This Sunday 7th July...

... I'll be reading at Illicit Ink, at the Bongo Club in Edinburgh, from 8:00. Neatly, this kicks off a season of events in celebration of Iain Banks, produced by the City of Literature. As they say:

A wonderful author, with an incredible imagination and wit, his huge contribution to Scottish writing makes him irreplaceable. His final novel, The Quarry, was published last week and its publishers, Little, Brown, released a statement saying the author was presented with a printed copy at a party with friends and fans before his untimely death.

Details of the event itself on Facebook:

Illicit Ink is celebrating Iain [M] Banks in the finest way we know – by creating a spoken word utopia in the Bongo Club. Brought to you by the folk who like to conduct gruesome fictional experiments on stage and play in the dark, This Side of Paradise will be a heaven on earth.

Compèring the night is science fiction visionary Andrew J. Wilson. Bringing the paradise to life with original stories and instruments of science are writers Ken MacLeod, Hal Duncan, Ariadne Cass-Maran, Erin McElhinney, Halsted Bernard and Tom Moore.

This event is UNTICKETED and there's a suggested donation of £4, every penny, tooth and hair of which will be donated to charity in Iain's honor.

I'm chuffed to have been invited, it goes without saying, honoured to pay tribute to the man himself. Cleaving to the utopian theme and aiming to reflect the relish of life he was always radiating any time I met him, I'll be reading an extract from "Susurrus on Mars," a crazy novella in progress set on a far future terraformed Mars, riffing on the pastoral idyll from Virgil through to Bradbury and Davenport. Sadly, I couldn't squeeze in any of the scenes told from the PoV of plants, equal parts Linnaean botany and Greek mythology, but I think you'll like it.

So come join us!

That is all.