Back in 2000 or 2001, a Czech magazine called Ikarie asked to reprint a story of mine called “Written in Blood.” I was chuffed of course, and in time a cheque arrived. Sadly, the exchange rate and the bank’s conversion fees pretty much chewed up its entire value. But nobody sells short fiction to foreign magazines for the money. It’s the honour that counts. And it is a great honour. My story was printed alongside Stephen Dedman’s excellent and very creepy “The Devotee”, and other issues reprinted writers of the stature of Alastair Reynolds, Michael Swanwick, Ian McDonald, Suzy McKee Charnas, Stephen Dedman, Rudyard Kipling, Greg Egan and Nancy Kress.

But I never received a copy of the magazine, and I found it impossible to find any sign of it on the net. After so many years, I worried that maybe the story had never actually been printed and I dropped “translated into Czech” from my bio because I wasn’t absolutely sure. Just the other day, though, Stephen Dedman found that Ikarie 04/2002 had been published after all and both our stories were listed in the contents.

This is what it looks like:

Mind you, I’m a little disappointed. I would much have preferred to be in November ‘03, with its gloriously demented cover art: