Simon Ings is the author of nine novels. He spent some years editing New Scientist‘s culture pages and now contributes to New Scientist, The Telegraph, The Times, Financial Times and The Spectator.
Note that Apple Tree Literary represents Simon only for fiction and ghosting services. For non-fiction, please reach out to Peter Tallack at The Curious Minds Agency
The Smoke
Nominated for the 2019 Kitschie Awards for best novel, Simon Ings’ The Smoke is about love, loss and loneliness in an incomprehensible world.
Humanity has been split into three different species. Mutual incomprehension has fractured the globe. As humans race to be the first of their kind to reach the stars, another Great War looms.
For you that means returning to Yorkshire and the town of your birth, where factories churn out the parts for gigantic spaceships. You’re done with the pretentions of the capital and its unfathomable architecture. You’re done with the people of the Bund, their easy superiority and unstoppable spread throughout the city of London and beyond. You’re done with Georgy Chernoy and his questionable defeat of death. You’re done with his daughter, Fel, and losing all the time. You’re done with love.
But soon enough you will find yourself in the Smoke again, drawn back to the life you thought you’d left behind.
You’re done with love. But love’s not done with you.
Wolves
This is a story that balances on the knife blade of a new technology. Augmented Reality uses computing power to overlay a digital imagined reality over the real world. Whether it be adverts or imagined buildings and imagined people, with Augmented Reality the world is no longer as it appears to you, it is as it is imagined by someone else.
Two friends are working at the cutting edge of this technology and when they are offered backing to take the idea and make it into the next global entertainment they realise that wolves hunt in this imagined world. And the wolves might be them.
A story about technology becomes a personal quest into a changed world and the pursuit of a secret from the past. A secret about a missing mother, a secret that could hide a murder. This is no dry analysis of how a technology might change us, it is a terrifying thriller, a picture of a dark tomorrow that is just around the corner. Ings takes the satire and mordant satirical view of J.G. Ballard and propels it into the 21st century.
Dead Water
25 May, 1928: Over the frozen seas of the Arctic, an airship falls out the sky. Among the survivors is a young scientist on the verge of a discovery that will redefine physics.
3 October 1996: Through the dusty industrial towns of India’s Great Trunk Road, a disgraced and disfigured female detective starts tracking a criminal syndicate whose tentacles spread from forgery to smuggling to piracy. Her life has been ruined, but she will have her revenge.
26 December 2004: On the island of Bali a tsunami washes up a rusting container. Locked within his aluminium tomb, the mummified remains of a shipping magnate missing for 29 years and a hand-written journal of his last days.
13 December 2011: Off the coast of Sri Lanka, a tramp steamer is seized by pirates. The captain has his wife and son aboard and their survival depends on following the pirates’ every demand. But what can they possibly want with his worn-out ship and its cargo of junk?
We know what they want. We know the ship was carrying a Dead Water cargo. And We know Dead Water is the key to everything. We could spin a thousand stories from this toxic Cold War secret but there’s only one of them can really make a difference.
And this is it.
The Weight of Numbers
The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love.
All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World, this novel sends the spectres of the Baby Boom’s liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overloadwith a deadly payoff.
The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs.