It’s publication day for the brand new 2026 edition of my interdimensional thriller String City, first published by Solaris Books in 2019, now reissued in paperback and for Kindle, and available from Amazon stores worldwide.
I know what you’re asking. What the heck is an interdimensional thriller?
Well, I could answer by telling you String City is a weird fantasy novel about a private detective who spends his days grappling with rogue gods and unlikely monsters. Or I could tell you it’s a science fiction romp set in a rain-soaked metropolis that’s all tangled up in complicated knots of cosmic geometry. Or I could tell you it’s a hard-boiled crime novel packed to the rafters with murder, mayhem and more suspects than you can shake a stick at.
All these things are true, which makes String City a tricky book to categorise.
So I shan’t bother trying. Instead, I’ll let you read the introduction to the new edition, hoping it might give you some idea of what was going through my head when I wrote the damn thing. After that, it’s over to you.
Way back in 2005, my short story The Wooden Baby was published in a now-defunct magazine called Realms of Fantasy. It was a light-hearted fantasy-noir mash-up about a detective who can hop between dimensions simply by slipping on his rather remarkable coat.
Six more stories followed, during the writing of which I developed the rain-soaked world of my unnamed gumshoe protagonist into a universe of monumental proportions. Since then, I’ve collected all seven stories into a single volume: The String City Mysteries.
The final story of the original sequence, Lifestrings of the Loving Couple, was first published in 2012 by 40K Books. As I planned my detective’s next adventure,
I realised I had enough material to create not just another short story, but a whole novel—the very novel you’re holding in your hands.But how to approach it? I’d written the short stories with an ‘anything goes’ attitude, taking great delight in mixing genres and twisting tropes. However, while I felt this no-holds-barred approach worked well with short fiction, didn’t a novel demand a certain rigour? If I was going to expand this odd little universe I’d created, shouldn’t I consider calming things down a little?
Then I got to thinking. The whole reason I’d written the short stories in the first place was to give my imagination free rein. Enlarging the canvas was no reason to shrink the ambition.
Never mind dialling things back.
It was time to dial things up.
Once I’d made the decision to go big, only one question remained: just how many ideas did I want to incorporate into the novel? This question quickly became a challenge: how many ideas could I cram in before the damn thing fell apart under its own weight?
My response was inevitable: I included all the ideas
I could possibly think of. Then I added more… and more… and more. The result is either a smörgåsbord or a pot-pourri (take your pick of culinary metaphor) with something for everyone who keeps one eye on the heavens and has a taste for the strange.I hope you’ll find things in these pages that make you smile, shiver, or question your place in an essentially unfathomable cosmos. If nothing else, I hope you’ll agree with my interdimensional gumshoe when he remarks that: “None of it makes sense. But somehow it all hangs together.”
Special thanks to Jon Oliver, Michael Rowley and Kate Coe at Solaris Books for helping me hurl this novel out into the cosmos on its first publication by Solaris Books in 2019. I’d also like to thank Shawna McCarthy, Giuseppe Granieri and Letizia Sechi for going out on a limb with the original stories that spawned it.
Graham Edwards – Author & Journalist 