You can download my Hugo and Nebula nominated novella BURN in its entirety in these file formats:

Microsoft Word  Burn 13/03/2007,09:39 294.00 Kb

Adobe PDF  Burn 13/03/2007,09:39 309.20 Kb 

Hear the podcast BURN 

I can't claim that it was inevitable that I would write BURN.  Many years ago my little novel began to accrete around a grudge I had against one of our literary Founding Fathers, Henry David Thoreau.  But Thoreau wasn't why I wrote BURN.  As I contemplated this project, one of its principle attractions was the lure of doing research into forest firefighting, a subject that is at once intrinsically fascinating and way obscure.  Lolling around libraries paging through books that haven't been checked out since 1975 is one of my principal joys as a writer.  In addition, I could find very little fiction about forest firefighting, and none in genre, which meant that I'd have the territory pretty much to myself.  But fire wasn't the reason I wrote BURN.  Of course, like so many of my fellow skiffy writers, I'd been wrestling with the problem of the singularity, and writing about a human enclave in a post-human galaxy seemed like a challenge that was within my range. But once again, that wasn't why I wrote BURN.