The even newer New World Order

Got my author's copies of the paperback New World Order yesterday, and it rocks.

The cover is everything I've ever wanted in a paperback. Strongly reminiscent of Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines et al, it features:

• an airship
• an army attacking a
• burning castle

Could there be a better reason for buying it? The fact that these three elements don't coincide into one scene at any point in the narrative - in fact the castle doesn't burn at all - has nothing to do with anything. Buy it. Now.

Meanwhile, a colleague suggests a reason for those infuriating gaps in Tacitus mentioned previously, and I must confess it's more plausible than my theory of supernatural entities known only as writers intruding into our time/space continuum. Time travellers, it is posited, went back to the Library of Alexandria and withdrew the manuscripts in question. Sadly we haven't yet caught up with whichever bit of the future they went to. But there's hope it may happen in my lifetime.

This is almost certainly the last post before Christmas, so HAPPY CHRISTMAS!