I have just uploaded the audio from the March BristolCon Fringe events. I suspect that this will provide our most listened to podcasts yet, by a long chalk.

We start out with Chris Cutting, who does more theatre than prose and always threatens to destroy my recording equipment when we work together. He has the loudest voice I have ever heard. My apologies if the audio is slightly distorted due to having to make it less LOUD. On the other hand, I think I have edited out all of the pauses caused by Chris having the story on his recalcitrant phone. I have to tell you about that because otherwise you won’t understand some of his comments in the Q&A.

Chris’s story isn’t exactly speculative, but it can be described as horrifying, and may have a slight tinge of steampunk to it.

Next up is the very wonderful Paul Cornell, who should need no introduction to the readers of this blog. Excitingly, we have an exclusive extract from his next Shadow Police novel. The book won’t be out until the end of the year, but once you have heard Paul read from it I’m pretty sure you’ll be wanting to read the rest to find out what the heck is going on. The title of the book will be…

No, I’ll let you listen. Paul announces the title during the reading. You are not going to believe whose murder his heroes end up investigating.

Finally there is a Q&A, in which we discuss all sorts of interesting things. Chris has a play to promote, which is all about vampires and social media. There are some terrible puns. We talk about Victorian fiction, including Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. We discuss the possible murderous tendencies of Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin. Paul drops another fascinating tit bit about the new book, and talks about a whole lot of exciting new projects he is working on.

Now I just have to work out how to get an advance copy of the book out of Paul, because I for one do not want to wait until December.