Timeless, the final book in Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series — as well as the first graphic novel adaptation, Soulless: The Graphic Novel — will be out in March, and Gail will be making a number of appearances to mark the occasion. Click through for details!
Locus published their 2011 Recommended Reading List today, and you’ll see a lot of Orbit authors among their choices:
And, in case you missed them the first time around, keep reading for a round-up of other Best of 2011 lists!
If you’re in the US or the UK, here are some of the places you can see Orbit authors in February, from bookstore signings to conventions.
February 2-4th: SFX Weekender
This convention in Prestatyn Sands, North Wales, will play host to several Orbit authors. Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Benedict Jacka, Michael Cobley, and Ken MacLeod will all be on panels and signing books (full schedule) — and we will have exclusive early copies of MacLeod’s Intrusion and Jacka’s Fated available. Plus, our own Anne Clarke will appear on the “How to Get Published” panel on Friday evening.
Saturday, February 4th
Gail Z. Martin at B&N Carolina Place Mall, Pineville, NC, 1 PM.
Mira Grant (with Stephen Blackmoore) at Borderlands Books, San Francisco, CA, 3 PM.
Friday, February 10th
Gail Z. Martin at B&N Morrison Place, Charlotte, NC.
Saturday, February 11th
Gail Z. Martin at Books-a-Million Concord Mills, Concord, NC.
Wednesday, February 15th
N.K. Jemisin (with Livia Llewellyn) at KGB Fantastic Fiction, New York, NY, 7 PM.
February 17-19: SheVaCon
Gail Z. Martin will be at this science fiction convention in Roanoke, VA.
Thursday, February 23rd
Kate Griffin & Benedict Jacka signing advance copies of their new books (both being published in March) at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, 6pm
February 24-26th: MystiCon
Gail Z. Martin will be at this SFF and horror convention in Roanoke, VA — including a launch party for The Dread in the con suite at 7 PM on Friday.
Saturday, February 25th
Gail Carriger as keynote speaker at the inaugural Passion & Prose Conference, Long Beach, CA.
Walter Jon Williams at Page One Bookstore, Albuquerque, NM, 7 PM.
Sunday, February 26th
Gail Carriger at SF in SF, San Francisco, CA, 1 PM.
Gail Carriger at Borderlands Books, San Francisco, CA, 6 PM.
Monday, February 27th
Robert Jackson Bennett at Book People, Austin, TX, 7 PM.
Wednesday, February 29th
Yes, it’s a leap year! Gail Carriger will be kicking off her tour for Timeless at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hill Crossing, Beaverton, OR, 7 PM.
The Mystery Writers of America announced their nominees for the 2012 Edgar Award this morning, and Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Company Man (US | UK | ANZ) will be on the ballot for ‘Best Paperback Original’!
This comes on the heels of The Company Man‘s Philip K. Dick Award nomination, and almost exactly a month before the release of Robert’s new novel, The Troupe (US | UK | ANZ). The Troupe follows 16-year-old piano prodigy George Carole and the mysterious vaudeville troupe he runs away to join, whose performances have a strange effect on their audiences. George gradually realizes the troupe is not simply touring: they are running for their lives.
The nominees for the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award, for science fiction paperback originals, were announced today, including three books from Orbit: The Company Man (US | UK | ANZ) by Robert Jackson Bennett, Deadline (US | UK | ANZ) by Mira Grant, and the Samuil Petrovitch trilogy by Simon Morden (comprising Equations of Life [US | UK | ANZ], Theories of Flight [US | UK | ANZ], and Degrees of Freedom [US | UK | ANZ]).
The award will be presented by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust to the winner at Norwescon in Seattle on Friday, April 6, 2012. The full list of nominees appears below.
NPR posted their list of The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy today, and we were pleased to see Joe Abercrombie’s The Heroes (US) get a mention! Lev Grossman called Abercrombie “not nearly as well-known in the U.S. as he should be,” and sung the praises of his gritty style of fantasy:
It’s as if Tolkien cared about the back story of every individual orc: Each soldier is one among thousands, floundering in the fog of war, but each feels like he’s living out a tragedy or a triumph with himself as the hero. There’s no right side and wrong side — even the warriors aren’t sure which is which — and in the end the question of who’s the real hero comes down to who survives to tell the story.
The rest of the list has some other great books, so be sure to take a look.
Daniel Abraham, author of The Dragon’s Path (US | UK | ANZ) and the upcoming The King’s Blood (US | UK), among others, has a guest post up at SF Signal today called “A Private Letter from Genre to Literature.”
Please, please, darling let us stop this. This artificial separation between us is painful, it is undignified, and it fools no one. In company, we sneer at each other and make those cold, cutting remarks. And why? You laugh at me for telling the same stories again and again. I call you boring and joyless. Is it wrong, my dear, that I hope the cruel things I say of you cut as deeply as the ones you say of me?
Check it out, and don’t miss all the related letters others are adding in the comments.
There are a lot of Felicia Day fans here in the Orbit office, so we were excited to see that she loved James S.A. Corey’s Le
viathan Wakes (US | UK | ANZ). Here’s what she had to say:
I loved this book because in a lot of ways it humanized a BIG SF world in a way that is normally tough. I cared about the characters, I yelled at them a lot, and I enjoyed every minute!
You can read the rest of her review on GoodReads. Look out for book 2, Caliban’s War, in June of 2012!
It’s down to
the final round in the 2011 GoodReads Choice Awards, and some Orbit books are still going strong. Keep voting for your favorites!
In Paranormal Fantasy: Ghost Story (UK | ANZ) by Jim Butcher and River Marked (UK | ANZ) by Patricia Briggs.
In Science Fiction: Leviathan Wakes (US | UK | ANZ) by James S.A. Corey.
In Horror: Deadline (US | UK | ANZ) by Mira Grant and Eat Slay Love (US) by Jesse Petersen.
Robert Jackson Bennett is thinking over on his blog today about the obligation an author has to his audience and why originality in art is so important, from Louis C.K. to Tom Waits. Check it out.
[Tom] Waits had a dependable night club schtick well into the 80’s, popular with a decent-sized demographic – a boozy, romantic, down-on-his-luck hipster, a callback to Kerouac and Bukowski. But Waits eventually got sick of it, and wanted to do something new.
When his producer, Bones Howe, heard what Waits wanted to try, he advised against it. He’d lose his audience, he’d lose all his contracts, and most of all, he’d lose Bones himself. But Bones’s reasoning wasn’t that it was bad, but that it wasn’t accessible – he said, “I knew that where [Tom] wanted to go, I couldn’t follow.” Suggesting that no one else could, either.
But Waits, despite the advice of nearly everyone around him, trusted his vision. He did not listen to his producers, or his fanbase, but went out and did his own thing. And what he made was and is wholly original. For a long time, it was impossible to describe a Tom Waits album – it was just that, a Tom Waits album, and there was no other word for it.
Robert’s third book, The Troupe, will be out in February (US | UK | ANZ). You may also remember that he recently won the Shirley Jackson Award and the Sydney J. Bounds Award for his first novel, Mr. Shivers.
