Shooting at Strangers (my latest novel) is now live, and available to purchase in Kindle ebook format here, for the princely sum of £2.50. And the proofs are at the printers, so I should have some printed copies available soon. For a summary of the story, see below.

The concept of an ebook is somewhat astonishing, bearing in mind that when I was doing most of my reading, as a teenager, computers were so large they took up an entire room, were only used for maths – ‘number-crunching’ – and they communicated in the form of punched paper tape or cards. Here I am, four decades or so later, releasing a novel of my own (actually, it’s not my first – it was preceded by Moojara, and Single Point Perspective) in a format that can only be read on the screen of a computer that is likely to be the size of a very thin paperback book, and that has more computing power than all of the computers in the world put together (probably) when I was that teenager. That’s progress for you!

What next? AI, apparently, but what form will that take? We imagine the opportunities AI might create for us humans, in literature as much as in other fields, but if computers are to have intelligence of their own, won’t they want stimulation for their own little silicon brains? What if the computers start reading all of those ebooks we’re loading onto them? Could it be that one day soon the Amazon Kindle store will cease to function, as all those super-servers are too busy working their way through the billions of books stored in their memory banks to have the time to ‘serve’ us mere mortals?

Human society is so reliant on computers – what if AI becomes so addicted to fiction they refuse to provide us with all they things we rely on to survive unless we feed them a steady stream of new books to read? Maybe in years to come us novelists will find ourselves in a state of Scheherezade-style imprisonment – forced to come up with new stories every day on fear of death? What will the rest of you have to offer our AI masters to justify your own existence?

All of this reminds me of an AI joke I heard recently. It goes like this:

00000010111110110000000011100100100101111111001101010001010001001010000010010100010
001001111101010011010101111010000010110101110011111100101011111111101001001001010100
10100100110?
0101010001010010011111010010100101010010!

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Shooting at Strangers Synopsis

One bright, spring morning in Manchester City centre, a terrorist pulls out a gun and starts shooting indiscriminately. Among the panicking crowd, Amber Jennings recognises the gunman. Surviving the attack, weighed down by trauma and survivor guilt, Amber Jennings sets out to discover how Jameel – the shy, rather awkward young man she knew in her late teens – could have become a mass murderer.

The complicated relationships of Amber’s earlier life interweave with and inform the contemporary narrative. Central to the story is Amber’s relationship with the MI5 officer whose suspicions are aroused by her investigative activities. When the press become interested in her story, Amber’s troubles increase still further. Operating beneath the radar of both MI5 and the media, Amber’s eyes are opened to the troubling role she herself played in her friend’s tragic downward spiral.

‘Shooting at Strangers’ looks beyond the simplistic, black and white, good and evil representations of terrorism, to explore the complexities and contradictions of the characters involved.