‘The Variant’

John August, screenwriter of such films as Go and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has self-published a short story called “The Variant”, which he describes as:

It’s a spy thriller with a strong dose of science fiction, in the vein of The Prisoner and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., or the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges.

It costs just $1, either as a PDF or on Kindle. August sent me a pre-release version earlier this week, and I really enjoyed it. (Actually, I went ahead and bought the Kindle version so I could give the new 1.1 Kindle iPhone app a proper test drive.) There’s also a free 13-page preview — give it a read and I bet you’ll cough up the buck for the rest of the story.

“The Variant” is both a good, fun, smart story and an interesting experiment in indie self-publishing for fiction.

★ Friday, 22 May 2009