Archive for Orbit Australia

The Future of Yesterday

The last ever space shuttle mission landed on Thursday morning in Florida, and it’s in light of this that I post this blog entry.

It’s mostly an excuse to send you to this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II7QBLt36xo

… which is a self-proclaimed love-letter to the wonder that has been the last thirty years of space travel, on which subject I have a proper rant on my own blog: www.kategriffin.net

… and which here provoked me to have a mull about how the past has written about the future!  This is, after all, a place for science fiction and fantasy writers to ramble, and what is this genre for if not to think about The Way Things Might Be?  (more…)

Jim Butcher on Harry Dresden

We are enormously excited that Ghost Story is out THIS THURSDAY and we hope a lot of you are too!!!

To start launch week on a real high note and to keep you going for just a few days longer, we asked Jim Butcher himself a few questions about his biggest creation…

Did you always know Harry’s grizzly fate (thinking of his ghostly nature by Ghost Story) or do his adventures evolve for you organically as you write?

Oh, I knew from the get-go that I was going to kill him at some point — and then make him solve his own murder. That’s just how the universe seems to treat the poor guy. : ) There are some story events that are fixed in my mind — mostly the large-scale stuff, such as the war with the Red Court, the rise of the Fomor, and the oncoming events of the story’s endgame. The fluid organic things tend to be very personal matters — Dresden’s friends, his family, and especially his romantic relationships.

Do you sometimes find yourself slipping into the Harry Dresden character when say at the supermarket? What would he buy?!

Nah, I’m not Harry Dresden and not much like him, except maybe when he’s screwing up somehow. : ) Getting into character is something that happens after several minutes at the keyboard, and it doesn’t really intrude on the rest of my life.

Dresden buys bachelor chow — things you can prepare by popping in the oven for a few minutes, or maybe by boiling a little water — and which are not too expensive. He’s never really had an expansive budget. : )

Who is your favourite minor character and why?

Butters, I think. He was supposed to be a one-off character when I first designed him, a kind of wacky ME that provided a little color and humor while I was dishing out some grisly details about a murder. But I liked the guy so much, I had to give him a job, and now he’s become part of the regular cast. Butters is such a contrast of clueless and spooky-smart, and while he’s never going to be a studly hero, he’s never going to leave a friend in the lurch, either. I just like the guy.

What’s the strangest question you’ve ever been asked about the Dresden Files series?

“How do I get in touch with the real White Council?”

Followed closely by a statement: “I’m from the real White Council, and we aren’t pleased with what you’re doing.”

Finally, could you give us one little-known fact about Harry and his world?

Harry loves horses! He doesn’t get to ride much anymore, but when he was living with Ebenezar on his farm in the Ozarks, they went riding all the time. Granted, given his size, it might be fair to say that horses don’t like him nearly as much as he likes them, but I wouldn’t want to be presumptuous about the opinions of Equine-Americans.

Thanks Jim!

Jim Butcher’s all-new Dresden Files novel is out this week (27th July). If you haven’t already met Harry Dresden, check out our quick rereads to the rest of the series below:

STORM FRONT
FOOL MOON
GRAVE PERIL
SUMMER KNIGHT
DEATH MASKS
BLOOD RITES
DEAD BEAT
PROVEN GUILTY
WHITE NIGHT
SMALL FAVOUR
TURN COAT
CHANGES

CHANGES by Jim Butcher: A Dresden Files reread

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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Changes: a Dresden Files novel by Jim Butcher.

Here is, as the title would suggest, where everything changes. This is the Dresden equivalent of Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, or of the Battle of Minas Tirith. This is one where Jim rips up what has gone before, and makes, in many ways, a fresh start. Many of our previous reference points are removed here — this book really does transform things in the Dresden world.

As I’ve said before, the Dresden books have a reputation of starting with a bang. This one is pretty outstanding:
‘I answered the phone, no big deal, until I heard the message: ‘They’ve taken our daughter.’

The phone call is from Susan Rodriguez, his ex-girlfriend who was turned into a vampire by the Red Court back in Death Masks. Harry is told about the daughter he didn’t know, Maggie, kept in secret from Harry for her protection. And then that Arianna Ortega, Duchess of the Red Court, has found out about her, kidnapped her and plans to use Maggie against Harry. Arianna is out for revenge following the death of her husband, an action precipitated by Harry.

Over the next three days Harry’s task, with Susan and half-vampire Martin, is to find his daughter and save her from Queen Arianna and the evil vampires!

Simple? Well, when Arianna initiates the kidnapping, she also simultaneously proposes a peace settlement between the vampire Red Court and the Wizards: something that would be greatly desired by the exhausted Wizard Council. Thus given a choice of saving Harry’s daughter or ending the war, the Wizards’ activities seem most concerned with ending the War – exactly Arianna’s point. (more…)

MR. SHIVERS Wins the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel!

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.

Wallpapers: ECHO CITY by Tim Lebbon

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

 

Crime and Punishment

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. (more…)

TURN COAT by Jim Butcher: a Dresden Files reread

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 … (more…)

Artificial Stupids

One of the hoariest of science fictional archetypes is the idea of the artificial intelligence — be it the tin man robot servant, or the murderous artificial brain in a box that is HAL 9000. And it’s not hard to see the attraction of AI to the jobbing SF writer. It’s a wonderful tool for exploring ideas about the nature of identity. It’s a great adversary or threat (‘War Games’, ‘The Forbin Project’), it’s a cheap stand-in for alien intelligences — it is the Other of the mind.

The only trouble is, it doesn’t make sense.

Not only is SF as a field full of assumed impossibilities (time machines, faster than light space travel, extraterrestrial intelligences): it’s also crammed with clichés that are superficially plausible but which don’t hang together when you look at them too closely. Take flying cars, for example: yes, we’d all love to have one — right up until we pause to consider what happens when the neighbour’s 16 year old son goes joy riding to impress his girlfriend. Not only is flying fuel-intensive, it’s difficult, and the failure mode is extremely unforgiving. Which is why we don’t have flying cars. (We have flying buses instead, but that’s another matter.) Food pills out-lived their welcome: I think they were an idea that only made sense in the gastronomic wasteland of post-war austerity English cuisine. I submit that AI is a similar pipe dream. (more…)

You need to know RULE 34

I feel like announcing this with some kind of roar or perhaps a drum roll as I’ve been waiting for this for so long and today is actually LAUNCH DAY! But as we’re open plan and I’m highly unmusical I’ll let this do the job …

Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (UK | ANZ) is many amazing things. It’s a fast-paced Edinburgh-based crime novel set a few years into the future. It also displays lashings of Charles Stross’s wry humour and I enjoyed more than a few winces and chuckle-out-loud moments. Another aspect I really enjoyed was Stross’s extrapolation of our current technology, where our usual gadgets have been moved on a step or three.  The BBC’s Click technology programme covered augmented reality just last month, but in Rule 34 it’s a useful, fully-fledged reality.

But perhaps most importantly, I found myself completely caught up in the colourful characters (a detective inspector, a young scalleywag called Anwar and a master criminal showing signs of psychosis known as the Toymaker). There’s not the space here to revel in the bizarre crimes DI Liz Kavanaugh has to investigate (domestic appliances in unlikely places …), or talk about the highly suspicious Eastern European bread-mix young Anwar is peddling. But you can sample for yourselves by reading this plot summary or by enjoying chapter one here. (more…)

SMALL FAVOUR by Jim Butcher: Dresden Files reread

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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It is wintertime in Chicago and, as snow falls, we begin another tale featuring Harry’s wonderfully complicated life.

At first glance things seem to be going swimmingly. Molly’s training as a wizard by Harry continues and this appears to be working really well. However, a sudden attack on Harry and the Carpenter family leads him to think the Winter Queen has not forgotten him – or his friends. But to Harry’s surprise, the attack actually came from the Summer Queen Titania’s goat-like militia (called by Jim ‘gruffs’). Combined with another case assisting Karrin and the Chicago PD, we are again off to a flying start.

This book is all about promises, made and broken. The small favour in this case relates to the promise that Harry made back in Summer Knight, to Mab, the Winter Queen and the Queen of Air and Darkness. Whilst snow piles up all over Chicago, the task Mab now sets Harry is a formidable one – to be her Emissary and retrieve gangster Johnny Marone, Harry’s nemesis. Johnny has been kidnapped, for reasons unknown, though as time progresses Harry finds that Johnny’s kidnapping is no more than a prelude to something much bigger. And the ‘small favour’ is anything but. (more…)