Here’s a little something different for jaded eyeballs though, quite honestly, I could have done without all the excitement.

Following a cascade of medical meet-ups and several scans (DAT, MRI and suchlike, which involved me going back and forth through a piece of noisy and elaborate machinery resembling an aircraft engine), I was recently diagnosed with Dementia. Of course, many PS friends and customers have had their suspicions but now it’s official .

The specialist told Nicky and me that the symptoms point towards the Lewy Body type but is also borderline Parkinsons . . . so I’m in good company with Billy Connolly.

Thus my current situation has not been a total surprise to us as we have had our suspicions for a while and I’m guessing that others who have been in conversation with me at conventions etc may have guessed that something was not as it should be. In other words, I fear I was burbling even more incoherently than usual . . . hard to imagine, I know.

Anyhoo, I’m boldly moving forward through a barrage of potions ‘n’pills (umpteen colours and shapes which takes me back to my Mod days at the Twisted Wheel club in Manchester in the mid-1960s) so I’m enjoying dancing around PS Towers with Nicky to the strains of Smokey Robinson et al (before Hippydom, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane called for me). And signs are already suggesting a reduction in the shake in my right hand which drives me bonkers at times (writing and keyboard use can be very challenging).

Meanwhile, we will be exploring various things to help with these elements (dictation is an obvious one but a totally new way for writing) ably assisted—as ever—by Nicky and Mike and Nick, Tamsin and Carole, Keith and Wendy, Robert and a host of other stalwarts from behind the scenes. I tell you, warriors the PS team continues with unabated enthusiasm.

So the bottom line is we are definitely not going anywhere for a while yet.

We truly believe that keeping busy is the way forward, so we’re aiming for new projects galore . . . so don’t put that billfold/wallet away any time soon.

As a couple of our recent newsletters have already hinted, Pete and I have put together a major original SF anthology (with a touch of fantasy and horror here and there) titled NEW WORLDS. Yes, this is a revival of, and tribute to, the famous NEW WORLDS magazine edited by Michael Moorcock in the Sixties and, converted to an anthology series, continued by him in the Seventies. The publication which helmed the New Wave in SF; which featured extraordinary, genre-transforming stories by Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Robert Holdstock, Norman Spinrad, Pamela Zoline, Moorcock himself, and numerous others; which outraged the establishment with its brusque yet playful dismissal of conventional mores, earning denunciation in Parliament and blacklisting by W H Smith; which embodied with courage and vigour everything innovative and thoughtful in the SF of its time.

Having obtained Mike Moorcock’s enthusiastic permission for the revival, Pete signed me on as co-editor and we got to work assembling an author line-up worthy of a reincarnated, new NEW WORLDS. Mike himself contributed a long new Jerry Cornelius novelette, a fresh, anarchic installment in a sequence highlighted in the original NEW WORLDS. The great Alan Moore wrote us an amazing account of events in the microseconds following the Big Bang, a bravura feat of baroque imagination and effervescent language. Margo Lanagan graced us with a scintillating piece of historical mischief; Michael Swanwick invited us on a unique robotic hunt; Gwyneth Jones swept us to the far transhuman future and the outer Solar System; M T Hill invited us to think in starkly moving terms of the economics of global warming; in one of the last stories John Grant wrote before his sad death, he conveyed to us new realities of ageing . . .

In short, the Table of Contents for NEW WORLDS is quite superb. Here it is:

And finally, here’s a storming review from Aurealis’s Clare Rhoden for Stephen Jones’s THE BEST OF BEST NEW HORROR.

Okay, that’s it for this week 

Nicky assures me that her Newsround will return raring for action next week so stay loose. Enjoy the weekend and each other—bear in mind you don’t want to miss your water when the well has run dry.

Pete