Saturn Returns and Cenotaxis (billed as "Astropolis 1.5", which I love) are now available unabridged, via the preceding links, from the most excellent Audible.com, which means they're purchasable on the iTunes store here in Australia.

I'm excited by this because they're my first audio releases since my novella "Evermore" and the Star Wars: Force Heretic trilogy (all of which are also still available on iTunes, the latter books in abridged form). I haven't heard them yet, but I'm intending to work my way through both during my afternoon walks.

Each recording comes with an intro from me, recorded in my very own voice. At some point I'll post the full text here for those who have already bought the paper books, but here for now are some samples. (Imagine me breathing heavily out of your headphones, and trying my best to sound learned...)

SATURN RETURNS: We live in a world very different to the one our parents and grandparents knew, one in which our lives and our societies are observed and recorded to an unprecedented degree. We also stand at the beginning of the long future history of the human race, which, as imagined in this book and others, might one day encompass the entire galaxy. Even in that distant future, the record of our time will be preserved by future generations of humans--we may even be among them, if medical science finds a way to release us from the curse of natural death. The baggage of so many memories is bound to influence the future in ways we can't easily predict. I for one am sure that some people in the distant future will be very much like us, imitating us in the same way that our fashions echo those of times gone by, the way we read books from the 19th Century, and the way certain songs keep recycling over and over again.

CENOTAXIS: Thematically, Cenotaxis also gave me a second chance to explore themes that had been squeezed out of Saturn Returns by the need to keep the story pacy and tight. My vision of this future human civilisation as one constrained by anachronism--by its memories of our time--was present in the novel but not dwelled upon as much as I'd have liked. The main character in this story, a man who believes himself to be a God, enjoys a complicated relationship with time--although perhaps "enjoys" isn't entirely the right word. His experiences, his life, gave me new opportunities to touch on the equally complicated relationship between this future galaxy and its past--us, in other words.