There’s another cracking review of Drake here at Speculative Herald:

http://www.speculativeherald.com/2015/12/30/review-drake-by-peter-mclean/

and they’re piling in nicely on Goodreads too now!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25355564-drake

To any of you lovely people who are planning on reading Drake when it comes out (in only one week’s time now!) please consider leaving a review whatever you think of the book, it really does help.

Well it’s a space station, obviously – what’s not to like about that?

Well, to be perfectly honest the technology is a bit of a let down. I was born in 1972, and my grandfather was an academic publisher. He wrote and edited science textbooks, and while his personal expertise was in ceramics he also edited and contributed to a lot of books on futurology and space exploration.

We really should have a moon base by now. I know that because Grandad said so in the 1960s.

That aside yes of course it’s an amazing achievement, but that’s not the point. The point for me is this – there is a British astronaut on the ISS right now, Major Tim Peake, and he went up in a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. Not from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, not from an RAF base somewhere in England, but from Kazakhstan.

Now when I was a kid in the 1980s no one in England knew that Kazakhstan existed – it was all part of that huge red block on the map that we called Russia, for all that it was technically the USSR at the time. That’s beside the point – for all intents and purposes it was Russia and as everyone knew in the early 80s we were at war with Russia.

Well, sort of anyway. Like I said I was born in 1972, so by the early 80s I was just about sort of alive. Alive enough to remember it now, anyway. Everyone was scared of the Russians. If you’re under 30 you probably can’t wrap your head around this but in the 1980s we still honestly thought there might be a nuclear war with Russia tomorrow. Or maybe later on today.

It was fucking scary and it was scary all the time, every day. I don’t think I realised just how scary it was until some well-meaning relative bought me a comic book one Christmas.

That comic book was by Raymond Briggs, who wrote “The Snowman”. You know, “we’re walking in the air” and all that shit, the sweet kid’s cartoon that’s on every Christmas? Yeah, that Raymond Briggs.

Well Raymond Briggs also wrote another comic book called “When The Wind Blows” and that’s the one the well-meaning relative bought me. It’s a magnificent example of storytelling in the graphic novel form but it is categorically Not For Children.

“When The Wind Blows” is about nuclear war, at the most painful, personal, heartbreaking level possible. It’s a superb book but it is Not For Children. But that’s beside the point.

The point is this – I grew up scared of the Russians, and so did pretty much everyone else my age. And now we have an International Space Station, and it’s exactly what it says on the tin. We sent up a British astronaut in a Russian rocket from Kazakhstan, and no one’s nuking anyone.

It’s wonderful.

All the best Major Tim, and Merry Christmas.

As promised, my Yuletide short story “Wassailing” has been published on the Barnes & Noble blog as part of Angry Robot’s Christmas promotion – come and meet Don Drake!

There is a very nice interview with me up at Fantasy Faction today :

Interview with Peter McLean

Many thanks to Marc Alpin for making this happen.

My publisher Angry Robot Books are taking over the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog for most of December! There are competitions and free short stories, including one of mine which will go up on December 11th.

In case you didn’t know, Barnes & Noble are the biggest chain of booksellers in America so this is rather a big deal 🙂

Details at the below link:

Someone asked on a discussion group today “What is Noir to you?” and that got me thinking.

Drake has been called Noir and I suppose it is, in a way. So what does that mean to me?

Noir needs to be dark, by definition, but I don’t think it has to be tied to any particular time period. The classic Hollywood Noir is set in LA or New York in the 1940s but it can work equally well in the backstreets of ancient Rome or the mean cantinas of Mos Eisley, or even in modern South London for that matter.

Noir implies bitter, cynical black-and-white men in hats and beautiful, dangerous women with secrets to hide, but it doesn’t have to be that. You could have a hard-bitten battle-scarred female veteran of an alien war as your main character and still be writing Noir.

It’s about the feel and the vibe rather than the place or even the people who occupy that place. Noir is about dark thoughts and dark motives, deep introspection followed by double-crosses in back alleys and brief moments of sudden, brutal violence.

But there is a certain aesthetic as well, and I think that’s important. To understand the visual motif you only have to look at how the old movies play with light and shadow, the half-seen faces and the way sunbeams stream through the slats of a blind into the air of a smoky room.

That’s Noir.

Case in point – this clip is from the late 1960s and is really nothing but a lightbulb swinging back and forth. But look at the lighting, and add that music… there it is, that’s Noir right there :

This is something I tried to capture when I was writing Drake – not the standard tropes of Film Noir but the feel of it, that sense of downtrodden cynical weariness but with perhaps a spark of hope in the distance, however far away it may be.

Let me know if I got it right.

Today I’m overjoyed to reveal the simply stunning cover for Drake, by the very talented artist Chris Thornley – thank you Chris!

You can check out the full cover reveal article over at Fantasy Faction, but right now I’m just floored by how cool this is. I love the cover itself of course, but finally seeing Drake come to life like this is something else altogether. It’s been a long time coming but I’m really starting to feel like a published author now!

It’s still two months to the day until Drake is officially released but don’t forget you can pre-order now from Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

It’s getting real now…

Things really are picking up the pace – Drake is now available for advance order on Amazon, and I should have a lovely shiny cover image to show you in the next week or so!

Go on, you know you want to…

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drake-Burned-Man-Peter-McLean/dp/0857665111/

http://www.amazon.com/Drake-Burned-Man-Peter-McLean/dp/0857665111/

So this happened today:

http://angryrobotbooks.com/2015/03/introducing-peter-mclean-angry-robots-latest-author/

That’s right, I’m now officially, really and truly signed to Angry Robot as a debut author!

This is one of those things that is difficult to write about without sounding lame but this really is a dream come true. I’ve been writing for over twenty years, short stories and sketches and bits of novels and unfinished half-of-novels and for the last five years or so, complete novels that no one wanted to publish.

But you don’t give up. If someone had told me last year that I would never, ever on God’s green Earth get published, I’d still be writing novels. Because I have to. If it’s what you do, you have to do it. And with every book you finish (and the key here I think is finish, not abandon) you learn something. About writing, about perseverance, about yourself. You keep going. You get better. You learn your trade, you learn your industry, you network and you make contacts and you learn from them and you go write some more and some more and eventually it’s good enough and you get somewhere.

Eventually.

I’m overjoyed to be given this chance by Angry Robot and I will not let them down. Drake is going to sell. How much I don’t know, but I know it’s going to sell. I’ve worked too hard to let this fail now.

But the first person who asks me what it feels like to be an overnight success is going to get punched in the face.