www.orbitbooks.net

The Orcs are coming! And to help introduce them we’ve created an Orc Mail website and Orc widgets.

And… if you’re one of the first ten people to post an Orc widget to your website or myspace page, and you email us the link at orbit@hbgusa.com, we’ll send you a finished copy of the book when it’s available in September! (US residents only!)

Charles Stross features in the latest podcast from Rick Kleffel’s Agony Column, which is a recording of a Geekspeak interview that was broadcast on KUSP radio on Monday.

Rick and Charlie, along with Lyle Troxell and Sean Cleveland, talk about a wide range of topics, including Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein; two of the major literary influences on Charlie’s recently-released novel Saturn’s Children.

They then go on to discuss the building blocks of the milieu that Charlie explores in Saturn’s Children: artificial intelligence, a robotics-based and dehumanised future extension of human civilisation, interplanetary travel, space exploration (and the necessity for robotics therein), memory backups and personality duplication, the class-structure of robotic society in the book, the ethics of programming an artificial intelligence and a whole range of other great sf-nal subjects.

You can visit Rick Kleffel’s Trashotron site to read the intro to the podcast, and then download the MP3 file from a link in the text.

Breaking Dawn, the fourth title in Stephenie Meyer’s global mega-selling Twilight Saga series, will be published in the UK on Monday August 4th.

To celebrate the launch of the eagerly-awaited conclusion to the story of Bella and Edward, dozens of boosktores right across the UK - including Borders Oxford Street branch and Waterstone’s Manchester Arndale - will be holding special publication-day events, with competitions, prizes, giveaways and more.

Visit the official Stephenie Meyer UK website for a full listing of all the events that are due to take place, and check to see which bookstores near you will be opening early on the big day.

Over at Of Blog of the Fallen, Larry has translated this June 2008 Fantasymundo interview with Andrzej Sapkowski. There are some marvelous insights from the author, including this digression on cats:

“For me the cats are an obsession. … I believe that they are supernatural creatures, with an identity and personality of their own … . It is very good to have one in the house, because then no demon will cross the shadows, because this [the cat] is in the shadows, waiting and vigilant.”

You can read the interview in Spanish here, or read Larry’s translation here and here.

All in all, we had a great time at the show. Lilith Saintcrow rocked the Eye on the Present panel, which should be online eventually. We had a limited giveaway of Orcs galleys which were snatched up by fans in minutes. Kevin J. Anderson chatted with us about The Ashes of Worlds (vid to come) And our friends at Yen Press threw a great rooftop party complete with fireworks.

Canberra’s fifth annual Conflux convention takes place later this year, over the weekend of Friday October 3rd - Monday October 6th, at The Marque, Canberra, Australia.

Ahead of the main event, Conflux is staging a Virtual Minicon this coming weekend, August 2nd - August 3rd.

Participation is easy: simply sign up for the Conflux Forums and then log in at the appropriate time, depending on the author(s) you’d like to chat to via the forums and bearing in mind the relevant time-difference between your own timezone and Canberra’s (GMT +10) of course.

A number of Orbit authors are taking part in the online activities over the course of the weekend, with time-slots as follows (again, these are Canberra-time…)

Saturday August 2
12.00 p.m. - Glenda Larke
7.00 p.m. - Karen Miller

Sunday August 3
11.00 a.m. - Sean Williams
12.00 p.m. - Kevin J Anderson
5.00 p.m. - Marianne de Pierres

Visit the Virtual Minicon page of the Conflux website for more information.

Welcome to our regular Friday links round-up. Plenty to get through this week, so without further ado:

As always, if you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

Jeff VanderMeer put six questions to Marie Brennan, author of Midnight Never Come [UK/US], for a piece on the Amazon.com blog, Omnivoracious.

Marie answers questions on her academic background in archaeology and folklore and how that helps her writing to develop and maintain a sense of perspective and separation from twenty-first century modes of thought and belief, as well as explaining her fascination for exploring the under-city of London. She even comes up with a survival plan for being stranded beneath the city with no hope of rescue.

Check out the piece at www.omnivoracious.com.

According to our content-management system (and we have no reason to believe that it would lie to us) this is the 300th post to go out on the Orbit website since we launched it back in March last year.

To celebrate, we thought we’d take the opportunity to consult with our traffic analytics software and run off a list of our Top 30 content items to-date. Looks like you folks really like your extracts! Well, we hear you, and we’ll make sure we keep them coming.

We’d also love to hear which articles you, our readers, have particularly enjoyed. Any hidden gems or more recent pieces that didn’t quite make the Top 30, for instance? Please feel free to use the comments below to let us know what sort of content you’d like to see more of (or less of - we can take it!) on the site.

And now, without further ado, here are those Top 30 items since March 2007:

1. Read an extract from Matter by Iain M Banks
2. Read an extract from Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley
3. Read an extract from Once Bitten, Twice Shy by Jennifer Rardin
4. Read an extract from Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross
5. Priestess of the Write: An Interview with Trudi Canavan
6. Read an extract from The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
7. Read an extract from The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski
8. The Wheel of Time Continues to Turn
9. Announcement of Robert Jordan’s passing
10. Read an extract from Black Ships by Jo Graham
11. Read an extract from Debatable Space by Philip Palmer
12. Read an extract from Empress by Karen Miller
13. Read an extract from The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
14. Orbit announces plans to expand in the US and UK
15. Mike Carey on camera
16. Introducing The Last Wish
17. Tom Holt Talks Time Travel
18. The Escapement arrives
19. Read an extract from The Devil’s Right Hand by Lilith Saintcrow
20. Introducing Matter
21. Urban Fantasy come true
22. Orbit acquires Red-Headed Stepchild by Jaye Wells
23. Just another day at the office… IN HELL!
24. Standing Out or Fitting In? Tim Holman on Orbit cover art
25. The bestselling debut of 2007 - The Innocent Mage by Karen Miller
26. Devi Pillai reports from World Fantasy 2007
27. Orbit in Australia
28. Fiona MacIntosh’s video-intro for Odalisque
29. Orbit acquires two more books in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series
30. Best Summer SF Reads in The Times

We’ve just re-launched the UK website of mega-bestselling author Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight saga is published in the UK by Orbit’s sister-imprint, Atom.

It looks a lot like this:

The fourth book of the saga, Breaking Dawn, will be published in the UK on August 4th and there are launch-day events taking place right across the UK - see this news item on the site for details of events taking place at bookstores in your area.

Iain [M] Banks enjoyed providing answers for his first email Q&A session so much that he’s asked us to set up another one right away.

And so, without further ado, we hereby call for all you Banks-fans and readers to send in your questions for Iain. Visit the official Iain Banks website for more information, general guidelines etc.

Over at io9.com Annalee Newitz has an interesting article on ARGs and pop culture marketing – The Argument Against ARGs. While she acknowledges that ARGs can be fun, she’s bothered by the ways that they blur marketing and entertainment.

“… what I’d like to see are ARGs for their own sakes — ARGs that involve fans not because they give away posters or free showings, but because they are genuinely compelling tales that you actually want to interact with.”

Jeff Somers has built small-scale ARGs for his books The Digital Plague and The Electric Church – both of which are extensions of the universe he’s created. For The Electric Church he scripted a story that involved a Monk and a hacker fighting for control of the “official” website of the Electric Church. The ARG was solved by the folks at Unfiction, and it’s still available for anyone willing to try and unlock its secrets. In solving the puzzle the player “wins” a resolution to the story the site is telling through its puzzles.
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Over at FantasyBookCritic, blogger Robert Thompson has posted a hugely complimentary review of the second of Mike Carey’s Felix Castor novels, Vicious Circle, which we published back in 2006 (and have since followed up with volume three in the series, Dead Men’s Boots).

Robert says:

“Vicious Circle … makes a strong case for being one of the top urban fantasy novels released this year. Simply put, I think Mike Carey is one of the most exciting new authors in supernatural fiction today and I can’t recommend the Felix Castor series enough.”

He’s also added an email interview conducted with Mike, which includes an update on a number of writing projects (including a fifth Felix Castor novel), the progress on a couple of film projects, his many comics-related interests, and what Mike sees as the future of fiction in printed form.

Check out the full review an interview at FantasyBookCritic.blogspot.com.

Well, not beyond really, but Lilith Saintcrow will be at Comicon in San Diego! She’ll be on the “Looking at Our World: Eye on the Present” panel along with Kelley Armstrong, L. A. Banks, Kate Brallier, Marjorie M. Liu, C. E. Murphy, Justine Musk, and moderator Samantha Sommersby ( Room 3). That’s a veritable who’s who of urban fantasy stars, so if you’re a fan this is a can’t miss event.

And stop by the Orbit booth to get your books signed and to pick up a sweet Orcs pin, which will likely be handed to you by a bedraggled looking guy with a few days’ old beard (me). You can also get some great stuff from our friends at Grand Central Publishing, Little Brown Books for Young Readers, and Yen Press. For a complete listing of HBGUSA events at Comicon, including panels with Stephenie Meyer, Jacqueline Carey, Brad Meltzer, Method Man and more, download our event schedule here.

If you can’t make it to Comicon, you can still catch up with Lilith at her sparklingly redesigned site, www.lilithsaintcrow.com – and stay tuned for a free, never before seen serialized novel coming very soon.

We’ve just posted the write-up of the first email Q&A session with Iain [M] Banks, over at his official website, www.iain-banks.net.

In case you missed the announcement first time around, we invited readers of this site and www.iain-banks.net to submit their questions for Iain - ideally something other than the usual sort of thing he tends to be asked at readings and convention appearances all the time - and then we selected a half-dozen question to put to Iain.

So, if you’d like to know which Culture character Iain would choose to write a novella on, or whether Iain would ever write a science-fiction novel that wasn’t filled with war and violence, or even which parts of Scotland Iain recommends for a visitor who’s also a fan of his books, then www.iain-banks.net is the place to head to next.

Ken MacLeod is the subject of the latest podcast interview at www.scifidimensions.com.

The discussion ranges across a number of subjects, including Ken’s new novel, The Night Sessions, which we’re publishing in the UK next month, and his previous title, The Execution Channel, which we published in paperback back in March.

Interviewer John C Snider also discusses with Ken how it feels to be nominated for awards, his current thematic interest in writing near-future speculation with an alternate-history twist, Heim theory, Ken’s politics (and how his views affect his writing), new media, blogging, how The Night Sessions was (partly) inspired by a U2 video, and much more.

Download the full 40-minute podcast file by visiting www.scifidimensions.com.

Welcome to this week’s round-up of links of interest featuring Orbit authors that we’ve found (or have been sent in to us) over the course of the past seven days or so:

If you see any online articles, reviews or interviews that feature an Orbit author, please feel free to drop us a line and let us know! We’ll happily name-check your website or blog with a heads-up credit in return (please remember to provide us with a link…)

Former military intelligence officer turned military-sf writer Robert Buettner is the subject of the 47th Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast.

The first three volumes in Robert’s Jason Wander series are out now from Orbit US and will all be published by Orbit UK in August:

• #1 - Orphanage [US / UK]
• #2 - Orphan’s Destiny [US / UK]
• #3 - Orphan’s Journey [US / UK]

I’ve just finished Orphanage myself and I thought it was a cracking, high-octane read that will definitely appeal to fans of Allan Cole & Chris Bunch’s Sten series, but don’t just take my word for it: check out these two recent reviews of Orphan’s Journey at bookreviewsandmore and sffworld.

Over at www.sfsite.com one of the bestselling fantasy authors of the past 30 years, Terry Brooks, has been interviewed by top UK fan-journo, Sandy Auden.

Sandy talks to Terry about the genesis of the Genesis of Shannara series - Armageddon’s Children and The Elves of Cintra - and how he planned the books to act as a bridge between his Word and the Void series and the long-running and hugely popular Shannara epic.

Terry goes into quite a bit of intriguing detail (warning: a few potential spoilers!) that fans of the series will love, and reveals the key importance of one particular character, who will become the focus of Genesis of Shannara volume three, The Gypsy Morph, which we’re publishing in the UK in September.

Check it out at www.sfsite.com.

Marie Brennan pops in over at Whatever, John Scalzi’s blog, to talk about her novel, Midnight Never Come, and the Big Idea behind it:

What would faeries be doing while English history is trundling along? Of course, that automatically implies something: that the fae aren’t static, timeless creatures. They have a history, too, and it reflects, contrasts with, or otherwise interestingly comments on what humans are doing.

Fittingly, then, the first thing I came up with was Invidiana: Elizabeth’s dark mirror. Being a faerie, she’s all about immortal beauty; Elizabeth tried desperately to create an unchanging image of herself as the beautiful Virgin Queen, even as she aged and her teeth went bad and smallpox left its scars. Elizabeth never married; Invidiana is the most loveless creature you can imagine. And both of them, of course, are reigning queens of England. I originally just implied a metaphysical link between them, but in the book it’s explicit: when Elizabeth was imprisoned in the Tower during Mary’s reign, she made a secret deal with Invidiana, that they would help each other out.

Read the full piece here and pick up Midnight Never Come at all good booksellers today!