EVEN THE MOST ESTABLISHED AUTHORS encounter setbacks. One such moment occurred to Geoff Ryman when his Cambodia-set 2006 novel The King’s Last Stand received a sniffy review in The Guardian. “I knew I was in trouble,” he remembers. “It was a book that was meant to be slightly bigger, slightly more mainstream.” A novel that, he still thinks, might have done well had travellers to Asia been able to buy it in Heathrow, rather disappeared.
So, the casual reader could be forgiven for thinking, did Ryman. He’s, a bold retelling of the story of Jesus that casts the messiah as transgender. But it’s been 17 years between novels. In truth, Ryman has often been busy. He worked on an unpublished “bizarro novel”. He taught creative writing. He published short stories. He is currently nursing his partner, who sadly is receiving palliative care. And importantly for the genesis of , he travelled in Africa.
