This
one came from three pieces of short fiction. After I'd written the first story
I knew there was far more to do with that background; the second and third stories,
set earlier, were deliberate explorations of the idea of a virtual heaven, with
the intention always being that they would become part of a novel.
And that's what I did. The first story was published in one of the Solaris SF anthologies and is to be reprinted in the 2008 Gardner Dozois Year's Best. The other two stories appear in Postscripts (summer 2008) and Pete Crowther's AI anthology, We Think, Therefore We Are (January 2009), both shortly before the novel comes out in January/February 2009.
To me, the best SF sets huge ideas against the intimate and personal, and this was what I quite explicitly tried to do with The Accord. Sure, it's about building a complete virtual universe - ideas don't come much bigger than that - but equally, it's a love triangle; but when the triangle involves multiple personalities and different instances of the people taking part, the geometry gets a whole lot more complicated than that...
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Here's what the guys at Solaris said about The Accord:
"The Accord, a virtual utopia where the soul lives on after death and your perceptions are bound only by your imagination. This is the setting for a tale of love, murder and revenge that crosses the boundaries between the real world and this virtual reality. When Noah and Priscilla escape into the Accord to flee Priscilla’s murderous husband, he plots to destroy the whole Accord and them with it. In revenge they arrange to have him assassinated but their success comes at the price of giving him the keys to the virtual kingdom. How can they hope to escape their stalker when he can become anything or anyone he desires and where does the pursuit of revenge stop for immortals in an eternal world? Consultant Editor George Mann said of the deal: 'I had the pleasure of publishing Keith’s short story, "The Accord", in the first Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. When Keith approached us with his idea to expand it into a novel, we were all incredibly enthused. This is a major breakthrough novel from an author I’ve admired for many years.'"
Their press release is quite scary, though...