cahokiajazz.bsky.social

Herman Diaz's Trust, James Buchan's William Neilson series, and (cough) my forthcoming Nonesuch (Feb 2026 or March 2026 for the Scribner edition). Cough.

I will feel no surprise whatsoever if Trump or Vance turn up in front of a billboard saying "Don't worry, don't wonder".

It's Sarah Mulally, not Guli, but still very good news. (And we get to keep Guli in Chelmsford.)

No! No! She's my bishop, and I don't want to lose her. (The greater good, you say? Never heard of it.)

'An ancient system is awakening in the stones of London…'

Introducing Nonesuch the most magical Francis Spufford novel yet.

💫 Get ready for the historical fantasy of 2026. Coming in February 💫

A pleasure to give alt-hist pleasure where alt-hist pleasure was received: I loved the multiple worlds of Promised Land, and of course Hitler as horrible private eye.

Looking forward to this very much - but is there an ETA for "Judge of Worlds"? Holding my breath to see the last piece of Kithamar's narrative Swiss watch fitted into place.

Humour present and correct.

I have indeed already loved them - but I've still pre-ordered them, because I need to own them on paper, and have the three spines spell AUD on my bookshelves.

If you count alternative history as science fiction, then my Cahokia Jazz might work for you. Only set in 1922, though: canneries and streetcars instead of a spaceport.

A trilogy was called for, obviously!

And an enormous eeeeeeeeeee!! from me too.

@daralind.bsky.social [cough] "Nonesuch", March 2026, US; Feb 2026, UK.

Happy birthday!

If only it were also available in contagiously readable, expanded form as a book!

Ah, I knew him when he was young in London. Cricket was his game then - batting with a copy of a John Updike novel in his other hand...

The taffeta and pom-pom producers of the British Isles will miss them.

I absolutely get where you're coming from. And I honestly don't make a habit of turning up to argue like this - it's just that in some ways the question you asked is *the* question a book like this, written by an outsider, has to face up to. Have a good day in Beijing!

All the same, doing it was a conscious step over the edge of my competence, and I'm sure that in many ways small as well as large I made errors. It was just that no-one else seemed to see the possibility of making the book exist. Right, vanishing now and turning back into a puff of authorial smoke.

The reactions to it I was proudest of were one from someone on GoodReads who'd grown up in the science town of Akademgorodok, and said the feel was right; and the abrasive review of the Russian edition that described my understanding of the Soviet 1960s as, quote, "crude but not ridiculous". 3/

Had to centre the sensibility of the book in the other world in which it was taking place, while at the same time looking for points of commonality and contact so that the reader had pathways in, to eg the experience of living where money was not decisive. 2/

I am that person. Forgive me for dropping by. On the substantive point: look, I worried all the time I was working on Red Plenty about the very narrow aperture I was staring at Soviet reality through. Hence the footnotes. Hence my constant reminders to myself that, so far as I could, I 1/

Don't think I'm the person you need to hear from about this, but for what it's worth the major bias I was *aware* of when writing it was the bias of Western European social democracy/democratic socialism, which made Bolshevism always look like the homicidal cousin in the attic.

Doug, look me up at my place of work (Goldsmiths College, University of London) and send me an email there. Ahem.

You may, if you wish, picture Oscar pounding up the stairs towards Barrow with a stretcher and bandages the instant the book finishes. As it says at the end of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, "Let sunny imaginations hope."

Me three. Eleven books of mine, and all of my parents' historical work too. Bastards.

Meanwhile in fantasy, Daniel Abraham's Dagger & Coin series is about (as the title suggests) the rival forms of power represented by force and by money, and features a fantasy-world version of the Medici Bank, carefully thought through.

IIRC, Stross's Neptune's Children is explicitly about banking at interstellar distances, and owes a lot to his reading of Paul Krugman. Very much a picture of money that depends on the interface between multiple private & public actors.

Also C N Hill's A VERTICAL EMPIRE. (Hi, Farah.)

Join the Jesuit Media Lab Book Club for a live Zoom conversation on April 3 with Francis Spufford on his 2024 novel “Cahokia Jazz.”

Register now: jesuitmedialab.org/bookclub