About
Stephen Palmer is the author of sixteen genre novels: Memory Seed (Orbit 1996), Glass (Orbit 1997), Flowercrash (Wildside 2002), Muezzinland (Wildside 2003), Hallucinating (Wildside 2004) and The Rat And The Serpent (Prime Books 2005). In 2010 PS Publishing published the far-future Urbis Morpheos. In 2014 Infinity Plus Books published his surreal slipstream steampunk novel Hairy London, and in 2015 his Beautiful Intelligence and short novel No Grave For A Fox. Ebooks of Muezzinland, Hallucinating and The Rat And The Serpent are available from Infinity Plus, who have also published the ebooks of Memory Seed, Glass and Flowercrash. In 2016, Infinity Plus published his alternate-world steampunk Factory Girl trilogy; The Girl With Two Souls / The Girl With One Friend / The Girl With No Soul, with another alternate historical work, Tommy Catkins, out in summer 2018. In 2019 IP published a return to themes of AI, The Autist. Following the relaunch of the Factory Girl trilogy later in 2019 with new Tom Brown covers, IP published a fourth work in the same world, The Conscientious Objector. His short stories have been published by Wildside Press, Spectrum SF, Newcon Press, Infinity Plus, Mutation Press, Eibonvale Press, Solaris, TFQ, Unspoken Water, Doghorn Publishing, Kraxon, Tickety Boo Press, The Manchester Speculative Fiction Group, Boo Books, Wayward Plants, Woodbridge Press and PS Publishing (forthcoming). In 2019, Newcon Press published a collection of short stories, Tales From The Spired Inn, set in the world of Memory Seed.
Stephen lives and works in Shropshire, UK.
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Stephen Palmer, 2018
Some authors speak…
‘Palmer’s imagination is fecund.’ – Paul McAuley on Memory Seed
‘A tour de force in imagining possibilities that lie beyond our information age.’ – Gwyneth Jones on Muezzinland
‘A gripping read to the poignant last line.’ – Eric Brown on Beautiful Intelligence
‘I really liked its blending of historical reality and whimsical – but sinister – fantasy. It’s an enjoyable and ultimately unsettling story, that (much like its hero!) defies easy analysis.’ – Toby Frost on Tommy Catkins
‘One of the most inventive and imaginative fantasy writers I know of.’ – Teresa Edgerton on The Girl With Two Souls
‘A deft twisting together of warring AIs and the evolution of machine intelligence against a global backdrop that’s as thoughtful as it is entertaining.’ – Gary Gibson on The Autist
‘This is first class SF.’ – Tony Ballantyne on The Autist
Author forum at SFF Chronicles
Pardon my ignorance, but I’m really confused by the Bryn Llewellyn/Stephen Palmer thing. Is Bryn Llewellyn a pen-name of Stephen Palmer? Because I just finished reading a copy of The Rat and the Serpent that I picked up in a used bookstore and it has Bryn Llewellyn as the author listed, not Stephen Palmer.
Greetings, Dan. When I was approached by Prime Books a decade or so ago, it was decided that ‘The Rat & The Serpent’ would better be published as if by a new author. I was cool with that decision. Much later, when I became part of the Infinity Plus stable of authors, we felt it would be better to use my real name, since by then I had a back catalogue of seven books. I hope you enjoyed the novel. It was quite a challenge to write it entirely in black-and-white…
Thanks for the response! And yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I truly haven’t read anything else quite like it. It was a very novel experience.