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E________, first draft: 70,800 words

I like to think that, when it comes to thinking, I’m a forward-thinking guy. And flexible. I write stories about the future but can also put out a good old murder mystery like A Quiet Teacher, which is heading pell-mell toward publication.

Unfortunately, the reality is that I’m not so much forward thinking as irredeemably backward, a swivel-eyed triceratops stampeding in panic along the information superhighway: a metaphor that, on reflection, only serves to illustrate just how dinosaurial I am. Who says “information superhighway” anymore? To make matters worse, the industry that has exposed me as a living fossil is not high finance (my day job is in financial counterterrorism) but book publishing, which, let’s face it, is hardly a byword for the cutting edge.

I’m a living fossil, it turns out, because when I think of book publishing, I think about, well, books. Hardbacks, posh paperbacks, less posh paperbacks. Spines, cracked (ick!) or otherwise, the rustle of pages, the serried ranks of carefully formatted lettering. Books.

I do know that there are such things as e-books. I even own an e-reader. But I rarely use it. For reasons that I can’t fully fathom, anything I read on an e-reader doesn’t seem to stick. I can re-read a book I bought decades ago and bits and pieces will start to come back to me as I turn the page. But an e-book I bought last year? Crickets, so far as my memory is concerned.

My true blind spot, though, the thing that makes me a complete dinosaur, is audiobooks. What I still insist on calling books on tape. My wife does almost all her “reading” this way, her iPhone feeding book after book after book into her wireless headphones as she potters about the house. I, on the other hand, one: still own headphones with wires; and two: had never listened to an audiobook until I received my complementary copy of Braking Day from the publisher. It’s simply not a habit I’ve ever picked up. If I see someone looking at a kindle, I’m sufficiently with-it to know they’re reading a book. If I see someone wearing headphones, I assume they’re listening to music.

And yet. Roughly 10% of all books sold today are audiobooks. Worldwide, audiobooks account for more than four billion dollars in sales and sales are expected to grow at a rate of more than 25% a year through 2030. I haven’t done the math, but that’s a lot of books. Audiobooks, it appears, are the future.

A fact of which I remained blissfully unaware until recently. Perhaps, if I had been more aware, I wouldn’t have written A Quiet Teacher quite the way I did.

A Quiet Teacher is a murder-mystery set in an upscale American high school. Owing in no small part to the main character’s backstory, there are a number of characters who speak English as a second language or are far too educated for their own good. As a result, Dr. Google and I had a great deal of fun peppering the manuscript with Russian, and German, and a little bit of Latin (the Latin is very, very rude, by the way). The Latin is all me (I’m a dinosaur with a dinosaur’s education after all) but I can’t speak Russian or German or any other living language to save my life.

Which didn’t much matter until last week.

Last week, Susan, the rights whiz kid at my agency, got in touch to talk audiobooks. Who would I like to narrate A Quiet Teacher? Oh, and by the way, here are some options to consider.

Feeling like a pretend Hollywood bigshot, I reviewed a number of audition tapes (they’re computer files now, of course) and settled on an awesome actor to do the reading. He has a great voice, can do a variety of accents, and his delivery is spellbinding. Even though I am not an aficionado of audiobooks, I can’t wait to hear the finished product.

Job done, I returned from my virtual visit to the movie industry and knuckled back down to the writing of E_________, which, thanks to the horrors of Ukraine and the resultant sanctions, is well behind schedule. My schedule, admittedly, but I hate missing deadlines, even if they’re totally made up.

So, I’m typing away when another email from Susan pops up. Could I please go through the book and prepare a list of unusual words with an accompanying audio file demonstrating how I’d like the words pronounced? Also, can I do it by August 26?

No problem, says I, once again abandoning poor E________ for a more pressing task. E________, when it grows up, is going to have daddy issues. I start going through the proof of A Quiet Teacher, making an index of words and their page numbers for inclusion in the file.

And then it hits me. There are a lot of Russian words. And some German. And I don’t know how to pronounce any of them! Why did I write them in the first place? Why couldn’t I just stick to good old English? Why did I not remember that audiobooks are a thing? There was no need for all those fancy foreign words. No need at all. Pretentious old coot, that’s what I am.

And now, continuing to be pretentious by quoting Vladimir Lenin, no less, “What Is To Be Done?”

I have no freakin’ clue.

So, here I am, a swivel-eyed triceratops stampeding panic-stricken down the information superhighway, leaving giant, steaming, dinosaur-sized droppings as I go.

A dinosaur hoist by its own petard.

E________, first draft: 67,400 words

The day job has brought me to London, which has been . . . interesting. I should have known that when my employers told me they were going to fly me over business class there would be a price to pay. Suffice to say, on the eve of returning home, I am completely exhausted.

It did, however give me a front row seat to Britain’s hottest day, ever. Temperatures in parts of England, including London, reached more than 40C/104F. Even in the States, this is hot. But most Americans have access to air conditioning, the British do not. Also, US infrastructure, however rickety it may be, is designed for hot weather. Britain, on the other hand, burst into flames, as if a giant with a magnifying glass had turned the sun into an orbital weapons platform. London had more call outs for its fire brigade than at any time since World War II (when, one presumes, German bombers were the cause of the trouble). Instead of a normal day’s work of 350 calls, the fire brigade handled something north of 2600. The tarmac at Luton airport, er, melted, preventing planes from taking off or landing. It was an apocalypse in miniature, courtesy of global warming.

Which brings me to the subject of evil clone armies. While, last summer, I scared myself witless reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, a near-future thriller set in a world desiccated by global warming, I tend to gravitate to far-future space operas, where clone armies and their ilk threaten to plunge entire galaxies into millennia of misery. Unless, of course, our plucky band of heroes can save the day. Which, though it may surprise you, doesn’t always happen.

I was asked not too long ago why I enjoy space operas so much. After all, they can be pretty freakin’ dark (millennia of misery, remember) and I am not, by nature, a downbeat person. I think the answer is that, for me at least, all space operas, no matter how grim, are basically exercises in positive thinking. Because in order for a space opera to happen, we have to get into space, which means that we have to have survived long enough to figure out the awesome technology, not blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons and, most importantly of all, survive climate change. If, in the far far future, we find ourselves facing off against a clone menace of galactic proportions, it means we got an awful lot of stuff right in the meantime. Yay, us!

So, come on clones! What are you waiting for?

E________, first draft: 62,000 words

Very excited about the upcoming publication of my second novel, A Quiet Teacher, which is due out on November 1! But also feeling that, as the saying goes, I have some ‘splainin’ to do. How has it come about that a writer of science fiction has turned his hand to a murder mystery?

The answer, I guess, is because I couldn’t stop myself.

The SF writer, Harlan Ellison, when asked where he got his ideas from, reputedly answered, “Schenectady.” Speaking for myself, the ideas that flash out of the atom-smasher of fact, memory, and emotion that is the Oyebanji subconscious tend to be about things, or situations. Fermi’s paradox, for instance (The Wrong Shape To Fly in Baen’s upcoming Worlds Long Lost anthology), or “What would happen at the end of a generation ship’s voyage?” (Braking Day). But A Quiet Teacher wasn’t like that at all. I literally (literarily?) woke up one morning with the character of the protagonist, Greg Abimbola, fully formed in my head. Well . . . I didn’t know his name at the time, and it was a while before I realized he’d lost his left eye in something other than an accident. Still, apart from that, I knew everything about him.

It was, to say the least, weird.

But there was nothing I could do with him. I was an aspiring science fiction writer (I don’t think Braking Day even had an agent at the time, never mind a publisher). Outside of high school English assignments, science fiction was all I had ever written, and Greg was very much a character who belonged in the “real” world. He was absolutely, most definitely not for me.

And yet he wouldn’t go away. Bit by bit, flashes of a mystery novel built around him would appear while I was buttering toast, or riding my bike, or (please keep this to yourselves) during conference calls at work. I kept ignoring it, but the flashes kept coming until I had something close to a complete plot just floating around in my head with nowhere to go. At which point, I stopped ignoring and got scared instead.

I don’t know how to write mysteries, I told myself in an increasingly panicky internal dialog. I don’t know enough about the genre. I’ll be a laughingstock. Well, why don’t you read some? See if you can get the feel of it? Can’t be any harm in that, surely?

So, I did. I read Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James, The Witch Elm, by Tana French, Broken Promise, by Linwood Barclay, and a bunch of others. And then, thinking it need never see the light of day, I had a crack at what became A Quiet Teacher. It wasn’t called, A Quiet Teacher, of course. I called it Varsity Reds. No one, and I mean no one, liked that title. As related elsewhere in this blog, my titling expertise is so poorly regarded, I expect that I will soon be contractually forbidden from naming my own books.

Having written it, and really enjoyed writing it, I put the manuscript to one side because I wasn’t sure it was good enough. No. That’s not quite right. I thought it wasn’t half bad. I thought it had pace, and great characterizations, and a really cool mystery at its core. But here’s the problem: I’m a science fiction writer! When it comes to mysteries, I can’t tell the difference between a Roche limit and an event horizon.

Enter R. R is my wife’s very good friend, not mine. R, unlike my tactful, circumspect better half, is blunt to the point of rudeness. R is also a retired police officer and, most importantly of all, a fanatical consumer of murder mysteries. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen her read anything else. With some trepidation I handed her a copy of the manuscript (printed out, the old-fashioned way). It came back covered in red ink. On closer inspection, though, they were nits, easily fixed. R even went so far as to say she had to force herself to slow down and give feedback because she kept racing on to find out what happened next. Pleasantly surprised, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and called up my agent, the estimable Brady. Brady’s interests are adult science fiction, the UNC Tar Heels, and world peace (in that order) and here I was, asking him to sell a murder mystery by a science fiction writer with one not-yet-published book under his belt.

He did, too. A Quiet Teacher comes out on November 1, 2022, courtesy of the fine folks at Severn House. Please give it a try. If you like it, I’ll write some more. If you don’t, you, me (and Brady) will pretend like it never happened.

E________, first draft: 56,800 words

For those of you who have visited my home page in the last couple of days, I am well aware that I have some explaining to do. What, I hear you ask, was I thinking? An SF author writing a murder mystery? And in Pittsburgh of all places! Outrageous!

I promise to tell you the creation story behind A Quiet Teacher in due course. I had, in fact, intended to tell it today, but something else came up.

As a brand-new author, publishing continues to be one surprise after another. One of the odder ones (at least if you work for a mega-corp like yours truly, or, say, in retail) is that after Braking Day was published on April 5, no one could tell me how many books had been sold. Publishing is a business, after all, and someone has to know how many units are being shipped, to where, and who is paying for them. But that person is buried in a hole somewhere and not allowed to see the light of day except twice a year in October and April when the royalties are reported. There are surveys that will provide educated guesses (for a fee), but there is no way for me, as an author, to know how many copies of Braking Day you folks have got your hands on so far. For all I know at this point, it could be zero.

Well . . . except for a couple of things. First, some of you have left (mostly very nice – thank you!) reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, which means at least a few people have cracked open the book. Second, I have started to receive readers’ letters, which means that I have, well, readers. These have been, almost without exception, both kind and thoughtful, and it has been my pleasure to reply to each and every one personally.

Which brings me (at last!) to the point of this post. I recently received an interesting email from Rich H., who wrote as follows:

“Almost done with Breaking Day, couple of pages to go.

Enjoyed naming the star ships after physicists, especially Chandrasekhar who was unknown to me until I looked him up on Wikipedia.  I imagine not many Americans have heard of him either.

One thing though.  Clearly in the book water is precious, even to the point that it is used as the medium of exchange.  However I noticed many references to frost growing on surfaces inside and outside of the starship.  Just curious if water was so precious why was there no effort to recover or harvest the water from that frost?  Is there some underlying physical or engineering reason for not harvesting?

Thanks, please publish more!”

I don’t think Rich H. is a bot (though if he is, he’s a very nice one), but when I tried to reply, all I got was a bounce-back email entitled “message undeliverable.” I feel bad that Rich went to all this trouble to write an email to me and he’s never going to get an answer. Because it’s an interesting question, I thought I might share with you what I tried to send by way of a reply – and (hoping that Rich might find his way here) salve my conscience at the same time:

“Rich:

Thanks for the kind words.  They are very much appreciated!

Re your intriguing questions about frost: moisture on interior surfaces isn’t really lost, as it will return to the atmosphere when the relevant compartment warms up (obviously, there needs to be some humidity in the air as people don’t do well when it’s too dry).  As for the exterior, a ship like the Archimedes is certainly large enough to have a gravitational effect, so water that escaped from the hull would undoubtedly settle on exterior surfaces.  My thinking though (totally made up as I have never been on an interstellar voyage!) is that all sorts of other molecules would have an opportunity to land on the ship over the course of 132 years.  A lot of deep space bodies (Pluto, for instance) appear to have a reddish cast because the ices on the surface are laced with tholins.  I figured the same might occur with Archimedes over the course of its journey.  That’s why the exterior frosting is often described as pink. Tholins are poisonous, so cleaning up the ice is a task that, up till now, has not been worth the effort.  The ship still has water, after all, and it has almost arrived.  However, if the Bohr were to continue its journey into deep space with people aboard, there would come a time when the ongoing water losses would justify having drones recover as much ice from the exterior as possible.  It would be a matter of life and death!

Take care and all the best”

Reading this again, I am reminded that, for an author (or, at any rate, for me) worldbuilding is more than what you see on the page. As I’ve explained elsewhere, worldbuilding for me consists of setting a couple of basic ground rules (in this case, “real” physics and no suspended animation) and then asking and answering a bunch of questions (Why would people leave Earth? What would their descendants, who had no say in the matter, feel about colonizing a new world?). Once you’ve done that, you have a framework for your characters to live in, and then all you have to do is make sure that nothing they do or say is inconsistent with it. However, just because you know what the answers to your questions are, it doesn’t mean you can dump those answers on the page. It’s not an exam, after all. If it doesn’t drive the story – and particularly if it’s not something your characters would think about in their day-to-day – extraneous information like the cost-benefits of ice recovery will turn your hoped-for propulsive story into a bad wikipedia entry.

It’s still a shame, though. I should at least have found a way to say “tholins.” How cool a word is that?

E________, first draft: 55,000 words

Just back from attending the Cymera SFFH book festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Awesome, just awesome. It was held in the Pleasance, one of Edinburgh University’s atmospheric stone buildings near the center of town: a rambling rat warren of rooms and stages where, no matter where you turned, there was always something going on. It was fun getting lost in it. And if you were tired of getting lost, there was always a helpful volunteer nearby to put you right. So many panels, so many interesting discussions, I lost track. It was incredible. I’ve never been to a book festival before, so I’ve nothing to compare it with, but I will definitely set aside time next year to just go as a visitor, or maybe even as a volunteer. I am totally hooked! My only regret was that my day job kept intruding (thank you, President Putin), otherwise I would have been there every second it was open.

My own panel “Ad Astra,” with Ken MacLeod (Beyond the Hallowed Sky) and Harry Josephine Giles (Deep Wheel Orcadia) and moderated by Annie Rutherford was a blast. The venue was an actual theater, so it felt like being on stage for the high school play (pretty much the last time I trod the boards!) and, like a play, the stage lights were so strong I only had the faintest sense of the audience, which, for me at least, is a cast-iron shield against stage fright. Just as well because we were required to give a short reading from our books. It was intriguing to hear authors read their own works. Ken, having written 18(!) books, is clearly an old hand at this. If you like SF stories about space exploration, Beyond the Hallowed Sky is definitely one for your to-be-read list. And then there is Harry Josephine. Their book is written in the local dialect of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, with an English translation. I had wimped out and only read the English, so listening to the Orcadian, as it’s called, was fascinating. And not so hard once you hear how the various words on the page are pronounced! We then answered a slew of intriguing questions from Annie and the audience, not one of which was what are you doing here, which I half expected to be fired my way any minute.

After that the three of us did a book signing above a Blackwells pop-up bookstore (I felt like I was in a movie scene rather than real life) and then down to the store itself where (as I did on several occasions) I bought way more books than I intended. My checked bag on the way home barely came in under the weight limit. Twenty pounds of book will do that for you.

The last panel I was able to attend was Sunday afternoon’s “Growing Pains” with Kate Campbell, Judith Crow and S.K. Marlay, on the subject of YA fantasy. On top of the inherent interest of listening to authors talk about their work and why they are attracted to it, I was reminded about how hard people work at this. Stella Marlay, for instance, had to write most of her novel, The Stone Keep, in her car because it was lockdown and there was nowhere else to work. Not something I would have had the fortitude to do. The Stone Keep was my last purchase – and I got it signed!!!

Book festivals. Awesome.

E________ first draft, 51,000 words

Ukraine continues to play havoc with my sense of time. I knew I was a little late with my blog, but it’s been a shock to discover I was last here a month ago. I am definitely losing it!

Anyway, I am super excited to be going to my first live, in person book event as an author. I will also be going home for the first time in three years, so I am super, super excited.

The cause of all this super excitement is Edinburgh, Scotland’s Cymera Festival, which I think is Britain’s only book festival exclusively devoted to SF, Fantasy and Horror. I’m a little vague on the difference between a book festival and a convention, but I think the main one is that you have to pay for a convention by the day, whereas you pay for a festival by the event. If you’re only interested in a couple of panels, for instance, a book festival will save you a ton of money because those are the only ones you need to pay for.

The festival starts on Friday, June 3 and runs through Sunday, June 5. It’s a hybrid event (one of the few positives to come out of our ongoing plague) so, if you can’t physically make it to Edinburgh, you can still attend via Zoom. But it also allows authors who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get there, like the legendary John Scalzi, for instance, to put in an appearance. Totally stoked to watch that one!

My own panel is at 4pm BST/11am EDT and is called Ad Astra. Presumably because the focus of the panel is exploration science fiction. I will be appearing with Scottish authors Ken MacLeod and Harry Josephine Giles. I have been a huge fan of Ken MacLeod’s since stumbling across The Cassini Division back in the day. And his latest, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, is partly premised on what might happen if the theory of relativity turns out to be a teeny bit different than we presently think it is. It also sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of Cherenkov radiation, but that’s another story – and one far less interesting than Ken’s. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to read Harry Josephine Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia yet because obtaining a hard copy here in the States has proved to be difficult. It looks like I will have to get the e-book version, which I have resisted so far. For a sci-fi writer, I am horribly old fashioned. I like books. For some reason (and it may be a sheer lack of practice) I never seem to remember what I read on an e-book, which would be a shame, because Deep Wheel Orcadia is a verse novel, which will be a first for me. Looking forward to it!

Jo Fletcher, my British publisher has also brokered an introduction to Stephen Cox, so I know at least one person who will talk to me! He is the author of Our Child of the Stars and Our Child of Two Worlds, and I am looking forward to his panel Kith and Kin, which takes place on Sunday at 3pm BST/10am EDT.

But first, I have to get to Edinburgh. I’m driving there from Heathrow. Here’s hoping I haven’t forgotten how to use a manual/stick-shift. On the “right” side of the road.

E________, first draft, 41,200 words

As I write this, I am sitting in my local coffee shop. A student at a nearby table is making ferocious underlinings in a book called The Death of Adam. I’ve just looked it up to post the link, and I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the guy is a philosophy student. Or maybe poli-sci. Regardless, although I am a grown man, the title is deeply disturbing to me. I would like him to move on, or at least do his underlining with the book flat on the table like a normal person.

It is also an irresistible lead-in to my explanation as to where I have been the last couple of months. Fortunately (for me, at any rate) I have not died. I have, however, been otherwise occupied.

My last entry here was on February 21. On February 24 the Russians (re)invaded Ukraine. Multifarious sanctions followed. As sanctions are a big part of my day job, I have simply been far too busy to do anything else. On April 5, when Braking Day was finally published, I worked a 16-hour day, had a quick glass of champagne and went straight to bed. I’d like to feel sorry for myself, but no one is trying to drop high explosive through the roof of my house.

Now that the sanctions are bedding in (and I pray they do some good) I can finally come up for air. It’s been weird to go to my local bookstore and see my book front and center in the new fiction display. That said, I can never show my face there again. My wife insisted on telling everyone there that the author of Braking Day was in their midst and they should be super, super excited. I wanted to die.

The critics appear to have been kind. I’ve had positive mentions in, among others, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. I’m just hoping you folks like it. Fingers crossed!

E________, first draft: 41,200 words

We are only about six weeks away from Braking Day hitting the shelves. Needless to say, I am very excited! D-day (P-day?) is April 5, but my agent, the estimable Brady, let it be known that I could expect my own author copies in the next couple of weeks or so, depending on production. (I get a certain number of books free: it’s in my contract. I can’t remember how many. I guess I should go read my contract.) Obviously (though I had not bothered to think about this) in order to get books released on the same date in bookshops across the country, you have to make them up ahead of time and ship them out so they are sitting in storage ready for the big day. Big is relative here. Big to me.

Anyway, having finally got to thinking about it, I also got to thinking: how on Earth do you make a book anyway? Turns out, the New York Times has the answer. They just did an article on the printing of Marlon James’s Moon Witch, Spider King, which comes out tomorrow. Enjoy!

How a Book Is Made.

E________, first draft: 41,200 words

I have finally finished my winter read, The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Despite its length, and the time it took me to plough through it, winter is still here. I have hopes, though, of warmer days ahead.

Regarding Dostoyevsky’s novel, I’m not quite sure what to make of it. Being Russian and from the 19th Century it was, of course, long, and full of philosophical side trips, and dark, though nowhere near as dark as I was expecting. It was also wryly humorous and, at times, utterly compelling. Not an easy book to describe by any means.

One thing I am sure of, though. There is no way Dostoyevsky could have sold The Brothers Karamazov into the modern market. It is far too long, lacks focus, and rambles all over the place. It does not meet the modern demand for tightly plotted stories told at pace – even allowing for the more relaxed standards of literary fiction – the “classy” genre – which has a higher tolerance for introspection. Insofar as The Brothers Karamazov is about anything, it is about a murder and the subsequent trial. But in the Penguin Classics edition, which is 985 pages long, we don’t even know there’s been a murder until nearly six hundred pages in. A modern editor would have told Dostoyevsky that he’d started his novel too soon and cut out the first two thirds of the book. Then he’d have a story!

Editors matter. If you want an insight into what editors actually do, you could do a lot worse than take a look at Genius, starring Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman, which looks at the relationship between the early twentieth century American author, Thomas Wolfe (not to be confused with his later namesake) and his editor, Max Perkins. Wolfe’s first draft of his most famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel, was something like eleven hundred pages long. Perkins persuaded him to cut it down considerably and focus on one character rather than spread himself thinly between several. The resulting novel was a sensational (and international) best seller.

When Braking Day, then called Starship Four, was taken on by my first agent (no one was more shocked and surprised than yours truly, by the way) she had a number of editorial suggestions. In addition to gently telling me that my title was … not good, she would say things like, “This particular character is intriguing. I want to know more about her. Where did she come from? Why is she doing this?” When she left the industry and passed me on to the estimable Brady, he had more of the same. “This particular character is intriguing. I want to know more about him. Where did he come from? Why is he doing this?”

The resulting manuscript was significantly improved from the original as a result. The characters were more nuanced, the plot more sophisticated. Then, when DAW agreed to buy it, my editor there, the redoubtable Leah, had more suggestions. “These characters that you barely mention are intriguing. I want to know more about them. Where are they coming from? Why are they doing this? Oh, and could you please change the ending by moving the characters a quarter of a million kilometers from where they presently are? Thanks!”

It was hard but rewarding work. A manuscript that I worried was getting too long at 110,000 words ended up at 130,000. But the result was a much more layered, more sophisticated treatment; way, way better than I had managed on my own.

Braking Day is now close to publication, and earlier this week we got a starred review from Publishers Weekly. I, of course, had no idea what a “starred review” was. Apparently, you get them for works that are “exemplary in their genre.” Wow. Here’s what PW had to say.

“Engineer-in-training Ravi MacLeod unwittingly becomes entangled in a dangerous conspiracy in Oyebanji’s brilliant debut, a vibrant exploration of society aboard a generation starship. One hundred and thirty-two years earlier, a fleet comprising three generation ships left an Earth overtaken by AI to forge a new life for humans on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, the “Destination Star.” As they approach their final destination, Oyebanji paints a convincing picture of a society molded by unusual circumstance, highlighting its commitment to the mission and a class structure based on one’s status as either officer or crew member. Ravi’s on track to be the first in his family to make officer when he starts having visions of a strange girl outside the ship without a space suit who delivers an urgent warning. Concerned he might be going insane, Ravi turns to his cousin, Boz, for help, and the pair stumble across information that suggests the three-ship fleet is hiding a devastating secret about their departure from Earth. Oyebanji builds intrigue upon intrigue through the novel’s first half and pays off the suspense with a series of jaw-dropping revelations. Innovative worldbuilding, a plot packed with surprises, and Oyebanji’s nuanced exploration of social and cultural shifts make this a must-read for space opera fans.“

Obviously, reading something like this (I would not have read it if it had been bad!) is potentially head swelling. But the honest truth is that I would not have “earned” a review like this – and certainly not the language I have bolded – without the committed input of two agents and an editor. They cared deeply about what I had written and worked above and beyond to make it better.

Writing, it turns out, is a team effort.

I had a whole blog post planned for today around Martian canals, an ocean on Europa, and the TRAPPIST-1 system. But then I came across this sweet story in the Guardian about a young novelist taking his first steps in publishing. So. Enjoy….

Book a prize: Idaho library has wait list for story eight-year-old hid on a shelf.