Ken Harrison: You were a film journalist before you wrote strips for 2000 AD (and my understanding is that you still write journalism). How much was that a help or a hindrance to you when penning comic scripts? I’m thinking that studying and thinking about films may have helped develop your visual literacy.

Alec Worley: I was a film journalist for about six years before I got into comics. I wrote for all sorts of magazines, from Sight & Sound to Zoo. When I went freelance back in 2000, I had this tragically naïve plan that niche journalism was going to pay the bills in between writing comics, novels, screenplays and wotnot. Suffice to say, many bitter lessons were learned trying to make that work! These days, I do the odd film piece for SFX, but the film writing’s fast losing ground to the comics work, to be honest.

I studied film under my own steam just before I left school. I pinched a massive book on film theory from the library – not cool! – and studied it cover to cover and back again. In a way, I got into reviewing as a way of finding out more about how films and storytelling work, which is something I’ve always been interested in. People often make the comparison between films and comics, but the similarities are mainly in editing, I think, between ‘the cut’ in film and ‘the gutter’ in comics. Moving from shot to shot and assembling meaning as you go along. But yeah, studying and writing about film definitely sharpened my instincts for visual storytelling, when to cut to a close-up, an establishing shot, how to shape the story and what have you. Having said that, I think I came to comics with a certain amount of arrogance, in that I knew I could write, I knew how stories worked and I knew the genres. But after receiving some of my very first amends from Tharg The Ever-Perceptive it soon became apparent that I had a lot to learn. And always will.

KH: How long had you been trying to sell scripts to 2000 AD before you sold your first Shock and did you have any other experience of writing comics?

AW: I decided to lay siege to 2000 AD in Christmas 2006. The plan was to spend the next few months writing nothing but Future Shocks and to write them as though they’d already been rejected. That way your head is clear to just write the thing without worrying about whether it’ll get accepted or getting bummed out when it gets turned down. Based on my previous ventures into submission hell, I assumed I’d never hear back or a rejection would turn up a year or so after I’d forgotten ever having written to them. As it turned out, Tharg got back to me within a week. I think I was lucky enough to have started submitting just as the Nerve Centre was commencing its periodic shovel through the slush pile.

Anyway, Tharg said he liked the idea but it needed revising. I’d written two more Shocks by then and was on a bit of a roll. So instead of reworking the first one, I just sent the next one the same day I got the reply from Tharg. That one got rejected a week later by a chap called David Leach, who said I should definitely send more scripts and whose feedback at the time was invaluable. By now, I’d written a stack of Shocks and when David received submission three he got back to me a few days later saying, ‘Christ, you’re keen!’ He said the script needed reworking but the idea and the twist were solid.

I dutifully tweaked it several times, but a month later, having completed the final pass, David moved on to Titan and my finely tuned Future Shock tumbled into a Thrill Vortex never to be seen again. I continued writing Future Shocks until I had a stock of about five or six, which I fed into the slush pile over the next few months. Eventually, Tharg began picking some of these up, by which time I was writing a film review column for the Megazine.

I’d previously attempted to get into some other UK comics including those by Panini, Titan and Games Workshop. That Warhammer Comic folded three days after I sent my submission! I very nearly got into Commando, whose then-editor George Low, was fantastically encouraging. I also had a few scripts picked up by some excellent small press comics, including FutureQuake, Something Wicked and The Girly Comic.

KH: Why comics? Why not prose fiction or screenplays or some other form?

AW: I’ve always loved comics, but I never thought they were a professional option until I realised some of them actually took submissions. I remember doing these sample scripts for Panini. I had Spidey and Black Cat vs. the Lizard in a museum full of animated dinosaur skeletons. Night at the Museum came out a year later, dammit! And another one with Spidey and Ghost Rider vs. Carnage on a runaway train. I was surprised at how easily the ideas came, how naturally the process flowed and how much it felt like I already knew how to do this even though I’d never done it before, which was a bit spooky.

Other than that. I’d pitched tie-in novels, screenplays, radio plays and everything else that involves you having to write 30,000 unpaid words based on the vaguest possible guidelines on the off-chance that an editor might say ‘yes’ to a project that will consume your life and end up paying you less than if you were stood at a set of traffic lights cleaning car windscreens with your tongue! No, the freelance experience hasn’t left me feeling at all bitter. Why do you ask…?

The thing is, in my experience, the try-everything-and-see-what-sticks approach rarely works. I found it really helped to focus on one thing at a time, gather momentum and have a body of work – published or not – to stand on. Comics was really the first time I’d ever done that.

KH: You’re talking about something in your answers here that I think I haven’t seen talked about much by comic creators: the importance of cultivating a relationship with an editor. How important do you think it was to show you were ‘serious’ about comics writing by regularly submitting scripts?

AW: I guess you prove you’re ‘serious’ by actually being serious, by just doing your job as effectively as possible, by being practical and thinking ahead. When I was Future Shocking, I was scoring one commission for at least one rejection, so it was important to have a pile of finished scripts to shovel onto the fire. I figured any that got bounced would still have been good enough to polish up according to Tharg’s feedback and sent to find a home in the small press. That way nothing was wasted.

I think in terms of being ‘serious’ about what you’re doing, I remember reading an interview with Ken Loach in which he said if you want to be a successful filmmaker you’ve got to be more in love with filmmaking than with the idea of being a filmmaker. And it’s the same with writing, or art, or music or whatever it is you’re into. Getting starry-eyed and full of yourself or starting to think about developing your ‘brand’ or whatever will only distract you. When I got the greenlight to write the first series of Age of the Wolf, I spent the first few weeks in a daze, thinking, ‘Bloody Hell, I’m actually gonna be writing a series for 2000 AD! How awesome is that?’ I got so carried away with the romance of what I was doing I lost sight of the best way in which to do the job and my first draft of the series breakdown suffered because of that.

Luckily, Tharg The Wise And Munificent has always been on hand to keep me on course. Since my very first commission, every single bit of feedback has been noted and referred back to. Having constant pointers from a detached and experienced editor makes it easy to deal with bad habits and blind spots. It can be embarrassing when your editor points out that you’ve made a goof, but it’s a good way to learn.

KH: Did the movie review column help in terms of getting work at 2000 AD in that you were in regular contact with Matt Smith?

AW: I’m not sure exactly how much the movie column helped. I guess you’d have to ask Matt. But my always being a good boy couldn’t have hurt, always meeting the deadline and the word count, and making sure the copy didn’t read like it was written by a stoned orang-utan with a Wikipedia fixation – and I’ve done enough sub-editing in my time to know how often that’s the case! In that sense, writing for the Meg and the Prog is the same as writing for any other outlet. As a freelancer, it’s your job to make the editor’s life as stress-free as possible. And when it comes to writing comics scripts, I’d extend that to the artist and the letterer too.

KH: How did the review column come about?

AW: I was early for a screening for another magazine and was mooching around Borders where I found a copy of the Megazine featuring a review of X-Men 3. I didn’t realize the Meg published reviews and, as a jobbing film journo, you’re always on the look-out for paying outlets that may be small enough to not have a dedicated film writer on their books. I sent a query email to the 2000 AD website and Matt got back the following day, asking if I could do a round-up of the month’s genre releases. He never asked me to stop, so I kept going for almost three years.

It was a bit of a dream gig, but orchestrating the screenings, check discs and images was a nightmare. In the end, the organisational side got too much to handle and I had to let the column go. Some of the bigger magazines for which I was writing were dying off and I suddenly found PR departments bullshitting me more often than usual, until I was almost literally fighting for a seat in the preview theatre. I’ll never forget that screening of Aliens Vs. Predator… It got to the point where I was pretty much paying to write the column.

Of course, the other thing was I wanted to concentrate on writing scripts for the Prog. Film writing was only ever meant to be a means to an end, so it was time to call it a day. I explained all this to Matt, who was brilliant and asked me to find a replacement. Luckily, I was friends with Andrew Osmond, who is a much higher profile journalist than me and has no problem getting past the velvet rope. Plus, he’s one of the most articulate, knowledgeable and insightful film journalists in genre circles right now, which helps.

KH: Why didn’t George Low being enthusiastic about your scripts turn into an actual gig at Commando? What’s the story there?

AW: The feedback I kept getting from George Low at Commando was that he’d published stories like mine a zillion times before. Unsurprising, really, given that the comic’s been around for five decades. No matter how much research I did or how offbeat I made the story, I just couldn’t get a submission accepted. George Low was really positive about my writing and said he wanted to see more from me, but in the end it felt too much like stabbing in the dark. Commando turned out to be a bit of a Moby Dick for me, to be honest, and I’m planning to give it another go soon.

KH: Which of your Shocks/Terror Tales are you proudest of and why? Conversely, which would you like to go back and re-write?

AW: I’ve hidden behind some of the best artists in the business. If I had to pick a favourite, I’d probably say the Terror Tale, Lost Property, which I did with artist Warren Pleece and letterer Ellie De Ville. This was the one about a guy who returns lost property to the ghosts on the London Underground. Actually, it was Tharg who came up with the idea of the ghosts needing specific artefacts in order to move on. And my wife came up with the ending. Warren’s a terrific storyteller and character artist. He’s also great with atmosphere. I was also really pleased with the Tharg’s 3riller I did with Death Sentence and Rex Royd artist Mike Dowling. I’ve never worked as closely with an artist on a comic as I did with Mike on that one and we were really in synch over what we were out to achieve.

Having said that, I’d happily rewrite everything! I’m one of those insecure writers who can’t read anything they’ve had published without seeing anything other than the mistakes I feel I’ve made, and I just squirm at the thought of anyone reading them. Having a new series coming out tends to fill me with dread. When a comic I’ve written comes out, I’ll set some time aside to see what I’ve got wrong and take notes. I started out with a two-page Word document listing the things to remember when writing a comic. Five years later, I’ve got 200+ pages in a ring binder stuffed with Post It notes, clippings and scribbled down quotations.

KH: Looking back specifically on your first Future Shock, A Terrible Hunt, what are your thoughts and feelings about it?

AW: This was the one that fell into a black hole after David Leach left Rebellion. I got to resubmit it once Tharg started commissioning some of my other stuff. It turned out to be my first published script, but the second commissioned by Tharg (after Adventures in the War Trade, which I did with Staz Johnson and Annie Parkhouse).

I think Terrible Hunt actually works quite well. The low squirm-factor on my part may be due to PJ Holden’s artwork. I’ve only just noticed, he put a sea monkey head on the wall of the trophy room! Sweet!

KH: I got the impression reading your movie column that you’re a big fan of horror stuff. I was a bit surprised to find during my research that you hadn’t written more Terror Tales (my memory had tricked me and told me you’d written a whole lot more). Which do you prefer, Terror Tales or Shocks, and why?

AW: I think Terror Tales are generally easier to write than Future Shocks, which can be a real challenge to anyone who’s still finding their feet. But then again, nothing beats a Future Shock that can pull off a fresh idea – or at least a fresh angle on a hackneyed idea – and a well-delivered twist. Terror Tales can get away with just a satisfying climax, which isn’t quite as demanding as a twist – which is a very specific type of satisfying climax.

I reckon good twist stories are like mousetraps and you really need to have an understanding of narrative engineering in order to set up a good one. I got mine right maybe once or twice, and even then I tended to overcomplicate stuff. I learned a lot by reading short stories by writers like Saki, John Collier and O Henry, who all keep their tales dead simple. One of the things I’ve noticed in their stuff is that the twist is usually in plain sight the whole time! I hate it when writers pull a twist out of a hat at the end with no reference to anything that’s gone before. You can’t have the main character suddenly reveal at the end that he was his own clone from the future all along without having established that cloning or time-travel are possibilities within the story!

I think twists use the same psychological tactics as magic tricks and street hussles, and part of the pleasure in reading them is in being ‘had’. But what makes the Future Shock writer’s job so difficult is the fact that the reader is actively looking to catch them out from page one! And this makes it harder to foreshadow the ending without giving it away. We’re all so bloody smug and postmodern these days, aren’t we? I’ve found that Terror Tales don’t put you under quite as much pressure. It’s enough for a Terror Tale to be scary, unsettling or shocking. But there’s a reason these things are considered an apprenticeship at 2000 AD. It’s because they’re all so bloody hard to write, but also a great way to learn how to write comics.

KH: Were you surprised when Dandridge received his own series? What would you have changed about that first one-off if you’d known he was going to return?

AW: I’d actually conceived Dandridge as a series from the very beginning. I love British ghost stories and used to read all those Usborne ‘World of the Unknown’ books when I was a kid. I got to thinking about all these ‘real’ ghosts from around the country, the Enfield Poltergeist, Borley Rectory and so on, and how they all felt like individual personalities, like these unique little treasures. So I figured what if people collected ghosts in the same way they collected antiques? In what kind of world could such a market exist? I also had this feckless dandy character floating around that I really wanted to write, and from there the whole thing just clunked together like a Transformer.

Ideas just kept coming and coming, all these scenes and characters and adventures. I thought if I ever get the chance to do a series for the Prog this is what I’ll pitch. But at the time, I hadn’t had anything published and getting a shot at a series seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky. So I got it all down in this horrendously overstuffed Future Shock, which ended up as a Past Imperfect alternative world story. Once the story had reached the twist, I still had to resolve Dandridge’s character and the easiest way to do that was to kill him off. As it turned out, this was the perfect thing to do.

I assumed that if the series ever came about, then I’d have to set it in some kind of Edwardian steampunk era. Until I saw Simon Davis had done this beautiful teaser picture for Ian Edginton’s Ampney Crucis and my heart just sank. I love Edginton’s work – really elegant, literate stories full of these really slick ideas – and I figured there was no way I could compete with that and that Dandridge was going to be just another case of, ‘Oh well, someone got there before me’. But in the end it forced me to think harder about how to make Dandridge different.

So I focused on an idea I had about exploring a sort of post-steampunk world, one in which all that scientific certainty and imperialistic optimism had given way to irrationality and the supernatural and everything had just gone to shit. The British Empire had failed and become a ghost of its former glory. This world could easily be the ‘Ghost Town’ described by The Specials, but with Dandridge as this sort of Adam Ant figure, full of charm and life. The shallowness and the romance and the politics of the eighties made it a perfect fit for Dandridge, so everything I’d set up in that Past Imperfect turned out to be just right.

KH: Why the change of artist, from Warren Pleece to Jon-Davis Hunt?

AW: I was in the middle of writing Return of the Chap, which was the five-part launch series, and I knew Warren was on board. I also knew Dandridge, who was now a ghost, had a magic jacket that would allow him to take on a physical form. And I knew the coat could transform into all these different outfits like a pop star with an unlimited wardrobe. But I needed some kind of default setting, some sort of iconic ‘costume’ for Dandridge. I had all these elements in mind, but no idea how to combine them into a coherent look and I didn’t want to dump all my notes in Warren’s lap when he was on a deadline.

So I asked Jon, since we’d just finished working on Age of the Wolf, how I could possibly make this work. About five minutes later he’d come up with this sketch, which was just perfect. The white frock coat and the red sash just said it all. I could imagine Peter Wyngarde or Johnny Depp swaggering about a haunted house dressed like that. So I included it in the script and Warren went with it. Tharg gave the following five-parter, The House That Dripped Devilry, to Jon, which came as a nice thank you for his contribution to the first series.

KH: What do you think makes a good comic artist/writer? What qualities are needed?

AW: I know very little about artwork beyond ‘Oooo, that’s lovely’ or ‘Errr, that looks a bit wonky’. But from what I’ve picked up listening to artists, I think nice splash pages are all very well, but storytelling has got to be key. You can tell when an artist has really thought through the action taking place in the script. Looking at Tiernan Trevallion’s work on Absalom in the Prog recently, he’s got all these telling details: the Sellotape around Harry’s mobile, the dead pot plant in his flat, the open flick-knife on the dashboard of his car. I don’t know how much of this stuff was in the script, but it all gives an insight into the story and its characters and the world, and brings everything to life without you even realising. I think character expression is also important, since the characters are the reader’s portal into the story. Again, look at what Trevallion did in Absalom and what D’Israeli did in Low Life. Just an extra line on a character’s face can make all the difference between the reader ‘getting it’.

As for writers, I think – again – storytelling is crucial. Going back to Absalom and Low Life, the writing on these is so simple and direct. It’s not cluttered. You know where the story is on every page. You know where the characters are going, what they’re driving towards. You’re not at any point fuzzy as to what the hell’s going on and yet it’s all happening in a completely unexpected way and the story is constantly surprising you.

But also what makes these two series stand out for me is how they deal with character. I think you’ve got to work really, REALLY hard to make a character feel alive within the space of five pages of action-heavy comics, to make them linger in your head long after you’ve put down the book. And it would be so easy to let characters like Absalom and Dirty Frank become these one-note, one-joke ciphers, but as you’re reading them, you’re really seeing who they are and why they do what they do. And then to find yourself identifying with and even liking a character who’s completely mental or a complete shitbag. That to me is really great writing. And when a writer and an artist are in synch like that the whole story just sings, the pages can’t turn fast enough and you find yourself poring over them again and again when you’re supposed to be doing the ironing or whatever.

KH: How did Age of the Wolf come about?

AW: This was another cherished idea that I hoped to pitch as a series one day. I wanted to do something that explored a different angle on werewolves. One of my favourite movies as a kid was The Company of Wolves, which I ended up getting a bit obsessed about at the time, probably because the lead actress looked just like this girl I fancied at school. Anyway, what I love about this movie is the way it explores ideas about the werewolf and moulds them into all these different stories and meanings. A bit like Clive Barker did in the Books of Blood, taking these genre tropes and mutating them into something completely different. As soon as I started researching werewolf folklore, I found out that what we consider these timeless werewolf legends are really only a very narrow cultural strain that didn’t really come about until the 1940s with Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman. The idea of this cursed guy who turns into a wolf every full moon is all well and good, but it’s really limited dramatically, there’s one way a story like that can end. And it doesn’t explore this wealth of wolf and werewolf folklore that runs through Britain, France and Northern Europe, stuff which is really gnarly and disturbing and more akin to Fight Club than The Wolfman.

Anyway, I pitched the series out of this paranoid fear that someone else would come along and write it before me – or even worse, write it better! I got very excited and perhaps a little too carried away with my own ideas, thinking I’d better get this in now as I may never get another shot. There were whole sequences I had to drop in order to make the thing fit. I had this big siege in the mall on Oxford Street and a lot more stuff with Pete the homeless dude. I think Jon’s spectacular artwork got me out of a lot of trouble.

KH: Did you write that first series with a sequel in mind? And has the sequel taken the direction you planned or gone off in another direction?

AW: The first story kept growing until I couldn’t fit everything into the first series. And it wasn’t long before I had this whole other story about a ‘Mad Maxine’-type character doing all this Robin Hood parkour stuff in a post-apocalyptic forest. Once the first series of Age of the Wolf was finished, I queried Tharg on the possibility of doing another. He said he’d be interested in seeing two more, which we could headline as the ‘three ages’ of the wolf. Since the story is based on all these Norse ideas of wolves and fate and stuff, I thought it might be interesting to take Rowan through the three forms of the Norse fates – the three women who spin the threads of our lives – the maiden, the mother and the monster. In the first series, Rowan’s the sacrificial maiden. In SHE IS LEGEND, she’s this protective mother of the people, and in the last one she’s going to be… something else…

But I also wanted to give the reader something different with each series, so each one could stand alone and let anyone pick it up without having to have read anything before it. So far, it’s all gone pretty much according to plan, although the characters in She Is Legend ended up taking the plot in some unexpected directions.

FPI would like to thank Alec and Ken for sharing their thoughts on the blog, thanks also to Tharg’s human avatar Matt Smith and to that man Matt ‘Madman’ Badham; the Megazine #324 is in store and available online now.

It’s been a little while since I checked out the most recent postings on Better, Drawn, the site that showcases comics works addressing mental and physical health issues. Simon Moreton flagged up one strip, Don Depresso by Asidewalk, on Twitter recently and I had to have a look, followed by a visit to Asidewalk’s own Tumblr blog for a browse at some more postings. Some are several panels, others only a couple, but there is some interesting work in there and a nice sense of humour shining through coping with the Black Dog, well worth a wee look.

One of our long-time favourite Brit small press comic creators Paul Rainey drops us a line to say that the Milton Keynes Art Gallery is hosting an exhibition of Pushwagner art this summer. This will be the first solo exhibition of Norwegian artist and comics creator Hariton Pushwagner outside of his native land and will include work from his Soft City, a comics work created off an on between 1969 and 1976 and which  “provides an account of mechanical, daily life in a dehumanized, dystopian modern city “, as well as numerous other works and paintings. The exhibition runs from 28th of June to 2nd of September.

(Jobkill from Apokalypse, by and (c) Hariton Pushwagner)

And alongside it they will be holding a number of art events including MKcomics, a small press comics fair which Paul is organising. The event will take place inside the actual exhibition space and it is not only free to enter, Paul tells us if you are a small press creator it will be free to exhibit. As Paul puts it “Currently, small press comics are one of the most vibrant, creative and diverse artistic scenes taking place in the UK and MKomix is your opportunity to sample just some of what is going on.” Absolutely no argument from us on that point, we know just how incredibly bustling, diverse and vibrant the UK small press comics scene is (it really is a great time to be reading Brit comics). MKomix will be on July 19th from 6 to 9pm in the Milton Keynes Art Gallery; for more details or to contact Paul about taking part check out the MKomix blog or drop him a line at paul(at)pbrainey(dot)com.

Just how lovely are these illustrations? The films of the wonderful Studio Ghibli re-imagined as if they had been old school Penguin paperback editions. Smile inducing work by Jason K, who is selling them as postcard sets on Etsy. (via Live For Films)

Cool Johnny‘s mashup of Calvin and Hobbes with Lord of the Rings made me smile. (via Live for Films)

Great news from John Allison – his excellent Bad Machinery webcomic on his Scary Go Round site has been picked up by great Indy comics publisher Oni Press, home of, among many others, Scott Pilgrim. The series sees two groups of schoolkids in Scooby Doo hijinks (okay, not that Scooby Doo…) investigating odd goings on in their fictional small town as well as the everyday interaction of young teens at a high school; given John’s work has consistently proved popular (with shout outs in our annual guest Best of the Years from his peers as well as blog crew) I think this should do well, we’re very chuffed for John. There are several complete Bad Machinery tales up online already and this first printed volume is due from Oni next March.

Matt Wagner’s Grendel – a fan film teaser trailer from Michael C. Poole on Vimeo.

From the description: ”[it]starts with the true life story of two badly burned boys being treated with stem cell generated skin grafts in 1983. We then follow the successes and setbacks of a group of researchers working together to use stem cells to cure blindness, whilst being introduced to knotty issues that are part of the process, including stem cell regulation and the controversial ethical issues surrounding the subject. Whilst some of the story lines sound like science fiction they are in fact all true, despite the fact the script was written by the well-known Scottish Science Fiction writer, Ken Macleod. Comic book artist Edward Ross illustrated the script with his clear, friendly and attractive artwork, whilst stem cell researchers from OptiStem provided the real-life examples of their research and experiences.”

Although Ken is best known for being one of the UK’s top SF writers his own educational background is in science, he’s always delighted in incorporating real scientific thinking into his fiction and in recent years he has been doing a stellar job as a writer in residence with science teams in Edinburgh (I caught some of the talks that were part of that residency, which were open to all, and they were fascinating and a good way to get the public thinking about the scientific research we rely on). Away from his Filmish self published comics I enjoyed so much Edward is no stranger to educational, science-based comics now either, having also worked recently on illustrating a comic work with Glasgow University’s Jamie Hall on a comic on malaria. The work is nice, simple and clear, taking in some of the early discoveries in the field of stem cells in medicine and the applications to help heal conditions which previously had few viable treatments that could be used for them, including the use of the research to literally grow more new skin to heal boys hideously burned in a bad fire.

I rather like the way the comic took some pains to explain the enormous effort that goes into scientific research, how many years of dedicated work goes on at the most basic levels to see where these new techniques can be pushed, some leading to fruitful new areas of further research, some eating years of work but leading nowhere (but as it makes clear, the research needs to be done, it is the only way to find which techniques and possible therapies could be viable and helpful in the long run – and any real scientific research has to consider the long run), and also how funding is required to sustain such efforts on the potential promise of new discoveries that can vastly improve human health and wellbeing, as well as commenting on the way some possible new discoveries are taken by the media and overblown in the usual tabloid style leading to a perhaps unrealistic expectation of how effective new therapies will be and how quickly they can be developed and delivered – the comic, thankfully, tries to put the reality of the research into some clear context.

Ken documents working on Hope Beyond Hype on his blog – his first comics work, for which he thanks, among others, former Tharg David Bishop (who, as regular readers will recall, also now teaches on a course in genre writing, including comics work, at Edinburgh’s Napier University), for advice in how to script a comic. You can read Hope Beyond Hype on the Euro Stem Cell site, download it as a PDF or order a printed version via Edinburgh University’s site. And one a related note I’d like to say a huge congrats to Edward and his other half (and Edinburgh Science Fiction Book Group regular) Mary on the recent birth of their wee boy.