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Welcome to our latest round-up of links to items of interest featuring Orbit authors. 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…)

Over at the official Iain [M] Banks website, we’ve just posted the second Iain Banks email Q&A session, in which Iain answers selected questions from his fans and readers.

This time around you can discover Iain’s predictions for the next big UK literary stars, his view of the Minds’ attitude toward the rest of the Culture, a question as to would he / wouldn’t he write an episode of Doctor Who, whether he thinks there will ever be a Culture-based MMORPG, and more…

Head on over to www.iain-banks.net to read the full piece.

Just a reminder that Karen Miller will be in the UK signing at:

Waterstone’s Bracknell at 1pm tomorrow

and

Waterstone’s Basingstoke at 6pm tomorrow.

Hope to see you there!

Two Orbit Authors - Brian Ruckley and Jeff Somers - recently took part in the first BookGeeks SF and Fantasy Writers’ Panel.

The round-robin discussion, which also includes contributions from authors Alastair Reynolds and Jaine Fenn, is on the subject of the marriage of prose and visuals. Specifically: maps (is their inclusion in sf / fantasy books a good thing / bad thing?), cover art (should an on-cover portrayal of a book’s characters or vehicles be encouraged / avoided?) and visualised representations of the authors’ work (what would they like to see, what would work best - games, comcis, movies?)

The piece is presented in round-robin format, with each authors’ responses to the three questions then commented upon by the other three authors, which works quite nicely to build up a the discussion between the participants. It all makes for some very interesting reading. Do check it out and do leave your own comments; pieces like this always work best with plenty of feedback.

It’s Friday lunchtime, which can mean only one thing (well, around here, anyhow): it’s time for our weekly round-up post of links to items of interest featuring Orbit authors:

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…)

Lilith Saintcrow – author of the Dante Valentine Series and the new Jill Kismet Series – has just launched a free serial novel: Selene. Set in the world of the Dante Valentine series, Selene expands on the Saint City adventures of Selene and Nikolai. New chapters will be posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You can read the serial here – or subscribe to follow it on your rss reader here. Enjoy!

If you’re in New York City this evening, stop by K.G.B. bar to see the always entertaining (and frequently blurry) Jeff Somers reading at the Fantastic Fiction series. Complete details here — see you there!

Karen Miller , the bestselling fantasy debut author of 2007, is coming to the UK! She’s going to be signing copies of all her novels, including The Innocent Mage, The Awakened Mage and Empress

Thursday, August 28th at:

1:00pm: Waterstone’s Bracknell
17 Stanley Walk, Bracknell RG12 1HA.
For more information, call the store on 01344 488124 or visit www.waterstones.com

6:00pm: Waterstone’s Basingstoke
35 Wesley Walk, Basingstoke RG21 7BE.
For more information, call the store on 01256460646 or visit www.waterstones.com

Hope to see you there!

We’re hugely excited about the recent release of Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series here in the UK. Shapeshifters, werewolves, vampires and mechanics? We were hooked!

And now there’s not one but two opportunity to win the entire series - Moon Called, Blood Bound, and Iron Kissed - and check them out for yourself. Visit LoveVampires.com and Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review for your chance(s) to win today!

Charlie Huston, author of the Joe Pitt series, is over at Fantasy Book Critic talking to Rob about his upcoming book, Every Last Drop, published by Orbit in March 0′09:

Q: To begin with, for someone who has never read a Charlie Huston novel, how would you describe your writing style and where would you recommend they start?

Charlie: I think my prose is very direct. There’s a writer’s voice, and I have a style that’s meant to keep things moving, but the stories are delivered without much in the way of decoration. Dark, violent and profane are all apt adjectives…

You can read the full interview here or an excerpt from Every Last Drop over at Charlie’s blog.

Alex Davis, the organiser of Derby’s annual Alt.Fiction event, has recently announced two additions to the Alt.Fiction calendar:

Alt-Fiction Writing Weekend

Alex tells us: “Alt.Fiction is proud to present its first writing weekend, set in the stunning hills of the Peak District. Join guest authors Conrad Williams and Kim Lakin-Smith for a weekend of writing workshops, discussions and free writing time- the ideal retreat for anyone interested in horror and dark fantasy.

“Weekend rates (including two nights stay, all meals and soft drinks) at £150. For further information, or to book your place, contact Alex on 07768 635293 or at alexdavisevents@hotmail.co.uk”

Sounds like an ideal opportunity for all the aspiring sf / fantasy / horror writers out there to hone your skills and learn your craft. And judging by the volume of enquiries we receive in the Orbit inbox every month, we know there are a fair few of you around.

Alt-Fiction 2009

Alex has also confirmed the date, and a venue-change, for the fourth main Alt.Fiction event:

“The fourth Alt:Fiction will move from being a one-day event to being a weekend-long festival on Friday 24th to Sunday 26th April. The extension will allow programme development and will offer the opportunity for the festival to offer greater content and value for money.

“The festival will also change venue, from Derby’s Assembly Rooms to QUAD, the city’s new centre for art and film, to allow organisers to develop an added element of quality genre cinema to the festival offer.”

More information on the line-up and programming will be released in due course, but if the last three events were anything to go by, then it should be a lively, interesting and author-packed event indeed.

In the meantime, check out our coverage of Orbit authors Philip Palmer, Brian Ruckley, Charles Stross and Mike Carey reading from their latest works at this year’s Alt.Fiction event, for a flavour of what the weekend will be all about.

Welcome to our latest weekly round-up post of links to Orbit authors’ activities elsewhere on the WWW:

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…)

Jennifer Says:

The Wolfblade Trilogy is about power, about love and about politics and how hard it is to separate the three. But it is also a prequel to the Demon Child Trilogy that I did not originally plan to write. So when I set to work creating the Wolfblade Trilogy (Wolfblade, Warrior and Warlord) it nearly made my head explode, writing a story that seamlessly fit the other series.

Because I had to create so many new characters who didn’t appear in the Demon Child Trilogy, but whose absence in the other series needed to be explained, for almost a year and a half on the whiteboard in my office was a list entitled “These People Must Die” with the names of all the characters I had to get rid of by the end of Warlord to explain why they never turned up in the Demon Child Trilogy.

On the upside, when my air-conditioner broke down, and the repairman came to fix it, he saw the “These People Must Die” list - a number of which had been crossed out by then - on the whiteboard and assured me nervously: ‘Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll fix it real good. I’m not going to end up on your list.’

I hope you enjoy the Wolfblade Trilogy. And as you read it, if you’ve already read the Demon Child Trilogy, see if you can spot who was on the list other than the air-conditioning guy…

The first two instalments in Jennifer Fallon’s Wolfblade Trilogy, Wolfblade and Warrior are out now from Orbit UK. The conclusion to the series, Warlord will be published in September 2008.

Find out more about Jennifer Fallon and her writing over at her official website, www.jenniferfallon.com and keep up with all the latest news on her regularly-updated blog.

The eleventh annual MeCon convention takes place at Queen’s University Student Union in the city of Belfast from the 29th-31st August this year, and the Guest of Honour will be Orbit’s very own Charles Stross.

Charles will be taking part in a variety of events and readings over the course of the weekend, details of which can be found on the MeCon website.

MeCon’s other guests this year include authors Michael Carroll, Ian McDonald and C.E. Murphy, plus comics artists Paul J Holden and John McCrea.

Jennifer says:

Bitten to Death is a love story. Sometimes it’s twisted. And a little sick. And there are parts you shouldn’t read while eating. But it faces the fact that sometimes people fall so hard they want to fold the objects of their affections into origami swans and lock them in cedar boxes forever. (No, that doesn’t literally occur in BTD, but you’ll get what I mean by the end.)

Of course my books are also all about the assassination. When you’ve based your operations in a Vampere community, however, you’ve created a dilemma. Namely, which ubercreep should you smoke first? The serial killer who greets you at the door? The snappy dresser who calls for your head before he even gets your name? The ally who may be just as evil as your target? Or Edward ‘The Raptor’ Samos, the guy you’ve been chasing forever? Decisions, decisions…

Read an Extract!

Ken says:

The Night Sessions is a crime novel set in 2037. It’s also an SF novel that asks the question: what if we finally got fed up with the influence of religion on politics, education, and law, and decided to drive it out of these areas for good?

We wouldn’t get the consequences we intended - quite apart from the blowback of faith-based terrorism that drives the plot of the book. The cops (there’s a reason why it’s regular beat cops, and not the army or the secret police) who enforced the reforms could be warped by the experience. Even years later, when they’re Detective Inspectors.

Besides, you can’t have an Edinburgh detective without a dark past. It’s the law.

The book also has robots, space elevators, presbyterian terrorists, a creation science park and a gothic lolita secret policeman.

And Russians. Sinister Russians. In Leith.

These are some of the reasons why I think you might like this book.

Multpile award-winner and award-nominee (he’s been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Awards no fewer than five times) Ken MacLeod’s new novel, The Night Sessions, is out now from Orbit UK in hardback. You can read an extract over at fantasybookspot.com.

Visit Ken’s blog, The Early Days of a Better Nation for more of Ken’s thoughts on a whole range of topics related to his writing, interests and the major themes of his work.

Jacqueline says:

At heart, Kushiel’s Scion is a simple coming-of-age tale – one that just happens to feature a boy with a treasonous mother, a perilously attractive foster-mother and an impossibly heroic foster-father. Oh, and a childhood based on lies, a terrible abduction and long months of torment in captivity that would have crushed a lesser spirit. Imriel de la Courcel comes into his story with a lot more baggage than the ordinary protagonist, and the essence of Kushiel’s Scion is about his struggle to transcend it.

It’s also about the redemptive power of love in all its forms, intrigue, trust, betrayal, possession, war, and the true meaning of heroism. And sex, lots of sex. There’s something here for everyone to enjoy!

Kushiel’s Scion, the first part of Jacqueline Carey’s Treason’s Heir series, is out now in paperback from Orbit UK.

Visit www.jacquelinecarey.com for more information her writing, and to read an extract from Kushiel’s Scion. You can also join her emailing list to be kept up-to-date with all the latest developments.

Philip says:

Space pirates, exotic aliens, battles in outer space, exploding stars, and characters we care about and love or hate (or both) and secretly or not so secretly want to be.

Those were the elements I wanted to include in Debatable Space. I think of it as a rocket fired through the reader’s imagination.

The several narrators of Debatable Space - the pirate crew who steal and pillage and murder and endeavour to save the universe - are like a family to me. Which means, sometimes annoying! But always my family.

And Lena is my favourite of all the characters I’ve ever created. She has many flaws, and one redeeming feature; she is vividly alive.

Debatable Space is Philip Palmer’s gloriously mind-mashing debut space opera and is out now in paperback from Orbit UK and large paperback from Orbit US (the regular paperback will be published in the US on September 1st). Click here to read an extract.

You can catch up with the latest news from Philip Palmer at www.philippalmer.net, where he regularly blogs about his writing (screenplays and radio-plays as well as prose), the movies he’s seen, the books he’s read… all sorts of good stuff.

It’s the eighth day of the eighth month of the eight year of the century and the Olympic Games are kicking off (if that’s even vaguely the right term) in Beijing. But you guys don’t care about all that running and jumping and swimming and stuff, do you? No! What you really want is your weekly dose of Orbit Author links:

As ever and 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…)

P.S. A quick note on last week’s links round-up. I’m pretty sure I posted it at lunchtime on Friday, but at some point during the week it seems to have been relegated back to the bench and reverted to draft status. I’ve dug it out of the ‘pending’ file and reinstated it to its proper place, which would be here, in case you missed it… DT

Orbit is pleased to announce the upcoming releases of four new books from four new stars of fantasy fiction: BEST SERVED COLD by Joe Abercrombie (June 2009); THE SAD TALE OF THE BROTHERS GROSSBART by Jesse Bullington (Sept. 2009); SOULLESS by Gail Carriger (Nov. 2009); and THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N.K. Jemisin (Sept. 2009). (more…)