tomorrow evening.
