Illuminations got reviewed at The Fix - under the circumstances the reviewer did a pretty good technical job of completing the review of an assignment I’d have hated.

He’s pretty tough on our little project (but fair, and his criticisms are solidly supported) though he finds quite a lot to like. I’m not going to get into the game of arguing with a reviewer - I’ve had the boot on the other foot too often (obviously when he talked about the bits he liked about my contributions he was very perceptive, wise even, and when he talked about the bits he didn’t like he was an ignoramus who deserved to be boiled in oil) but I would point out in editor Paul Raven’s defence that one of the decisions we made early on was to publish the stories without too much extra polishing (hence quite a few grammar nits surviving into the printed version) as partly it is supposed to reflect the quick, almost disposable nature of the FFF experiment. Perhaps we should have made that clearer in the introductions.

You can buy copies of Illuminations from our website (www.oddtwoout.co.uk) or order it from any bookshop in the UK using the handy-dandy ISBN978-0955866203 - you can even see the cover (and hopefully soon some content) at Amazon (though despite several pokes they’re still showing it as available only for pre-order).

Still, proving that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, the review has brought in a little flurry of sales in the last 24 hours - for which I’m grateful to Alvaro (the reviewer), Eugie (The Fix’s inestimable editor) and, of course, to the folks who put their money down.