Hollywood Animals in the upcoming Interzone #295

Just a quick not to say that my short story Hollywood Animals will be in the December issue of Interzone, issue #295. Preorders are up now, with full TOC at the link.

It’s the first story I’ll have published that sits under the banner of Crisp SF. Crisp isn’t just about genetic engineering (taking its name from CRISPR technologies) but about genetic engineering in a world struggling under the weight of rampant capitalism and/or catastrophic climate change. The cli-fi angle is non-existent in Hollywood Animals, but it has a heavy emphasis on labor relations. To my mind,  a resurgent union movement is one of the best current real-world examples of the little people (here workers specifically) pushing back against the constant grinding demands of the same capitalist system that is both driving climate change and standing in the way of us making timely changes.

I’m excited to have a story in Interzone and to have something else out in the world. Strangely enough, 2022 has been the year of short stories for me – Night, Rain and Neon, Phase Change, and now Interzone. Now I just have to hope that I can sell a novel or novella by the end of the year.

Phase Change – Available to Order

I just wanted to share this briefly – I got my contributor’s copy of Phase Change, and it is a hefty slab of hopeful energy futures, coming in at a bit under 450 pages.

It’s available for order now via the Twelfth Planet Press website, in ebook and paperback. Even if I wasn’t involved I’d be excited about this book – it’s exactly the sort of fiction we need for the current moment.

Catastrophic climate change sparked by the fossil fuel industry leaves us no choice: we must decarbonise. To create another world we need different narratives. With visions spanning from transhuman planet-hopping through post-cyberpunk paranoia to solarpunk ecotopianism, this collection dislocates our present energy regimes to imagine energy transitions and futures in all their complexities. These are stories of phase change.

Paolo Bacigalupi • Eugen Bacon • Carmel Bird • Grace Dugan • Thoraiya Dyer • Greg Egan • Tom Flood • Andrew Dana Hudson and Corey J. White • Sid Jain • John Kinsella • Rosaleen Love • Andrew Macrae • Nick Mamatas • Paul Graham Raven • Simon Sellars • Cat Sparks • Molly Tanzer • Ben Walter • Jo Lindsay Walton • Wendy Waring • David Whish-Wilson • Jasper Wyld

‘Wildly imaginative, heartrending, furious and hopeful, the stories in Phase Change are a reminder of science fiction’s vital role in helping us imagine a new and better future.’

— James Bradley, author of Ghost Species

‘From transformed planetary ecologies to transhuman altered genomes, from ubiquitous drone surveillance and widespread mass extinction to prison abolition and a people’s history of ecoterrorism, Phase Change is your handbook for the next century (and beyond).’

— Gerry Canavan, editor of Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

Where To Find Me

Just a reminder: Repo Virtual won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

Now that’s out of the way…

I’ve been doing a pretty terrible job of keeping this website up to date, but I most certainly have not been resting on my laurels (whatever those are). I’ll have some short-story related news to share – eventually – and movement on some new long-form works.

But in the meantime, I’ve also been keeping busy with:

Nothing Here Newsletter

At Nothing Here, we scour the internet so you don’t have to, and serve up a selection of interesting articles on culture, politics, ecology, climate change, the end of the world, and all that good shit. We’ll also let you know what books, films, TV, and music we’ve been enjoying, because, hell, sometimes you need something to distract from the endless parade of atrocities that is the 21st Century.

Each fortnight the team – Daniel C. Harvey, m1k3y, Marlee Jane Ward, Lidia Zuin and I – will come into your inbox with all sorts of stories across climate change, geopolitics, tech, science, space, labor, and economics, as well as bits of culture that are helping us keep going despite the above.

Buddies Without Organs

Buddies Without Organs is a podcast by Sean Oscar, Matt Colquhoun and Corey J. White — three buddies interested in the relationship between culture and philosophy.

We started off discussing the work of Gilles Deleuze in podcast form, but have since pivoted to a) video (though we’re still offering audio format too), b) the Zer0 Books Youtube channel, and c) to discussing the lesser known writings of Mark Fisher in The K-files.

This project is a lot of fun, and I learn so much reading through these texts and chatting to the buddies about them. I have no formal philosophy education, so come hear/watch me struggle to make sense of some really big, weird, and interesting ideas.

Oh Nothing Press

Creeper Magazine, MechaDeath, and now some t-shirt designs from yours truly coming under the banner of CRINGE.

Award-Winning

The Aurealis Awards Ceremony happened over zoom the other night, and Repo Virtual has won the Aurealis Award for Best Science-Fiction novel, tied with Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country.

You can watch the full ceremony here – my acceptance “speech” (I had nothing prepared because I was up against an amazing slate and honestly did not expect to win) is near the end as Best SF Novel was the second last award announced.

I was pretty sure that Laura Jean McKay was going to win, as The Animals in That Country has been nominated for a number of awards and has also won Australia’s richest literary prize… but I never thought that I might win as well. For some reason it feels even more special to be sharing the award; maybe because joy is better shared, maybe because it’s a great reminder (to myself and anyone else that needs it) that publishing isn’t a zero-sum game.

I am proud of my work on Repo Virtual, but with its pandemic release it’s easy to feel that the book could have done better and gotten more attention if it had been released at almost any other time. So it really means a lot to me for the book (and myself, I suppose) to receive this sort of recognition. A lot of my depression and anxiety manifests as self-doubt and self-loathing, but it should be hard for my mind spiders to argue with this external validation.

Again, I’d like to thank the judges for finding Repo Virtual worthy of this honour. And thanks to the Aurealis Awards gang for all the hard work they do year in and year out – Australian SFF is a vibrant and exciting field, and they do a fantastic job celebrating that.

Thanks also to reviewers, booktubers, readers, etc who have talked up my work this past year, and reached out. It’s people connecting with the work that makes it worthwhile, so thank you for helping to spread the word. And finally, thank you to my partner, Marlee Jane Ward, who has been such a huge support.

Four More Years!

Alternative title: May the 9th Be With You


Killing Gravity was published on the 9th of May, 2017, which means it’s been 4 years since I started this (hopefully long) journey of building a writing career for myself.

[Killing Gravity cover art by Tommy Arnold]
It’s easy for me to look at Repo Virtual‘s plague year launch and feel dejected, but 4 years later people are still discovering the VoidWitch Saga books for the first time, and they’re tweeting and gramming about how much they love the books, and reminding me that books can have long tails. As long as the books are “in print” (scare quotes because I’m sure a lot of people are discovering the ebooks and audiobooks), then they’ll continue to find their audience… Largely thanks to reviews and support from my fantastic, beautiful readers. To everyone who’s talked up my books online and off, who’s taken the time to write a review, and who’s reached out with kind words for my work, thank you. You make this all worthwhile.

They say the best promotion an author can do for their book is to release the next one, and I’m hard at work editing it now, ready to go on sub to agents (hopefully) next month. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I’m keeping busy. There’s the nothing here newsletter, the Buddies Without Organs podcast, and a new collaborative fiction project in the works, not to mention a line of t-shirt designs I plan to launch soon via Oh Nothing Press. Oh, and an anthology that commissioned a story from me, and another video-related project, another collab story that just needs final edits before we get it out into the world, and on and on. Berserker mode, as usual.

Thanks for joining me on this ride.

And just in case you need a prompt, buy my books 😉

Repo Virtual is an Aurealis Awards Finalist!

Repo Virtual is a Finalist for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Science Fiction Novel category! It is an incredibly strong slate this year, and I’m legitimately honoured to be selected alongside these great works/authors.

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
Ghost Species, James Bradley (Penguin Random House)
Aurora Burning, Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff (Allen & Unwin)
Fauna, Donna Mazza (Allen & Unwin)
The Animals in That Country, Laura Jean McKay (Scribe Publications)
The Mother Fault, Kate Mildenhall (Simon & Schuster Australia)
Repo Virtual, Corey J. White (Tor.com Publishing)

Congrats to all the other finalists!

Events April 2021

I’ve got a couple of great (virtual) events coming up.

Flights of Foundry

Flights of Foundry is running another all-timezones virtual convention – this is exactly the sort of thing I love to see flourishing after our pandemic year. As an Australian it can be easy to feel left out of various US-centric elements of the industry and fandom, so a chance to chat with people from all across the global SFF community is fantastic.

I’ve got two panels:

Times are at the above links (and you can set your own timezone to see the full program at your local times), as well as details about the other panelists and all the rest.

The convention is free to attend, but you will need to register and also have the option of donating if you’re able.

Read the Room

I’m really excited to be doing this event – Read The Room – The Future is Now: The Intersections of AI, Technology, and Power in Science Fiction, Moderated by Charlie Jane Anders, with Naomi Kritzer, J.S. Dewes, and Nnedi Okorafor. It’s a killer line-up, and I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic conversation.

April 28th at 6:00pm EST / 3:00pm PST

Full details here.

Some recent odds and ends

Happy 2021, wherein we’ll have to continue to fight for a better future because our governments and the corporations have no interest in working for it unless we make them.

Anyway, I’ve got a few bits and pieces to share.

Australian science fiction author Corey J White proves that cyberpunk is not dead in his first full length novel Repo Virtual. Set in a slightly in-the-future Korea Repo Virtual is a fast moving tale that features evil megacorporations, plucky gamers, AI and robot dogs.

Some great contemporary cyberpunk books – including Repo Virtual, Infomocracy by Malka Older, and Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor – to check out if CP2077 left you feeling disappointed.

Recent Repo Virtual Reviews

One of the good things about taking a break from twitter (apart from the removal of a deep sense of sadness and constant outrage) is that when you return you might find a few people with nice things to say about your book.

As a rule I don’t read reviews of my own work. The book is done, or at least I’m done with it, so the review isn’t for me, it’s there to help give readers an idea of whether or not the book is for them.

(While the above is true and what I think about reviews, the real reason I don’t read them is because even thinking about reviews gives me anxiety. So it’s a good thing that I’ve got an amazing and supportive partner who can read reviews for me.)

So below are some pull quotes from, and links to, some recent reviews. Thanks to Marlee for the quotes. I like knowing that people out there both get and enjoy what I was trying to do with Repo Virtual.


I really enjoyed the focus on loving character relationships in Repo Virtual. It shows how cyberpunk is actually evolving. What was great about, say, Case and Molly’s relationship in Neuromancer was they clearly had an attachment to each other that went beyond just physical, but they were so alienated from the world and from each other that ultimately it could never work; I liked that and thought it made a powerful statement about how capitalism ultimately alienates us from our fellow humans. Corey J. White is saying something different, that despite that alienation we are still human and woe betide any CEO whose profits supersede our humanity.

If this book is anything to go by, I feel like the tone of modern cyberpunk may be shifting too? I hope I’m not misplaced in glimpsing a tiny shred, if but a kernel, of hope in the modern genre.

For a genre awash with such advanced biotechnology it really shouldn’t have taken this long for it to start exploring ideas around gender identity. Thankfully Corey J. White has dragged cyberpunk kicking and screaming into the year 2020 and with it he’s also consigned a bunch of the shittier stereotypes of the genre to the dustbin of history.

Jonothan Pickering at Parsecs and Parchment


Readers of White’s Voidwitch series (starting with Killing Gravity) know that White hits the action beats and rings those changes well, and he takes those skills and puts them into his mid 21st century story with conflicts and set pieces both small and large. From a tense gun standoff, to a pulse pounding chase across the city, when the author turns on the action, the words just flow off of the page.

what really sets this novel apart from most Cyberpunk is its strongly philosophical bent. It sounds more than a little strange to talk about ontology and philosophy in the context of an often pulse pounding SF novel, but White’s novel and its thesis, for lack of a better word, is encapsulated in the sections when the AI starts to swim toward the surface of consciousness, and the debate, and the issues of a new sentient intelligence, and what that means. It is a far less toxic meditation on artificial intelligence, their rights and nature, than in say, the movie Ex Machina, which I kept thinking of as the AI moves from being a pure MacGuffin to being an entity in their own right, with slowly developing hopes and goals of their own. What rights does an AI have? What is the social contract, here? I was not expecting this level of deep thought, as JD and Troy and the AI come to slow understanding, JD and Troy from without, and the AI from within.

Does Cyberpunk still have something to say and to present itself as a viable subgenre for the early 21st century for writers and readers? Repo Virtual by Corey J White proves that the answer is, that eye of the needle can be threaded. It’s difficult to write near-future SF, but White not only manages it but succeeds excellently at it.

Paul Weimar at Nerds of a Feather


The book really shines when it uses the heist plot to facilitate some fantastic social commentary as well as advance its pretty heavy themes… In many ways, the book reads like a well written political paper more than a story – which weirdly works for me.

Andrew Mather at Quill to Live