Stories of the Smoke - the launch!

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, so much so, in fact, 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.

And you could be at the launch of Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke, which is taking place at the Betsey Trotwood pub (56 Farringdon Road, EC1) from 6.30 pm on Wednesday, 4 April.

I will be reading an extract from my story Necropolis during the course of the evening, as will several of the other authors. You can find the full table of contents here.

There is a limited amount of space so, although the tickets are free, you'll need to have one - and you can pick up your ticket here.

See London as Dickens did

Dickens's Victorian London is a collection of 19th-century photographs which has been published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the author's birth.

You can read more about this story here.

A life in maps

Before starting work on the latest Pax Britannia adventure Human Nature, I picked up a copy of London: A Life in Maps by Peter Whitfield (having come across it quite by chance in a bookshop near Covent Garden).

It's a fascinating tome that traces the history of the capital through various historical maps. Also included in the book are numerous illustrations of famous (and not-so-famous) London landmarks.

As well as helping in terms of being a reference work for my research, it is also proving to be something of an inspiration for future stories. So, included within this post is an image of the smoky Victorian metropolis, and two locations, one from the current book I'm writing, and one that will feature in the fifth Pax Britannia novel, due next year. Can you work out what and where they are?