My short story ‘The University of the Sun’ is published in the New Scientist. I was tasked with writing something “wilfully seasonal yet completely nuts”. It is accompanied by alluringly strange illustrations by Dave McKean. The story takes place in the same fictional universe as my last novel The Destructives, and explores the working lives of the emergences.

“A CHIME in his office informed him that the third and final candidate had arrived for the test. He kept a physical office in the University of the Sun with a view of the curve of Istor College, and – as the university drifted between the sun and the perihelion of Mercury – a veined sunsky of roiling violet.

Ezekiel was a solar academic specialising in human studies, and he pressed the rituals of humanity – gender, the office, the interview and Christmas – on his fellow emergences at every opportunity…”

Read the rest of the story at the New Scientist