It was twenty years ago today…

Well, maybe not today exactly, but it was about this time of the year in 1994 that I embarked on six months unpaid leave from my then job as a social work manager to write The Holy Machine.  An expensive decision, which looked at the time as if it wouldn’t yield much in the way of concrete results.   What I managed to complete in 1994 was a clumsy thing that I knew didn’t quite work, but couldn’t figure out how to fix.  It was was to be another three years before I thought of a way to recast the book in its present form, ten years before it was first published (by Wildside in the US) and sixteen years before it was first published in the UK by Corvus.  A long haul, but I’m very proud of the end result.

Holy Machine cover
The wordless cover of the original Wildside edition. Image by Wilhelm Steiner

2 thoughts on “It was twenty years ago today…”

  1. I for one loved it, glad you persevered with it. So looking forward to follow up to Dark Eden. Only one request please write more! Have read all your output.

  2. Thanks very much John. That Dark Eden follow-up has proved to be quite a long haul in its own right, but I’m pleased with it now, and I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *