Archive for July, 2011
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Have you heard the joke about the Hollywood starlet who was so dumb she slept with the writer?
Another favourite of mine is the joke about the writer who died and was offered the option of going to Heaven or to Hell. So he went to Hell, escorted by St Peter, and was shown a room full of writers chained to desks, being beaten and whipped and abused by demons. He didn’t fancy that, so he went to Heaven and was shown a room full of writers in chains, being beaten and whipped and abused etc. The writer, baffled, asked what actually was the difference between the two places? And St Peter said, “In Heaven, the writers all have book deals.”
I love writer jokes because they’re all true; writers are crazy people who only write because they have to.
In the course of my career I’ve met a lot of writers. Almost all of them nice, a couple not so nice. I’ve worked with theatre writers and movie writers, including one Oscar winner (“The British are coming!”), and as a writer myself I’ve written prime time TV cop shows, thrillers, movies (2, as co-writer), and a pretty wide variety of radio plays, as well as writing SF for those nice people in Orbit. [NB the software on this site is programmed to automatically amend the words 'my bloody publishers' to 'those nice people at Orbit' - clever, huh?]
Writers, you’ll be interested to hear, are all the same, no matter what medium they write for. We’re all, in other words, wonderful, warm-hearted, generous, and totally obsessed with the ideas in our own brains. We’re also inclined to carp; Kieran Prendeville once told me that the apposite collective noun is a ‘whinge’ of writers. Read the rest of this entry »
by Philip Palmer •1 Comment • Categories: Guest Post, Uncategorized • Tags:
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“Phat off, you molking bucket of steaming clang!” Right. So what’s that all about, then?
My first fantasy novel Dusk (published by Bantam in the USA, and winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel 2007), polarised opinion. I think that’s a good thing – I’d rather have people love or hate my books, as opposed to being mostly indifferent. And some of the criticism about the book focussed on the sex and swearing it contained. It was suggested that, because it was a fantasy, I should have thought up new swearwords. But I argued that if that were the case, I’d also have to think up new words for hill, and saddle, and kidney.
I stick by that now, and though Echo City is, of course, a purely imaginary world, it’s inhabited by very human characters. A fantasy novel needs distinctly human characters to make it work. So they drink Mino Mont ale and, if they can afford/steal it, Marcellan wine; they swear when they’re angry or scared; and they have sex. Indeed, it’s not glib to say that there’s a hand-job in the novel that is a pivotal plot-point. So watch out for that one when you’re reading it.
I love swearing. It’s effective in real life and in my writing, and can be cathartic, a venting of angry steam. I love ale – dark, light, summer ales, heavy winter warmers. And I love … well, doesn’t everyone?
So in order to create characters that feel human to the human readers of Echo City, I wanted them to come across as people you could almost know. Admittedly, some of the inhabitants of Echo City wouldn’t look at home anywhere we know. But I’d really like to sit down for a beer with Nadielle, and Malia, and Gorham. We’d put the worlds to rights, both mine and theirs. I’d talk about “f**king phone hackers”, and they’d talk about “bastard border spites and Marcellans”. And in ale and swearing, we’d find a common language.
by Tim Lebbon •2 Comments • Categories: Guest Post, Orbit UK • Tags: Echo City, Tim Lebbon
- Lauren Panepinto - July 19th, 2011
Mid-series covers are at the same time a relief and a challenge. On one hand you already have the general look and feel of the art established, so a lot of the trial and error is skipped. Unless something has gone terribly wrong you are usually commissioning art from the same artist, and they start working a lot closer to the target. The type style is usually set, and overall it’s kind of fun to be able to play within those constraints. However you also can’t play it too safe and end up with boring art, or at least, art that isn’t pushed to its full potential. Because sometimes, especially in the case of a new author, the second cover is even more important than the first—you want to really show this author is establishing a strong series and the world is something you want to be drawn into. I know a lot of people—in fact, I am married to one—that won’t start a series if just the first book is out. (For example, he’s recently got into Game of Thrones on HBO and was really interested in reading the books until he heard it wasn’t a completed series…and yes, these are the fights that go on in my house) Thus, it’s really important to make mid-series covers as awesome, if not MORE awesome, than the first cover.
This brings me to Exogene, the next book in T. C. McCarthy’s Subterrene War series (Germline is the first, which just came out and is getting great reviews). Steve Stone did a fabulous job on the Germline cover – it was the perfect tone – obviously military SF but the attitude tells you there is something deeper going on here. Of course, this makes the Exogene cover harder. For one, a female lead character which means you are immediately fighting certain clichés, and (I don’t want to give away anything here) she is a character full of contradictions. We wanted to capture her maybe right on the edge between blind belief and doubt. A soldier still heroic, but perhaps with just the slightest uncertainty beginning to show on her face. And add to that delicate proposition the fact that it’s a beautiful young woman who also happens to be bald. And then make her look like a convincing soldier. Not an easy task. But in my opinion, yet again, he nailed it.
After the jump, see the cover next to Germline and get a teaser…. Read the rest of this entry »
by Lauren Panepinto • 3 Comments • Posted in: Art, Covers, Orbit US
- The Orbit Team - July 18th, 2011
We’d like to extend our heartiest congratulations to our author Robert Jackson Bennett, whose debut novel MR. SHIVERS was chosen as Best Novel at the 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards, held this past weekend at Readercon. MR. SHIVERS, compared by Publishers Weekly to “a collaboration between Stephen King and John Steinbeck” and called by the Guardian(UK) “a startling debut, a deft amalgam of thriller, cerebral horror and American gothic, written with a stark and artful simplicity.”
If you haven’t yet read MR. SHIVERS, do — and don’t miss Robert’s second novel, THE COMPANY MAN, about which Booklist notes, “Bennett does the seemingly impossible here. He’s written an alternate-history novel that measures up in every respect to Philip K. Dick’s masterful The Man In the High Castle.”
High praise indeed — and completely deserved.
by The Orbit Team • Post a Comment • Posted in: Awards, Orbit Australia, Orbit UK, Orbit US
- Devi Pillai - July 15th, 2011
Over at Orbit Short Fiction, we have a new short story from Jennifer Rardin. It is a standalone — and it’s completely different from the Jaz Parks novels.
What do you do when you’re in college and can’t think of anything better to do with your time? Make a deal with a voodoo queen, of course! And so starts the journey of Paul and Brady in PAUL AND BRADY GET HOODOO WITH THE VOODOO.
You can find the rest of Jennifer’s short fiction here, or you can start by reading the first novel in the Jaz Parks series, Once Bitten, Twice Shy.
by Devi Pillai • Post a Comment • Posted in: New Titles, Orbit US
- Emily Rowland - July 15th, 2011
We’ve got a visual treat for you heading into the weekend: beautiful atmospheric Echo City wallpapers for your device of choice.
The imaginative Lee Gibbons has done the illustration, and Peter Cotton has designed this fantastic dark fantasy cover.
Tim Lebbon posted about Echo City earlier this week, so definitely check it out if you haven’t already.
Wallpaper download links are below. Enjoy!
iPad | iPhone/iPod | NETbook | 1024 x 768 | 1280 x 800 | 1440 x 900 | 1680 x 1050 | 1920 x 1200
by Emily Rowland • Post a Comment • Posted in: Orbit Australia, Orbit UK, Uncategorized
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One of the major influences on Rule 34 was a throwaway idea I borrowed from Vernor Vinge — that perhaps one of the limiting factors on the survival of technological society is the development of tools of ubiquitous law enforcement, such that all laws can be enforced — or infringements detected — mechanistically.
One of the unacknowledged problems of the 21st century is the explosion in new laws.
We live in a complex society, and complex societies need complex behavioural rules if they’re to run safely. Some of these rules need to be made explicit, because not everyone can be relied on to analyse a situation and do the right thing. To take a trivial example: we now need laws against using a mobile phone or texting while driving, because not everyone realises that this behaviour is dangerous, and earlier iterations of our code for operating vehicles safely were written before we had mobile phones. So the complexity of our legal code grows over time.
The trouble is, it now seems to be growing out of control. Read the rest of this entry »
by Charles Stross •10 Comments • Categories: Guest Post, Orbit Australia, Orbit UK • Tags: Charles Stross, Rule 34
- Lauren Panepinto - July 14th, 2011
Philip Palmer’s Red Claw was one of the first covers I designed when I joined the Orbit team, and it’s still one of my faves. I love working on these covers, they’re so much fun, because his writing has this fabulous pulp scifi feel to it, and you can get that feel with the photo shoots. That’s one of the fun things about establishing a really strong author look, it anchors a book, and let’s you get crazy within that framework. It’s kind of like a mullet—business up front, party in the back! (Yes, I really just compared Book Cover Design to Mullets, call the graphic design police, it’s been a rough week.)
Photographer Laura Hanifin was my partner-in-crime for this cover, which we shot at the same time we shot for Hell Ship and the new e-book cover for Debatable Space. It was an exhausting (and smelly!) shoot, but we got three fantastic cover images out of the day, and you don’t get 3-cover-days very often, trust me!
After the jump, see the whole series of covers together, as well as a teaser!
Read the rest of this entry »
by Lauren Panepinto • Post a Comment • Posted in: Art, Covers, Orbit UK, Orbit US
- The Orbit Team - July 13th, 2011
Mark Yon has been a reviewer and web administrator at SFFWorld, one of the world’s biggest genre forum sites, for nearly ten years. He has also been on the David Gemmell Awards organisation committee for the last two years. In this series of rereads, Mark will guide us below through the whole of Jim Butcher’s fabulous Dresden Files series as we count down to the new hardback Ghost Story at the end of July.
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Turncoat definition: ‘A person who shifts allegiance from one loyalty or ideal to another, betraying or deserting an original cause by switching to the opposing side or party.’
After tense events featuring the Fae in Small Favour, we’re back into Wardens, Wizards and vampires in this one. The cease-fire existing between the vampires and the wizard White Council seen in Small Favour still remains, but is still fragile. This is in no small part due to the so-called Black Council (an exciting addition), the fifth-columnists within the White who seem determined to bring the wizards down.
We start, as is usual, with a bang. Though most of the Dresden novels start with a hit of adrenaline, this one tops the lot so far. Harry is at home when on his doorstep appears a badly injured Morgan, the Warden with whom Harry has had a difficult relationship with to date. Then after asking for protection from the White Council, Morgan collapses … Read the rest of this entry »
by The Orbit Team • Post a Comment • Posted in: Fiction, Orbit Australia, Orbit UK
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Last Saturday I ran a workshop for a bunch of new and aspiring SF writers on behalf of a great organisation called Spread the Word, at the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. This was the follow up to a previous event last year organised by StW called Guilty Pleasures, which was a panel/workshop day featuring writers of SF, crime, horror and historical romance — ALL IN THE SAME ROOM!
But the brief this time was to explore the potential and craft of SF in a one- day workshop for writers new to or experienced in that genre; and I was pleased to find it was a sell-out.
I began the day by discussing some general concepts of writing that are particularly important for SF — namely worldbuilding and POV. I read a chapter from Hell Ship, featuring Sharrock, his cathary, and his lost village. And I then read a section from The Book of the New Sun, a fantasy novel that’s actually SF (although, since it’s Gene Wolfe, that’s never ENTIRELY clear) and which is a masterly example of how to create a world with a detailed geography, culture, and language all its own.
Words are the key in my view; those magic phrases that feel real, yet evoke strangeness. Wolfe’s genius is to use words like ‘autarch’ and ‘fuligin’ and ‘asimi’ which sound invented, but are in fact real words that have fallen out of use, or are utterly arcane. World building isn’t just about making maps and writing future histories; it’s about the poetry of words that imply as much as they describe. At the other end of the spectrum, a military SF writer like Dan Abnett has to invent words for GUNS; like the PDW (personal defence weapon) and PAPS and hardbeams and M3A pipers and thumpers, all of which feature in his fab new book Embedded. If the jargon is right; the world feels real.
I also talked about Scott Westerfeld’s The Risen Empire, which is the masterclass in how to manipulate POV to create great action sequences. And I talked a bit too about Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, which creates a stunningly real near-future world in prose so beautiful you could kiss it.
Then I asked a room full of strangers to create an alien for me … Read the rest of this entry »
by Philip Palmer •Post a Comment • Categories: Guest Post, Uncategorized • Tags:
