Irregularity is a collaboration between the National Maritime Museum and award-winning publisher Jurassic London: a collection of fourteen original stories from some of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction. Using the Longitude Act as the jumping off point, Irregularity is inspired by the great thinkers of the Age of Reason – those courageous men and women who set out to map, chart, name and classify the world around them. The great minds who brought order and discipline to the universe. Except where they didn’t. Irregularity contains new stories from Nick Harkaway, Claire North, Adam Roberts, E. J. Swift, Tiffani Angus, Rose Biggin, Kim Curran, Richard de Nooy, Archie Black, Simon Guerrier, Roger Luckhurst, Henrietta Rose-Innes, James Smythe, M. Suddain and Adam Roberts. The anthology includes an afterword from Sophie Waring and Richard Dunn, Head of Science and Technology and Royal Museums Greenwich. The stories are illustrated by Gary Northfield, based on imagery from the archives of the National Maritime Museum. The cover shows “Resolution”, a work by Howard Hardiman. It’s been a while since I’ve read an anthology and when Irregularity dropped through my letterbox it appeared that the book gods were indeed smiling on me. Fourteen new works…

Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke brings you London as you’ve never seen it before – science fiction and fantasy in the great tradition of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens lived and breathed London in a way few authors ever have, before or since. In his fiction, his non-fiction, and even his own life, Dickens cast an extraordinary shadow over the city he so loved – so much so, indeed, that his name has become synonymous with a certain image of London. A London of terrible social inequality and matchless belief in the human potential; a London filled with the comic and the repulsive, the industrious and the feckless, the faithful and the faithless, the selfish and the selfless. This London is at once an historical artifact and a living, breathing creature: the steaming, heaving, weeping, stinking, everlasting Smoke. At the tail end of 2011, those crafty folk over at Pornokitsch published their first anthology Stories of the Apocalypse. I’ll admit that I rather enjoyed it (what can I say, I have a soft spot for the end of the world, feel free to ask me about it sometime). In April this year, their second release Stories of the Smoke was released. I had…

Welcome to Pandemonium. Ragnarok, climate change, Skynet, Mayan prophecies, zombie hordes, swine flu, reality TV, Gozer the Gozerian, the youth of today, the rise of the apes, no phone coverage, rogue asteroids and the Fox Network cancelling your new favourite TV show. Whatever your end-of-days desire, humanity has a knack for summoning an apocalypse to fit. So what kind of Judgement Day junkie are you? When I heard that some of the team behind Pornokitsch, one of my favourite websites, were putting together an anthology of short stories I was interested. Their geek culture, book, and film reviews are always a delight to read and tend to offer great insight into the topics they cover. Then I discovered that the theme of this collection was going to be the end of the world, a subject very close to my heart, I was very keen to get my hands on a copy. This first Pandemonium collection is inspired by the evocative, apocalyptic artwork of John Martin (19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854). Eighteen short stories have been commissioned to coincide with Tate Britain’s John Martin: Apocalypse retrospective. More so than any other anthology I’ve read this year, I actually found it difficult to pick my favourite stories from this collection. Not…